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Small Jewish community in Armenia strives to preserve its heritage

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  • Small Jewish community in Armenia strives to preserve its heritage

    Jewish Telegraphic Agency, NY
    Sept 7 2006

    AROUND THE JEWISH WORLD
    Small community in Armenia strives to preserve its heritage

    By Yasha Levine
    September 7, 2006

    SEVAN, Armenia, Sept. 7 (JTA) - A community of rural residents in the
    former Soviet Union, descended from Russian peasants who converted
    to Judaism two centuries ago, may soon be consigned to the dustbin
    of history.

    Mikhail Zharkov, the 76-year-old leader of Armenia's tiny Subbotnik
    community, says only 13 of the 30,000 people living in his small
    alpine town of Sevan are Subbotniks. There are three men and 10 women,
    and all are nearing the age of 80.

    The community in Sevan is part of an estimated 10,000 to 15,000
    Subbotniks spread across the former Soviet Union.

    Zharkov, a retired welder who is wiry and full of energy and has a
    head full of white hair, estimates that about 2,000 Subbotniks lived
    in Sevan during the community's zenith in the 1930s.

    Located at an altitude of 6,000 feet, Lake Sevan's turquoise waters
    were seen as a vast exploitable natural resource. After Armenia became
    a Soviet republic in the 1930s, the lake fell victim to disastrous
    Soviet planning and industrial expansion.

    During Soviet rule, the Subbotniks' religious freedom, which had
    helped preserve their identity for almost two centuries, vanished
    along with their prime waterfront real estate.

    According to Zharkov, Soviet authorities confiscated the Subbotnik
    synagogue in the mid-1930s. It has since been privatized, and the
    building no longer belongs to the community.

    An unknown number of Subbotniks from elsewhere in the region immigrated
    to Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union, but community members
    in Sevan never dreamed of leaving for Israel.

    In Sevan, Soviet repression, combined with Armenia's difficult economic
    conditions after the fall of communism 15 years ago, tore into the
    fabric of the community.

    "My son, who is 48, and daughter, who is 36, are in Moldova. And of
    course they have been baptized," Zharkov said. "They did it without
    consulting me or my wife. My daughter had to. She married a Russian
    Orthodox man."

    Zharkov's family situation is mirrored in the rest of the community.

    Sevan's Subbotniks have dispersed all over the former Soviet Union
    and offer no financial assistance to their parents, Zharkov says.

    "We lead a simple life, but life has become very expensive. Without
    the aid of the Jewish community, we would have a very tough time,"
    he said. "Our pensions are meager, not even enough to cover utilities."

    The Armenian office of Hesed Avraham, a welfare center sponsored
    by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, periodically
    provides the Subbotniks with food packages.

    The Subbotniks' mysterious 19th-century conversion to Judaism,
    strict adherence to the Torah and staunch refusal to convert back to
    Christianity exposed them to repression and persecution. During the
    rule of Czar Alexander I in the first quarter of the 19th century,
    Subbotniks were deported en masse to remote parts of the Russian
    Empire.

    According to Michael Freund, founder of Shavei Israel, an Israel-based
    organization that reaches out to "lost Jews," the Subbotniks are spread
    out in small pockets across remote corners of the former Soviet Union.

    Sevan's Subbotniks do not know what part of Russia their ancestors
    came from or what prompted them to convert to Judaism.

    "Maybe they thought it a purer form of religion," Zharkov speculated.

    Subbotniks derived their name from their observance of the Sabbath
    on Saturday - Subbota in Russian - rather than Sunday.

    Most Subbotnik communities practice circumcision, but otherwise the
    Subbotniks do not differ in outward appearance from other Russian
    peasants.

    The women wear headscarves and long skirts; the men dress in simple
    slacks and shirts. They do not observe kashrut or Jewish dietary
    laws, and their melodic Shabbat prayers, chanted in Russian, could
    be mistaken for Russian folk songs.

    According to Gersh-Meir Burshtein, who heads a small Chabad-sponsored
    synagogue in the Armenian capital of Yerevan, the fact that the
    community owned two Torah scrolls is proof that Sevan's Subbotniks
    once were well-versed in Hebrew.

    Some years ago one of the old Torah scrolls was taken to the Yerevan
    synagogue, where it remains to this day. The other was stolen from
    the small community. Sevan's Subbotniks now sing and read out of
    their own Torah-based Russian-language prayerbook.

    "Maybe at some point one of their elders realized that the community
    was losing its Hebrew knowledge and adopted the Torah into a
    Russian-language prayer book that they use now," Burshtein told JTA.

    http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?intar ticleid=17030&intcategoryid=5
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