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Rites Of Passage
Even in Siberia, it's never too late
for a Jewish awakening.
* 2015-2016
Bar/Bat
Mitzvah
Dates Still
Available!
11111r.
AMIN&
B'NAI
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MOSHE
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Congregation B'nai Moshe
6800 Drake Road 1 West Bloomfield, MI 48322 1 www.bnaimoshe.org
74 September 18 • 2014
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Participants in the Bar/Bat Mitzvah Family Camp read from a Torah scroll in
the Siberian city of Novosibirsk in August.
Elaine Berke
JNS.org
S Iberia is not known for its
welcoming appeal. But in
2005, I stood for the first
time in the warm
glow of a small
group of eager
Jewish students
in Khabarovsk, a
remote Siberian
town on the border
with China, and
asked how many of
them had a bar or
bat mitzvah.
Two raised their
hands. While many
said they would
have liked to have
celebrated that
Elaine Berke
Jewish rite of pas-
sage, they felt too
old to do so.
Yet three weeks ago on Shabbat —
nine years later — I stood in awe as
more than 70 Jews from across this
vast region of Russia recited prayers,
read Torah and learned about
Judaism at a hotel in Novosibirsk,
the unofficial capital of Siberia.
They were participants in the Bar/
Bat Mitzvah Family Camp, a pro-
gram I founded together with the
American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee (JDC) that trains Jewish
youths and adults to undergo bar
and bat mitzvah ceremonies and to
strengthen their Jewish identities.
Witnessing this event was, for me,
the culmination of the effort that
started back in 2005 with my initial
trip to the Russian hinterland, evoca-
tive of so much history.
At that time, Jewish
communities across the
vast expanses of Siberia
— stretching from the
Pacific Ocean in the
east all the way to the
Ural Mountains in the
west — were start-
ing to re-emerge after
decades of oppression
under Communism.
In cities like
Novosibirsk, Tomsk,
Krasnoyarsk and oth-
ers, tens of thousands
of people were reclaim-
ing their Jewish iden-
tities and rebuilding
synagogues and community centers,
with the help of a number of Jewish
organizations and local initiatives.
But because of decades of Soviet
oppression — including bans on
Jewish religious practice and Jewish
quotas in a variety of Soviet institu-
tions — they did not have the tools
to do so on their own. Important
rites like being bar or bat mitzvahed
were rare.
That saddened me at the time
because of the value I believe that
Jewish tradition has, a value I
imparted to my children. So I was