The Forsaken Converts of Russia: In Zoya's Kitchen

Zoya Zaitzva, in whose home I was a guest, did not have any Samogan. “My mother did not teach me how to prepare it”, she apologized. Zoya refuses to disclose her age. She looks young but she is already a grandmother. So it is in the village, she explains. The ideal age for marriage was 19. Zoya has three grown children, one of whom lives in Israel. Her mother also lives in Israel, but Zoya and her other two children are not allowed to make aliya because of her second marriage to a non-Jew. “My mother always told me to marry ‘someone from amongst your own’, so I returned from my studies in the big city and married someone from the village, but after a year and a half I got divorced because he was an idiot”, Zoya says with a smile. Even her second marriage, this time to a Russian, did not last. “It turned out that he too was an idiot,” she says.

Evening is approaching and Zoya closes the curtains. The heating system does a good job of warming up her small yet meticulously cared for home. Zoya and her mother, who has come for a visit, completed the renovation of the house last summer. Zoya parted with the old oven, tore down some walls and put up light-colored wallpaper. In the bathroom she finally installed a toilet, but she seldom uses it in order not to fill up the cesspit too quickly. She did not give up on the little basement that is hidden under wooden beams at the entrance of her living room, where she stores jars of jam and pickles.

The television is on nonstop. The news continuously praises Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, but there is not a word about how the residents of the rural areas cannot make ends meet.

“It is a hole”, insists one of the neighbors, adding that, "The villages are not considered important at all in Russia. We are like flies in the eyes of the regime, far from the eyes and far from the heart.”

We are sitting in the kitchen. Instead of samogan, Zoya offers me a cup of excellent cherry wine that she prepared by herself. Zoya is unemployed for a few months already, and barely subsists on her mother’s pension of 3000 rubles a month, which is the equivalent of 111 dollars. In order to register her son for studies in a military academy, she had to use some connections via her brother, who is a senior military intelligence officer who lives in Moscow, and pay under the table. She didn’t have the necessary funds, so she traveled to Moscow to earn some money by cleaning streets. Now she hopes that her brother the officer will be able to pull some strings and get her a job at the local train station. Zoya dreams about the first paycheck that she will get, how she will buy presents for everyone, and maybe even a small car for herself. “This is how it is in Russia. Everything is based on who you can bribe. Nothing has changed,” she says.

In the morning I tasted the small potatoes that Zoya fried along with a small piece of carp that she cured on her own, and then I went to pray. When I left the house I noticed two small holes on the inner doorpost of the living room. “There was once a Mezuzah here," Zoya said as she pointed with her finger to the niche that was left in the wood.

Exactly ten men were gathered in the small stone house which was heated beforehand. The prayers had already begun. Eliezer Yakovlevich, the cantor, quickly recited the morning blessings, followed by "Shirat Hayam" ("the song at the sea", which was recited by Moses and the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea) and the "Shma Yisrael" prayer. The prayers were said in Russian, as the last of the villagers who knew Hebrew had already made aliya to Israel.

The flow of Cantor Yakovlevich's reading of the prayers was truly amazing. The worshippers, some of them wrapped in prayer shawls, with caps or fur hats on their heads, knew exactly when to stand, when to sit and when to respond ‘Amen’. They no longer use the old tefillin (phylacteries) that they received for their Bar Mitzvahs. Each uses a prayerbook whose pages are divided into two - one part for the Hebrew prayer and the other for the Russian translation. When it comes time for the Torah reading, Eliezer passes by everyone as he holds the Torah scroll, in order to give each of them a chance to kiss it.

Lately, the holding of the morning prayers cannot be taken for granted, except for the Sabbath and holidays. When Eliezer heard that I wanted to come for prayers, he had to organize a minyan (prayer quorum) and call his friends. The village has hundreds of Jews, but only ten arrived for the prayers and they are all retirees.

After the morning prayers I pop over to the local school to see what level of Judaism remains among Vysoki’s youth. Lubov Yakovlevna has run the school for 46 years and has no intention of leaving. Jews, Christians and even a few Muslims study in her school. “We do not teach Jewish identity here. This is a Russian school”, she says, “but my presence here does influence the children even though it is absolutely forbidden for me to openly introduce Jewish elements”.