Reassembling the Jewish Matryoshka dolls in my family

Sometime after the second intifada began, when I already lived in Australia, my parents moved from Israel to the famous Crown Heights neighbourhood in New York. They are still there, in a place where the air ripples with rap and Orthodox pop deep into the night while the black-clad Chabadniks pass the time mixing with their black neighbours until their leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, makes his comeback from the dead as the Messiah.

Every so often, I beg my parents to move somewhere more conducive to their health – somewhere quieter, with better-quality vegetables in the shops, with less rubbish strewn on the sidewalks. “But this is where I most belong,” my mother always says – not something you’d expect to hear from a former Soviet Jew.

After the Bolshevik revolution, gods were exorcised from Soviet Russia. Most churches and synagogues were shut down or even destroyed. While some strains of Christianity were outlawed, Judaism wasn’t officially banned. However, following the establishment of Israel, it became associated with the state which the Soviet regime deemed evil. So even if you wouldn’t be arrested for worshipping the Jewish God, you were likely to lose your job and be blacklisted in other ways. It was safer to do what most Soviet Jews did – forget their spiritual heritage.

I remember when the Russian mass aliyah began in the late 1980s, how horrified the more traditional pockets of Israeli society were by the hordes of pork-eating Shabbat-ignorant “barbarians” descending onto the Holy Land. Later, however, it became clear that most of those barbarians had a strong cultural Jewish identity.

Paradoxically, it was the Soviet state that wouldn’t let them forget who they were. Every citizen’s ethnic origins were stamped onto their ID cards; the authorities used this information for discriminatory purposes.

In an example particularly relevant to my parents’ story, universities had quotas to limit admissions of Jewish students. That was how my Odessa-born father, a brilliant scientist, ended up doing his PhD at Siberia’s Novosibirsk State University, a rare university that welcomed Jews unreservedly. And it was there that he met another student, my mother, who initially wanted to do her Masters in English in Moscow but was rejected as a Jew. 

Before encountering academic discrimination, my parents, as many young Jews of their generation, were starry-eyed communists. And they’d enjoyed their share of pork. One of my vivid childhood memories involves eating thick slabs of uncooked pig fat, salted and studded with raw garlic cloves – a favourite in Siberia, consumed allegedly to keep warm.

Nowadays, my parents wouldn’t even pronounce the word ‘pork’. My mother wears a wig; my father prays countless times a day. Their synagogue attendance is divided between the 770 Chabad synagogue and a smaller synagogue for migrants from the former Soviet Union.

As Russian-speaking Jews, my parents are a minority within the minority of the Chabad crowd, which in turn is a minority within Judaism. But even in their other synagogue my parents stand out – it seems to be their fate to be the tiniest, innermost doll within any kind of Jewish Matryoshka. While most, perhaps all, of their fellow congregants came to religion after leaving the Soviet Union, my parents found God while still living there.

There is more to their unusual story – by the time we left the Soviet Union in 1985, my parents not only moved from the study of Das Kapital to the Bible, but were the leaders of a small yet vigorous underground of religious Jewish refuseniks in Odessa (we moved there when I was six).

According to my family lore, it was my fault, or achievement – depending on who tells the story – that my parents discovered God.

I was born with a faulty heart and required open-heart surgery. Congenital defects like mine are usually quite easily repairable, but Soviet hospitals never had enough drugs or machinery. Sober medical staff were a rarity too. My chances of survival weren’t high.

In the paediatric cardiology ward of Moscow hospital to where we flew for my surgery, our supposedly atheist doctor finished her daily rounds with this suggestion for the parents: “Now go to your respective divinities and pray for mercy.” So my parents, unwittingly, ended up following her instructions.

At the time, I was scheduled to be operated upon by a surgeon nicknamed The Butcher because of the number of patients who died under his knife. Luckily for me, while waiting for my surgery, my parents (who were already refuseniks) were introduced to a group of Moscow’s religious refuseniks. One of them, an anaesthetist, helped my parents to bribe the Butcher not to operate on me. The others prayed vigorously for my health. The surgery was successful and my parents grew convinced that it was God who held the key to our salvation.

During my post-operative recovery, still in Moscow, my parents got married again, the Jewish way, and, with the help of that same anaesthetist, my father endured a belated Brit-Milah. From then on, our lives changed irrevocably, and not just because my mother threw out her swimsuits, and extended the hems and sleeves of her dresses to cover her knees and elbows. And not just because I was no longer allowed – to my great delight – to attend school on Saturdays (my parents obtained an exemption, allegedly on account of my health).

The greatest change was that now we graduated from garden variety refuseniks to full-blown dissidents. “It wasn’t intentional,” my mother told me years later. “We just couldn’t not be that if we wanted to remain true to who we became.” Whatever it was, our lives, already marked by marginalisation and poverty – having become refuseniks, my parents were demoted from their jobs, and my mother turned to cleaning parks for a living – were now also marked with danger.

Observing Judaism properly is always arduous, but in the Soviet Union it was mission impossible.

Paradoxically, while the religion wasn’t outlawed, Hebrew was – is – a “Zionist language”. The mere act of uttering prayers in Hebrew, let alone studying it together with Odessa’s other religious refuseniks who soon emerged from their isolation and gathered around my parents, could land you in prison.

And our circle needed things impossible to obtain in the Soviet Union, such as prayer books and Hebrew dictionaries. Western tourists periodically snuck into our apartment at night, bringing these “criminal items” and also some material goods to support us. As our home increasingly drew in local and overseas Jews and our plight became known in the West, my parents were categorised as “dangerous agitators”. Permanent KGB surveillance was installed around our building – that is in addition to some neighbours already recruited as informers.

God and I never really gelled (we formally parted ways when I was 14 and got my way, moving to a secular school). But while as a child I didn’t like the religious restrictions, I was mostly excited about our unusual homelife, sometimes thrillingly terrified. Ours was a life where, whenever we had enough money for meat, headless chickens roamed our small kitchen chased by a self-taught shochet to ensure we ate kosher. It was a life where I could be suddenly pulled out of school and taken to another town to avoid yet another KGB interrogation or a home search.

Still, it wasn’t all fun even for me. Antisemitism at school was rife and it didn’t help when, in my newfound dissident fervour, I refused to make the oath of allegiance to the Party – an obligatory ceremony for ten-year-olds joining the Pioneers youth movement. The only one in my grade without a Pioneer red tie, I got bullied even more than before. Worse, I was pulled out of a cast of the school play which then was the highlight of my existence. For years later I’d dream of that disappointment…

I know now that my parents sheltered me from the worst, like the beating by the KGB that my father endured. Or the fact that they could be, at any given moment, subjected to the brutalities of Soviet jail and I could become a ward of the state, as happened to some other dissident families. What for me was a time of adventure, for my parents was a time of deprivation, humiliation and constant fear.

Those six years left indelible marks on them. To this day, for example, they are distrustful of any authorities to an extreme extent, something that became dangerous during the Covid pandemic when they grew convinced that lockdowns were propaganda, and a good dose of garlic and vitamin C would suffice to keep them healthy.

But while it’s easy to ridicule my parents for some of their odd ways, it is wiser to remember the extent of their courage and integrity in the face of a ruthless regime. Racy stories of KGB aside, there were also the acts of bravery they performed routinely in order to keep to their beliefs. It would take many pages to account for all their daily trials (outside of chasing chickens around the kitchen), so I’ll tell just one story – that of my mother’s mikvah immersions.

For most of our life in Odessa, the city’s mikvah was shut down. To observe purity laws, a core commandment for Jewish women, every month my mother would immerse herself in the sea (to perform the ritual properly it must be natural water). She’d do this at night-time, because immersions must be done fully naked. The trick was to get to the water exactly at 1am, when the armed guards who patrolled the beaches took their break, and to finish before they got back.

“Your father and I had to walk through the park to the sea very quietly,” my mother would tell me later, “because if they mistook us for deserters, they’d have shot us.” She also said: “On some wintry nights, there would be icicles floating on the seawater. Even after avoiding the guards, I was never sure I’d come back alive.”

On a bright autumn day in 1985, after the authorities finally allowed us to leave the country (at a time nobody else was allowed), because they’d had enough of my parents’ “dangerous agitation”, we landed at Ben Gurion airport. I remember being dazzled by the media’s camera flashes and by a bunch of girls my age, 12, waving signs at us: Welcome.

During our first years in Israel my parents continued featuring in the media, and various “important people” came over to pay their respects. Today, however, precisely 40 years since that arrival, our story has slid into oblivion. Which makes sense – if you’ve ever owned a Matryoshka, you’d know that the smallest of its dolls often gets lost.

Although the world forgot about religious Jewish Soviet dissidents, I’ve been haunted by my parents’ story for years. I wanted to write it, but a voice in me always said – who would care? What’s the point? More recently, in the post-October 7 world, it began to seem there might be a point after all.

Right now, when the Soviet anti-Zionist rhetoric is resurrected, replicated and amplified in the social media universe (I’ve written about it elsewhere), and when expressing your Jewishness – which for most of us includes an attachment to ancestral land – opens us up for discrimination and is becoming increasingly dangerous, my parents’ story feels relevant again, even urgent. Theirs is one of the most recent stories of persecution in our turbulent history and, eerily, in many ways it reflects our times.

As Jewish communities around the world are yet again in survival mode, I think right now we need as many narratives of strong, defiant Jews facing impossible circumstances as we can get – for inspiration, and possibly for lessons in stamina and even resistance tactics. Or perhaps it’s just me who needs it.

The writing fire that got extinguished in me after October 7 is finally crackling again, as earlier this year I began to write my parents’ tale. While in the past a big part of why I wanted to write it was to honour my parents, now my primary aim is more practical than altruistic. I am writing to try and understand how they succeeded in standing up to a merciless, powerful state in their fight to be free (even if the freedom they sought is questionable to me – to practice a restrictive form of Judaism).

I am writing to understand how to live my own life in the new, ruptured reality. It’s as if by reassembling the Jewish Matryoshka, I can make myself whole again too. This is mission impossible, I know, but just like my parents once did, I am game to try.