•

_Travel

A WISH FOR HEALTH,
HAPPINESS AND PROSPERITY
IN THE COMING YEAR

Back To The Pale

Five hundred Jewish
Agency leaders explore
=bow American dollars
are rebuilding Jewish
life in the former Soviet
Union.

INA FRIEDMAN
Israel Correspondent

nly a century ago, the
wooded eastern European
city of Minsk, Belarus, was
in the heart of the Pale of
Settlement, the only place where Jews
were allowed to live in czarist Russia.
;- Today, in a land better known for its
struggling economy and see-saw rela-
tionship with nearby Russia, the most
ecent ancestry home for many of
today's American Jews is a center of
Jewish rebirth — due in no small
part to funds raised in Diaspora
Jewish communities.
\
That became clear recently as, on
• their way to Jerusalem for its annual
Assembly, the Jewish Agency for
Israel had 500 delegates stop in seven
republics of the former Soviet Union
•
check in on their Federation con-
tributions.
The team that went to Belarus vis-
ited a region replete with Jewish sig-
• ficance. This is the land where
( Lubavitcher Chasidism, the Bund
• and the Labor-Zionist movement
were born. Chaim Weizmann, David
Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and
Shimon Peres all hailed from here. Its
inspired Marc Chagall to
p aint his famed works on the theme
of the shtetl. And many of these
towns — with their dirt roads, small
wooden houses, outhouses and wells,
freely roaming chickens and goats —
still look as they did during the
Russian revolution seven decades ago.
The group arrived in the capital,
• Minsk, on June 22, the anniversary
•
the Nazi invasion of the USSR
Belarus. By the end of that period,
about 2.2 million citizens — a quar-
ter of the population — had been
• murdered. About a third of them,
?some 800,000 people, were Jews.
•
The countryside is dotted with
monuments to the fallen. Minsk itself
boasts the only monument in the
,whole of the FSU dedicated, in
7 —kussian and Yiddish, to Jews mur-
dered by the Nazis. Jewish war veter-
ans, now in their 80s and 90s, proud-
ly haul out their Red Army uniforms

-

(

to display their medals.
The most prosperous Soviet repub-
lic before the breakup of the USSR,
Belarus has since been reduced to
dire poverty. The average monthly
wage is $50. People on welfare assis-
tance or unemployment squeeze by
on $10 a month, war veterans and
pensioners on about $40.
There have also been recent set-
backs in democratic rule and the
efforts of the Belarus government to
form a union with Russia. President
Alexander Lukashenko recently dis-
persed the democratically elected par-
liament and appointed a new one,
mostly of his own supporters.
Human rights suffered a severe set-
back as he led the country back to
Soviet-style rule.
Today, official statistics put the
Jewish population at about 1 percent
or 100,000 people. But no one really
knows how many Jews are living there.
Jewish Agency (JAFI) statistics show
that in the past seven years, 56,473
Jews emigrated to Israel from Belarus,
which due to the poor economy has
the highest rate of aliyah in the FSU.

With American
Jewish help, Jews
are still leaving
Russia, but also
rebuilding
communities.

But more Jews seem to emerge
from the "closet" every day. What
had been a stress on getting them out
as quickly as possible has turned into
a "rescue mission" of providing for
the elderly, reviving Jewish culture
and preparing younger people for life
in Israel.
Both JAFI and the American
Jewish Joint Distribution Committee
(JDC) are engaged in outreach pro-
grams to locate and serve the coun-
try's Jews. The lengths to which they
go seem remarkable.
"We send our people to sit in
Jewish cemeteries, wait for someone
to visit a grave, and then ask about
the other Jews in the town or vil-
lage," explains Sarah Bogen, the JDC
Coordinator for Belarus in Jerusalem.
Amazingly, after three generations

MOE SELL
JANET RANDOLPH
CHUCK H. RANDOLPH
HILDY RANDOLPH
ERIC RAN DOPH
JOANNE KOWALSKI
DEBBIE ARAS
MICHELE MCNARY
SHIRLEY MOPPER
GERI PORTNER
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PA RTICIA BARU77INI
DIANNE BAROFF

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FLORA GOLDFARB
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