In December 1991, as the Soviet Union was collapsing, some 20 young Jews gathered in Kiev’s Kozatsky restaurant.
The great emigration of Soviet Jewry had begun two years earlier, and nearly a million already had left for Israel, Europe and North America.
This group of Jews, however, planned to stay — and they were looking for a Jewish identity that would take them into this brave new post-Soviet world.
“It was a Hanukkah party,” recalls Rabbi Alex Dukhovny, a young activist at the time. “We didn’t know what would come — it was the beginning of the miracle.”
The miracle he was referring to was the return of Reform Judaism to Ukraine, where the movement first emerged in Lvov in 1826. The group at that Kiev restaurant decided to form a congregation called “tikvah,” Hebrew for hope, “in the hope that Reform Judaism would open the gate for young Jews to find their way to Judaism,” says Dukhovny.
Now head of the Reform movement in Ukraine, a position he’s held since his 1999 ordination from Leo Baeck College in London (there are no Reform rabbinical schools in the former Soviet Union), Dukhovny has witnessed that hope become a reality.
This year, on Sept. 28, after 22 years in a small rented facility, Congregation Hatikva dedicated its new synagogue center in Kiev’s historic Jewish district. The building boasts a sanctuary with seating for 150, spacious activity rooms, a library, a youth center, administrative offices and a kitchenette.
But those are just the bricks and mortar. What the building really represents is a solid future for Progressive Judaism in Ukraine.
Dukhovny was in the Bay Area two weeks ago, speaking to local congregations on his way to the Reform movement’s biennial in San Diego. He made sure to visit Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, one of five synagogues in the United States that “twin” with an emerging Reform congregation in Ukraine, to offer financial and moral support (Beth Am’s twin is in Poltava).
I ran into him at a luncheon at Congregation Beth Israel Judea in San Francisco, where he presented an update on the movement’s progress.
I first met Alex in the summer of 2000, in Kiev. Then as now, he was a large man with a baby face, immaculately dressed, with a perennial smile and expansive manner.
In 2000, the Reform movement was going through a heady period of growth. In a decade, it had gone from one congregation in Moscow to some 80 throughout the region. In Ukraine alone, it grew from 18 to 32 Reform congregations in the prior year.
Most of these congregations were lay-led, not surprising given that there were just three Reform rabbis in the entire FSU. Within a few years that number grew to six, where it remains today.
Two of those rabbis are in Ukraine, serving 47 congregations with some 13,000 active members. One more is about to be ordained in London, and will return to serve her former congregation in Odessa. Three Reform rabbis for Ukraine may not be an impressive number, even next to another three in Russia and one in Belarus. But it’s not easy to get rabbis for the former Soviet Union, say leaders of the World Union for Progressive Judaism.
Alex Kagan, the union’s director of FSU operations, told me that while the movement has focused both on buying buildings and training rabbis, the former has proved easier than the latter.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, says Los Altos resident Steven Bauman, former WUPJ chair.
“In Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, an attractive building is an attractor of more affluent people, so buildings became a priority,” he explained to me. The plan is to develop local communities that will sustain themselves rather than rely on foreign (i.e., American) support. There are now synagogue centers in Kiev, Petersburg, Moscow and Minsk, the four major cities where the Reform movement works.
The “buildings-first” strategy already has paid off in Kiev, Dukhovny reports. Ten “well-off families” joined in the weeks following the synagogue center opening, and the head of a local bank has booked his son’s bar mitzvah.
“For me, it’s so important for Reform Judaism to be strong in the place where it started,” he says.
Sue Fishkoff is the editor of j., and can be reached at [email protected].