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Generation of the Desert: The Exodus of Soviet Jews to Israel
| Article
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20546 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
2,516 Words |
| Author
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Nechemia Meyers
Nechemia Meyers, affiliated with the Weizmann Institute of
Science in Rehovot, Israel, has previously published two
articles in The World & I: Israel and the Far East: Growing
Links Between Jews and Asians (January 1989) and Bar Kokhba: A
Two-Millennia Debate (July 1990). |
It is customary for recently arrived Russian immigrants to be invited to the Passover seders of veteran Israeli families, where, between courses, the story of the Exodus from Egypt is retold. For most of the Russian Jews, this is their first seder. Having grown up in a society where Judaism was suppressed, they are likely to know far more about Marx than Moses. So an attempt is made to explain the Exodus to them in the most basic Hebrew possible.
But the Passover story is less relevant to them than what happened afterward in Sinai. Then, it will be remembered from Num. 32:13 "The Lord made them wander to and fro in the wilderness for forty years, until all the generation that had done evil in the sight of the Lord was consumed." The parallel to their situation is all too clear. For though they no longer are slaves, most still are figuratively wandering in the desert, not truly at home in the Promise Land.
In many respects, the newcomers from Russia are reliving the experience of the German Jews who immigrated to what was then Palestine in the thirties. They moved not because they were Zionists but because the country offered them refuge from Nazi terror. It was not easy for those Jews, either professionally or personally, yet they went on to transform Palestine from a provincial backwater into a relatively sophisticated society. They were primarily responsible for establishing the world-famous Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, scientific, research centers like the Weizmann Institute, and a modern banking system, as well as for "Europeanizing" life in the Holy Land.
Emigration from the former Soviet Union probably will have the same dramatic effect on Israel as did emigration from the third Reich sixty years earlier. This offers little comfort, however, to the 400,000 Russian immigrants who have arrived in the last few years: They are in the midst of a wearying struggle to acclimatize and acculturate themselves.
Solving The Professional Problem
Had the vocation of Russian Jews been the same as those of their non-Jewish neighbors, their absorption would have been much easier. Jobs probably could have been found for most of the construction workers and farmers, most of the cooks and street cleaners, and most of the schoolteachers and accountants. But some 50 percent of the Jews of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev--like their coreligionists in other countries of the Diaspora--are concentrated in the free professions. And Israel, after
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