Renewal: Reconnecting Soviet Jewry to the Jewish People; A Decade of American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC) Activities in the Former Soviet Union, 1988-1998 (review)

In 1938 , the Soviet Union evicted the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC). The onset of Glasnost and Perestroika enabled the JDC to re-enter the country and begin relief, rescue, and rehabilitation work. The Soviet Union, and the subsequent former Soviet Republics, contained the third largest Jewish community in the world. Soviet cultural and religious suppression, however, had isolated the Soviet Jews from the rest of the world's Jewish population. In 1989 , the JDC created a six-member Soviet Union Team to stimulate a revival of Judaism in the Soviet Union through a variety of programs. Anita Weiner, a retired faculty member of Haifa University's School of Social Work, examines the JDC's involvement in the rebirth of Jewish communal life and the reconnection of Soviet Jewry with the Jewish people in Renewal: Reconnecting Soviet Jewry to The Jewish People. She argues that the basis of all JDC activity in the Soviet Union and the former Soviet Republics centered on the rebuilding of Jewish communities.

The JDC's initial concentration involved the establishment of Jewish libraries. Soviet Jews did not have legal access to books regarding Judaism for seven decades. In general, Soviet Jews were highly literate and compassionate about books. The JDC believed that Jewish literary works would serve as a calling card by attracting and generating interest in Jewish culture and history. The JDC purchased, translated, and distributed books to Jewish communities that could provide adequate space, engaged a professional librarian to catalogue and organize the books, and permitted everyone in the Jewish community open access to them. By 1996 , more than 700 ,000 volumes of Judaica had arrived in the former Soviet Union. In a number of communities the libraries became focal points for Jewish activity. Despite its success, the JDC discontinued its library project in 1997 to concentrate on different needs.

The renewal of Jewish education and culture emerged as a priority for the JDC. The organization funded Jewish music, dance, and theater groups as well the publication of Jewish periodicals and newsletters. It subsidized intensive teacher-training programs, created and supervised Jewish kindergartens, and produced and distributed hundreds of thousands of textbooks, holiday kits, and posters for Jewish school children. The JDC supported Jewish summer camps and family camps to instill Jewish values.

The JDC reduced its commitment to Jewish education and cultural activities as relief and welfare services emerged as its most pressing concerns, concentrating its efforts on developing programs to help the elderly and the ill. These groups did not have a viable option to emigrate and many of them lived in poverty. The JDC developed social service programs based on a three-pronged approach: community, voluntarism, and Yiddishkeit. Welfare programs, manned by volunteers, operated within the context of the Jewish community and promoted Jewish rituals and customs. The Hesed program, for instance, provided food distribution services such as meals-on-wheels, visiting home care, a day-care center, medical-equipment loans, Jewish holiday celebrations, and volunteer home repairs. The JDC incorporated the celebration of Jewish holidays in its social service programs. The JDC offered these and other programs through local welfare groups on the premise that the projects would become self-sufficient. The organization helped Jews establish a community infrastructure enabling them to help themselves.

Another method the JDC used to reconnect Jews to their heritage involved promotion of religious observance without endorsing a specific branch of Judaism. It purchased and distributed items involved in Jewish prayer and ritual such as Torahs, kippot, menorahs, matzoth, and ketubot. Because of the dearth of Jewish educators and religious leaders, the JDC organized programs that trained rabbis and cantors, kosher butchers, ritual circumcisers, and other Jewish religious functionaries.

The development of Jewish community centers provided another avenue for the...