“every day there was a present”
The annual eight days of Passover and the weekly Sabbath meal evoke the greatest amount of nostalgia today and were probably the most important religious identifiers in the Soviet shtetl of the 1920s and 1930s.
But many people we interviewed also remembered some of the other holidays that fill the annual ritual calendar. Yakuta recalled that during the festival of Succoth her father would put up a sukkah, the temporary booth in which it is traditional to eat meals and sometimes sleep, and “all our neighbors would come over to sit in the sukkah. And we used to sing songs like ‘The small Sukele, with pretty little panels, Jews, it's made for you and me.'” In the Lunacharskii collective farm, according to the Palatnikova sisters, sukkahs transformed the skyline during the week of the holiday. But elsewhere in the region, the custom was less common. The building of booths during Succoth was already declining in Russia by the time of the revolution, particularly in large towns. Whereas Passover could easily be observed inconspicuously in the home, the construction of a sukkah created a physical landmark, a structure visible to neighbors and government officials. As a result, the pious devised means of following the commandment as best they could without drawing outside attention. Many houses in Soviet shtetls, for instance, had partially enclosed verandas that were commonly used as sukkahs during the festival holiday.16 Others had lofts with windows whose shutters could be opened to create a sukkah. Avrom Furer's grandfather “had a loft. You could open a door on the ceiling and [it led to the loft]. He put in a table. We were children. We would run here and there. But my grandfather would pray there.... He couldn't sleep there—it was a small loft. But he would eat there.”Many also remembered Tishah b'Av, the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the Temple.
Few, however, could tell us what the holiday actually commemorates. Instead, they remembered the now largely forgotten custom of throwing burrs. During the mournful day, as the men fasted and wore torn clothing, children would collect burrs and throw them at each other and into the beards of their elders. Ya- kuta remembered: “Oy there was such a clamor, an outcry, chatter and a lament. People cried. The girls ran away, ran away from the boys. On Tishah b'Av we wouldn't leave the house. We were so afraid of the burrs.” Evgenia Kozak added that children would throw “burrs, these little burrs. And they would stick to them [the adults]. Around us the burrs really grew. They would stick to your coat.... It was a great game to throw the burrs.”17Recollections about Hanukkah, although not as prominently celebrated in the Soviet shtetl, came up often in interviews. Yakuta recalled: “On Hanukkah we would get Hanukkah gelt [money]. Everybody had a little bag for holding it. My uncle would give us five kopeks. Somebody else would come and bring twenty kopeks and would put them in little bags. Hanukkah gelt. Every day there was another present of money or gifts.” Evgenia Kozak had vague recollections of the holiday: “Hanukkah is also a joyous holiday,” she told us. “My grandmother would give Hanukkah gelt.” Tatiana Marinina, too, recalled, “And our father would always give us Hanukkah gelt.” Donia Presler remembered the jelly donuts and sweet latkes of Hanukkah. Many others remember baking potato latkes: Tatiana Marinina told us, “On Hanukkah we would make potato latkes, from potatoes. And we would prepare everything like for a holiday.” A few people we spoke with remembered lighting menorah candles: Nekha Vainer-Shpak vaguely remembered “eight candles— eight or seven?... We had a menorah. Hanukkah was a joyous holiday.” In Haysyn, Arkadii Burshtein remembered, “On Hanukkah, the kids would get Hanukkah gelt. My grandfather used to give us all Hanukkah gelt. The candles were lit and we would celebrate Hanukkah, but not as we celebrate it today.” Only a few people we spoke to could recall the custom of playing games of chance, often while spinning a dreydl.
Avrom Furer remembered playing games of chance with nuts.Writing back in 1937, Berl Botvinik described the celebration of Hanukkah during his childhood in the prerevolutionary era: “Only the truly pious Jews would light Hanukkah lights silently and nonchalantly. And here and there a cantor in a synagogue would utter a prayer in honor of Hanukkah before a small gathering of pious people.”18 Indeed, the growing importance of Hanukkah in the modern era was largely an innovation of secular Zionists, who first embraced the holiday, viewing the Hasmonean State that Hanukkah celebrates as an early manifestation of the Jewish State they hoped to establish. The Hasmonean victory provided a concrete example of Jews asserting their sovereignty over the land. Jewish socialist youth organizations of the early twentieth century also looked favorably upon the holiday, viewing the Maccabean revolt as a victory for the lower classes against the Hellenized aristocracy. Since the holiday has no restrictions on work and few specific religious obligations, it was a usable festival for secularists seeking a national holiday to replace the major religious holy days of Judaism. During the pogroms in the early twentieth century, some interpreted the Seleucid oppressors as precursors to modern pogrom perpetrators, allowing for the historical contextualization of contemporary problems. The coincidental timing of Hanukkah with the Christmas holiday further elevated the Jewish holiday to a major festival in some traditions. Today those who remember its celebration in their childhood shtetl are probably prompted to think of it because of the high importance it has in the post-Soviet Jewish ritual calendar, as well as their reminisces of Hanukkah gelt.
Writing about post-Soviet Jewry based on 3,300 interviews conducted in major cities in Ukraine and Russia, Zvi Gitelman argues that Jewish identity in the Soviet Union was based on “thin culture”—cultural identity without any tangible manifestations (language, customs, foods, clothing)?9 In contrast to the majority in Gitelmans much larger urban sample, the elderly small-town Jews we interviewed retained a deeper sense of religious sentiment.
Their recollections and knowledge of aspects of Jewish religious ritual and culture indicate that in small towns in the Ukrainian hinterland, Jewish religious life persisted well into the 1930s.The older men we were able to interview focused their piety on institutionalized forms of religious expression, the synagogue and the heder from which they learned a consciously cultivated religious tradition. For the most part, the antireligious policies of the state pushed religious life out of the public synagogue and into the domestic sphere, where it was more resistant to public censure, and where it was seamlessly integrated into the routines of everyday life. The result was an amalgamated faith, rooted in Jewish tradition but transplanted to a Soviet garden, where it cross-fertilized with a host of adjacent beliefs and practices. In addition to venerating the synagogue as the most salient expression of Jewish life, many experienced their religious lives in the form of “domestic religion,” the informal inculcation of religious identity through home ritual rather than through formal public practice and dogmatic education.20 Among Jews, domestic religion is commonly associated with women because women were traditionally excluded from public rituals in the synagogue—they were not permitted to read from the Torah and were relegated to their own section of the synagogue, usually behind a wall or curtains in the balcony, where they were hidden from the gaze of the men conducting the service below. But in the prewar Soviet shtetl, Jewish men and women alike expressed their Judaism primarily in the home.
Recent scholarship on the role of religion in identity has shifted focus from public demonstrations of prescribed ceremony—in the church, mosque, or synagogue—to expressions of faith and spirituality in the home, and to constant and routinized domestic observances, which in the case of the Jewish religion includes such practices as Sabbath observance and the display of religious artifacts, such as mezuzahs.
Many of the periodic Jewish holidays that mark the calendar, like Passover and Hanukkah, are more commonly celebrated in a domestic setting than in the public synagogue. Among scholars of the Soviet Union, in particular, interest in domestic or “popular religion” has helped us understand the impact of the formal attacks on institutional religion?1 Due to the political and social constraints on the public observance of Judaism in the Soviet context, even men shied away from synagogue attendance and public displays of religiosity. As a result, male as well as female religious expression, activity, and ritual were largely moved into the domestic sphere, the private home. Domestic religiosity, which folklorists looking at Jewish religious practice in Israel and America have identified as a female space, was, in the Soviet context of the 1920s and 1930s, the primary means of religious expression for both men and women. It also contributed to the perseverance of Jewish religious practice and faith under the Soviet government.The oral histories examined here tell us more than the institutional history of religious organizations. They also tell stories about the role that religion played in the home, and about the role that personal faith played in the hearts and minds of ordinary individuals. They paint a picture of a shtetl population in Ukraine, whose lives were still steeped in Jewish religious belief and ritual in the interwar period. Their patterns of belief mirror those that Glennys Young observed for the Russian Orthodox peasantry during this same period: they were characterized by “the delicate integration of behavior, beliefs, and institutional loyalties that we would assume to be incompatible.”22
Synagogues were a regular part of the elder generation's life, and continued to serve as important symbolic landmarks for children, whose lives incorporated both Soviet and Judaic rituals. Jewish holidays were routinely celebrated in domestic settings with special food and family time.
The generations that grew up in the 1920s and 1930s—at least those who speak Yiddish and continue to reside in the region—still recall their childhoods as pious and insist they grew up in a deeply religious environment. From their perspective, they did. They may not recall all the words to the moyde ani or the Shema—two of the most important prayers in the Jewish liturgy—but their piety and faith was, and remains, genuine. They acted out the rituals “as it should be done” and followed the rules “as you are supposed to do” to the best of their knowledge and ability. This faith, which sustained many people through the turbulent revolutionary era, the famine, collectivization, and the Great Terror, was about to be put to a test that would fundamentally demarcate the lives of Soviet Jews along with the rest of the world, between “before the war,” “during the war,” and “after the war.”Indeed, many Soviet Jews, when asked when they stopped going to synagogue, responded simply “when there were no more Jews.” Ultimately it was not the Jewish Sections and their successors that dealt the death blow to Jewish religious observance in the Soviet Union, but the Second World War. As Nekha Vainer-Shpak put it: “Before the war, Jews were Jews. And then the war—Hitler took everyone away.”