LEV KRICHEVSKY

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Moscow

IV

hen Rabbi Pinchas
Goldschmidt first
arrived in Moscow 10
years ago, the city near-
ly scared him away.
"It was like traveling 50 years back
in a time machine," the chief rabbi of
Moscow says.
"The streets, the cars, the way peo-
ple looked — everything was not just
another country, it was like another
century." When Goldschmidt arrived
to teach at a newly opened yeshiva,
the Soviet Union still existed. The
Jews were a beleaguered population —
Jewish life was confined to few syna-
gogues, and the shadow of the all-
powerful KGB was still hanging over
the Jewish community — whose only
hope seemed to lay in emigration.
The policy of glasnost, or openness,
instituted by then-Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev, offered some
hope, yet few believed the policy
would last — or lead to political or
societal overhauls.
Goldschmidt admits that before he
moved to Moscow he never thought
of becoming a Russian rabbi.
Indeed, why would he? The
Zurich-born son of an Orthodox
Jewish family, he has no Russian her-
itage. His family fled to Switzerland
from Germany and Hungary during
the Holocaust; the chief rabbi of
Denmark was one of his great-grand-
fathers.
He traded a pulpit in Israel for a
position in Russia to avoid the more-
well-trod rabbinical paths.
"I was always looking for a place
where there is nothing — to try to cre-
ate something," says Goldschmidt, 36.
"To be a rabbi here, you have to
start from zero" and be willing "to
work with people who completely
were not in touch with the Jewish
world." When he was offered a job as
an adviser on Jewish law to Russian
Chief Rabbi Adolph Shayevich soon
after he arrived in 1989, Goldschmidt
could never have imagined the whirl-
wind of change that the next decade
would bring both to himself and his
new community.
At 25, Goldschmidt was probably
the youngest member of the congrega-
tion that he also took over soon after
he arrived.
"In those days, the synagogue was
like an old-age home," Goldschmidt
recalls.

9/24
1999

30 Detroit Jewish News

Jewish kindergarten in Moscow in
1989. His older son was in its first
class.
"It was mostly for our children and
the children of the refuseniks, who in
fact were half out the door," he says.
But soon after the collapse of com-
munism in 1991, it became clear that
not every Jew was going to leave right
away and Goldschmidt increased his
involvement in Jewish school projects.
His wife Dara, an American who is
a graduate of Yeshiva University, is now
the principal of a Jewish day school in
the Russian capital.
The home life of the Goldschmidts,
0
0
the first rabbinical family from abroad
to make Russia their home, was filled
with different challenges. For several
years, kosher food was impossible to
get at local stores, and the family had
to bring in the majority of their rations
from abroad.
Goldschmidt, the father of six, says
that his family had to abandon their
notions of healthy eating.
"In the morning, we usually had
kasha or roasted potatoes. It was a
totally different diet, and it took some
time till we got used to it." Today,
Goldschmidt runs an active kashrut
program, negotiates with food factories,
issues lists of kosher foods available
from Russian stores and oversees some
kosher catering businesses in Moscow.
The family also had to learn
Russian. Today he speaks only Russian
to his congregants, and his children
converse mostly in Russian with each
other.
During the past decade, Jewish life
in the former Soviet Union had to rely
on funds from abroad. As a result of
inflation and price increases, Jewish
leaders realized that foreign donors
could not keep up with the growing
needs of a community undergoing a
rapid revival.
binical court, he dealt with cases corn-
In 1995, Goldschmidt, along with
ing from across the Soviet Union.
other Jewish leaders, started to plan a
The task was especially challenging
local organization of Jewish business-
given the fact that many families were
people to fund some of the communi-
coming out of the Jewish closet after
ty's activities.
50 or 60 years, Goldschmidt
"Most people were afraid of
Moscow's
chief
says.
touching Jewish topics, so they
rabbi, Rabbi
"It was an exodus of biblical
wouldn't even agree to see us
proportions," Goldschmidt says Pinchas
and talk," he recalls.
Goldschmidt,
of a mass wave of aliyah in the
People close to the Russian
late 1980s and early 1990s. "No stands behind
the
lectern
in
Jewish
Congress credit
one was doing any long-term
the
Choral
Goldschmidt
with persuading
planning; we just tried to help
Synagogue.
Vladimir
Goussinsky,
a promi-
people with their immediate
nent
banker-turned-media-
needs. I felt like I was a rabbi
magnate, into giving his name and
for a DP camp." Yet Jewish leaders had
financial support to a new Jewish
to think about the future — if only as
group.
it pertained to their own children.
The creation of the RJC, the first
Goldschmidt helped start the first

Russian

eaco

Moscow's
chief rabbi
forges a future for Jews
who stayed after
Soviet fall.

The congregants were mostly elder-
ly pensioners who did not risk their
jobs or benefits by going to syna-
gogue.
"On my very first visit to the syna-
gogue, an old man came up to me and
said in Yiddish, pointing at another
pensioner, 'Don't talk to him, he is a
KGB collaborator.' Minutes later, that
second man approached me and
repeated the same thing, referring to
the first old man.
When the Iron Curtain fell in late
1989, and Jews began to pour out of
the country to Israel, Goldschmidt's
career took a new twist as he now had
to authenticate many of the would-be
emigrants' Jewishness.
As the head of the beit din, or rab-

',