Who are Our Russian-Speaking Jewish Travellers?

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  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Who are Our Russian-Speaking Jewish Travellers?: A Night in Northeast Philadelphia

On Tuesday I flew to Philadelphia to do a pre-trip educational program with the Russian Jewish travelers from Philadelphia who will be joining the Spain trip.   The program organizers selected Chicago and Philadelphia as the launch cities for Davai, because as it turns out, both cities have a good infrastructure for Russian-Jewish programming.  We also wanted to make sure that participants in Davai felt like the trip to Spain was embedded in a year-long program of learning and community.  After all, the uniqueness of Davai lies in its three goals combined in one program: personal transformation, key to so many Jewish identity travel programs' success, community involvement, which requires extensive follow up after the trip, and leadership development, which demands significant investment in time and resources down the road.  So with these lofty goals in mind, I designed a pre-trip evening of learning that exposed them to questions of contemporary Jewish identity and to Spanish Jewish history and, I hope, to begin to create a community of life-long learners.

After meeting up with Nadya, our program director, and Misha Zilbermint, whose job is to make sure these 80 Russian Jewish individuals from Philly and Chicago become a community of young Jewish leaders, we took a cab to the Russian neighborhood of Philadelphia, Northeast Philly.  I knew the area from my childhood, as the place my mother's relatives lived, and from which my mother herself fled forty years ago for sunnier climes in California.  I had forgotten how far out from the city center Northeast was, but it makes sense that immigrant communities, which used to be located in impoverished urban centers like the Lower East Side of New York, have been pushed out of those gentrified areas and are now located in relatively run-down 1950s suburbs.  These are places that in the 1950s had been the great hope of the white (Jewish) middle classes and now serve as an inexpensive immigrant soft-landing.

Unlike Chicago, which was an all-English language affair, the Philadelphia group definitely felt more at home in a bi-lingual world, with the local coordinator, Vika, working with us almost exclusively in Russian, and some of the participants even introducing themselves and conducting their hevruta text study in Russian.  When we had begun plans for the trip, the organizing team decided on an English-language approach, since many of these "Russian-speaking Jews" really grew up in the U.S. as primary English speakers and are, more importantly, literate only in English.  But after meeting with the travelers, it is clear to me that creating a travel program for global Russian-speaking Jews demands a bi-lingual approach and, if Israel gets included in future programming, a tri-lingual approach.  Working in both English and Russian would make many of the participants feel more confident in their ability to interact, but it would also give us the opportunity to show these 20-something immigrants that Russian is a language of Jewish culture - a message not always reinforced by their families, friends or communities.

The group warmed up quickly as we debated the merits of the Russian Jewish immigrant writer Lara Vapnyar's short stories and whether or not the Spanish Golden Age was really golden for Jews or whether retrospectively Jews have created a mythology of better times when Jews and Muslims got along.  The group is smart, engaged, and very excited to learn.  In two hours, we did five different texts studies (from Vapnyar to Maimonides and back), shared stories about our pasts, including one participant telling us about how the school leaders of his hometown in Ukraine created an all-Jewish "magnet" school so that it would win regional educational competition. Ah, the myth of Jewish intellectual superiority.  But PS, they did win.

As we left, Nadya, Misha, and I did a high-five, because the evening had gone so well, but also because we could see transformation happening before our eyes...both among the participants and in ourselves.  The work was starting to feel real.  Next entry from Spain...

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