Attoning in Russia

Yom Kippur in Moscow was both funny and sad. I went to a synagogue near my place, which is kind of a holocaust memorial. See pic below:

I did a test drive on the Saturday before Yom Kippur to check it out, and there was a bar mitzvah going on. A small one, no big celebrations, but it was a very looooog service! For Yom Kippur there were very few people, mostly old women. In fact, the Monday morning service consisted of me, two rabbis, one cantor, another guy and 14 old women. The upside was that I was called to read the torah twice :-)

The service was hilarious: the synagogue considers itself progressive, i.e., not all the prayers are in Hebrew. Therefore, there were tons of stuff in Russian and sometimes I got completely lost. The hardest thing was knowing what page we were in, so I had the fastest crash course in Russian ever, and learned the numbers in amazing speed.

The two rabbis and the cantor were also funny: three old fellows who fought all the time. At some instances, one of the rabbis wanted to skip part of the service, and the other one would make him stop and start from the proper passage. Later on, one of the rabbis wanted to call me for a torah reading but the other one started yelling at him: as I'd taken the torah from the ark, I think I was not supposed to be called to read it (that's what I assume, since they were fighting in Russian...). And sometimes the 2 rabbis would fight with the cantor, who was prone to taking naps and forgetting to sing.

It was also interesting that the older rabbi could not read hebrew; I stopped to wonder why and it ended up making sense, since he must have been born in the beginning of the Stalinist repression against the Jews and was never taught hebrew.

Ah... transportation: the synagogue is on the same avenue where I live, and I went on foot for shabbat and Kol Nidrei. I almost died! Distances in Moscow can be quite tricky and it took me 45 minutes each way! For the following days, I learned what buses I had to take and it was much easier.

At the end of Yom Kippur service, I went home even though they were going to serve a small meal to break the fast: the old women had already looted all the food on shabbat and I didn't want to be there to see it again. At home, I had Russian bread, cream cheese with lox and then ate 3/4 of poppy-seed cake which gave me a huge stomach ache. I wonder why, since I only ate 75% of the cake, not all of it!

During service there were some things I'd never seen before. At one time, every body kneeled on the floor: jews are actually allowed to kneel, but we don't do it as a form of differentiation between our rituals and Christian ones. Another weird moment was a heavy-metal-like gesture that people made when the torah was raised -- I felt as if I was at an AC/DC concert! And some of the songs were different, while some of them were not sung at all.

After all, it was a very an interesting yet saddening experience -- there were very few people and those who were there were elders and could not speak Hebrew. It made me realize how much Russian Jews suffered: starting with the Pale of Settlement (when were mandated to move to the western border of the Empire and prohibited to live in large cities), then the pogroms and WWII, and finally the Stalinist represseion. Not to mention that anti-semitism is still pretty strong in Russia: 2 synagogues (and 1 mosque too) were attacked with graffiti in the last 2 weeks...