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chapteR f oURt een Holiday Observance in the Private Sphere The Jewish holidays were times when a special religious atmosphere was felt: the synagogue was painted and repaired, extra seats were added, and so on. Accordingly, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet media tended to ramp up its antireligion propaganda during the holidays. Where for Christians the propaganda intensified on the eves of Christmas and Easter, for Jews this happened on the eves of the High Holidays and Sukkot (which officials called the “Jewish autumn festivals,” osennye prazdniki) and on the eve of Passover. After the war, this intensification of antireligion activity was carried out less by the media and more by the SRA. Heightened attention was paid to religious activity and the behavior of the population in the SRA meetings around the holidays, and special reports were issued on the subject. The archival material thus affords us a peek at the behavior of part of the Jewish population and the attitude of the authorities in response to this behavior. In any treatment of Jewish observance of the holidays, a distinction should be made, to the extent possible, between the public aspect and the private-family aspect. The public aspect found expression primarily in visits to synagogues and minyans and in the communal arrangements for Passover matzah baking. In this chapter we shall try to focus on the private-family aspect, which by its nature was kept hidden, especially from agencies that persecuted religion, and is thus reflected only in the most partial way in the internal Soviet documentation . Nevertheless, even this material suffices to broaden the characterization of religion in the communal experience of the Jews of the USSR in the period in question. We shall focus here on two components of the picture: (1) workplace behavior during the holidays and (2) different ways of celebration of the Jewish holidays within the family or other contexts. Holidays, on the most basic level, are days of rest. Indeed, the official obligation to work on Shabbat and holidays troubled quite a few Jews in various countries, and a struggle for the right to choose a day of rest was waged in Russia and other countries over dozens of years. Freedom to choose one’s day of rest was advocated by all the Jewish political parties throughout Eastern Europe , including nonreligious ones like the Bund. In the Soviet Union—from its outset an antireligious country that viewed rest on Shabbat as a manifestation 184 Between Private and Public Spheres of a Jewish-religious worldview—the issue took on special significance. Yet the problem was not so acute in the 1920s so long as there were still factories and private workplaces that could elect to close on Shabbat or holidays. This state of affairs changed in the 1930s, when nearly the entire Soviet economy became state-run; the various cooperatives (arteli) were no different in this respect from the state-run factories and institutions. Moreover, the obligation to go to work was imposed in effect on the entire working-age population: unemployment was considered parasitism and incurred a range of punishments. This helps explain why in the 1930s, and even more so after WWII, nearly all Jews worked on Shabbat, except for an isolated few who managed to evade doing so by various means. In Berdichev, for example, in the first postwar years, a certain cooperative was headed by a Communist Party member named Gikman. Most or all of this cooperative’s workers were Jews, and by general agreement of labor and management the day of rest was transferred from Sunday to Saturday.1 Yet this was an unusual case in the European USSR (although less uncommon in the Central Asia and Caucasus regions) and it lasted relatively briefly. Yet the Jewish holidays—when, like Shabbat, work was prohibited for observant Jews—took up only a few days a year, days often unknown to the local authorities , making it easier for Jews to evade work on them. The simplest and most direct way of not working, at least on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, was to ask permission to take unpaid leave or to use vacation days. Indeed in the Chernovtsy district, the rabbis’ council applied to the SRA representative on August 17, 1945, asking that factories and institutions announce that Jewish workers interested in taking leaves of absence be free to do so on both days of Rosh Hashana and on Yom Kippur. This request, reflecting ignorance of the realities in...

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