The Forsaken Converts of Russia: They thought we were rich

The fear that the Communist regime would discover that Vysoki’s residents were observing a Jewish lifestyle was great. “It is not only that we prayed quietly, in order that no one should discover it, but we even performed Jewish wedding ceremonies at midnight. I remember that even in the hospital they tried to dissuade us from circumcising our children. And in fact there were some that stopped doing so. However, I and many others continued. Why? If I am circumcised, I want my children to be. I always remember the words of my late mother who told us that we were different from the Christians and that we have a covenant with God”, says Yosef Yakovlevich.

Yakovlevich adds that all the villagers were poor. “All the parents went out to work at first light and returned after sunset, but we were happy. Our parents earned very little, all they had to eat was black bread, but that was enough. Everyone was very friendly and helped each other out.”

The strong work ethic of Vysoki’s residents and the great emphasis they placed on the education of their children only served to strengthen the loathing and anti-Semitism around them. “All of the neighboring villages were jealous of us. They thought that we were rich. They wanted us to live exactly like them, and not develop ourselves. But we worked hard in order to give our children a brighter future and that apparently bothered them very much”, recalls Yakovlevich.

Mikhail Voronin relates that the high school students with whom he studied in the neighboring village “would smear pig fat on my lips and shout ‘Jew, Jew, eat pork’. They hated us and told us on more than one occasion that if the Germans would come to the region they would kill us and that they, the local villagers, would assist them in finishing us off. So what could we do? We prayed and worked harder- that’s all”.

Gradually, the special social fabric which Vysoki’s residents had worked hard to create for themselves began to fall apart, and along with it went the strict Jewish lifestyle they had maintained as well. It wasn’t just the Communist ideology which denied the existence of God that led to the assimilation of many of Vysoki’s residents. In the beginning of the 1960’s, the authorities ordered the Kolkhoz to unite with a local agricultural institute. As a result, Vysoki’s residents were forced to work and send their children to school on the Sabbath. “They told us that whoever does not come to work on the Sabbath will be punished. And do you think we had a choice?” said Eliezer Yakovlevich. Later, a number of homes were built in the village and non-Jews were settled in them. Some are of the opinion that this was an intentional policy aimed at eradicating the Jewish presence in Vysoki.

And then came intermarriage. For decades it was clear to the young people of Vysoki that they must marry only among themselves. “The belief was that Vysoki was a separate breed from the non-Jewish Russians in the area. Our parents instilled within us the importance of maintaining our Jewish identity and that this could only be done by marrying other people from Vysoki”, says Mikhail Voronin. But Vysoki was after all just a small village with a few hundred inhabitants that was largely cut off from other Jewish communities. After the frequency of marriages with second- and third-degree relatives had peaked, there was no choice but to marry non-Jewish outsiders. The process of assimilation intensified further with the departure of the young people to institutes of higher learning outside of the village.

A deep sadness was apparent in the eyes of the newspaper editor Bocharnikov when he considered the changes that had taken place in the village of his birth. Of the 1200 residents today, 400 are not Jewish. Many of those that did not relinquish their Jewishness nevertheless now have family ties to non-Jewish Russians. Bocharnikov says that even though as a member of the Communist party he was an atheist, his Jewish identity is deep and firmly rooted. He too was called up to the Torah and received a pair of tefillin, and he also remembers his father participating in prayers and his parents commemorating the Jewish holidays. And he also heard the promise from his grandfather that the day would come and they would all return to the Land of Israel.

“When I was a boy, the village was united by shared interests, an identity and a common heritage. And we all had a similar lifestyle. Almost all of us were related and the village was virtually a closed entity. As we grew up, many of us became atheists in line with the communist ideology, but our environment did not allow us to forget that we were Jewish. This no longer exists today in Vysoki. The communalism for which Vysoki was so famous is no more, and the young people have strayed far from their heritage. I know less and less people in the village, and assimilation is rampant. If they don’t allow us to make aliya to Israel, there will be no remnant left of the village's magnificent past," Bocharnikov says.

On the way back to Voronezh, I stop at the central bus station in the small town of Talubia and buy coffee and a slice of bread with cheese. The saleswoman at the hat stand notices my foreign accent and asks me where I come from. I tell her that I am from Israel and I just got back from a visit to Vysoki. “I hate them, the christo prodavtsi (those who sold Jesus), those Jewboys that live there. They just work all the time, trying to make more money. They are rich, as if they are better than us," she says.

"It isn’t good to work?" I ask her.

"Let them just get drunk like us," she laughs.