“This Is Who I Would Become”: Russian Jewish Immigrants and Their Encounters with Chabad-Lubavitch in the Greater Toronto Area

Joshua  Tapper

doi:10.25071/1916-0925.40169

Authors

Joshua Tapper

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/1916-0925.40169

Keywords:

Chabad-Lubavitch, Soviet Jews, Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, religion

Abstract

Since the early 1970s, the Chabad Lubavitch movement has served as an important setting for religious, social, and cultural activity among Russian-speaking Jewish migrants to Canada and the United States. While scholars and community observers have long recognized the attentiveness of Lubavitch emissaries toward Russian Jews, there is no quantitative data and little qualitative research on Chabad’s influence in the post-Soviet Jewish diaspora. This paper explores the motivations, mechanics, and consequences of this encounter in a Canadian setting, examining how Chabad creates a religious and social space adapted to the unique features of post-Soviet Jewish ethnic and religious identity. Participating in a growing scholarly discussion, this paper moves away from older characterizations of Soviet Jewish identity as thinly constructed and looks to the Chabad space for alternative constructions in which religion and traditionalism play integral roles. This paper draws on oral histories and observational fieldwork from a small qualitative study of a Chabad-run Jewish Russian Community Centre in Toronto, Ontario. It argues that Chabad, which was founded in eighteenth-century Belorussia, is successful among post-Soviet Jews in Canada and elsewhere thanks, in part, to its presentation of the movement as an authentically Russian brand of Judaism—one that grew up in a pre-Soviet Russian context, endured the repressions of the Soviet period, and has since emerged as the dominant Jewish force in the Russian-speaking world. The paper, among the first to examine the religious convictions of Canada’s Russian-speaking Jewish community, reveals that post-Soviet Jews in Toronto gravitate toward Chabad because they view it as a uniquely Russian space.

References

Rachel Altein and Israel Jacobson, Out of the Inferno: The Efforts That Led to the Rescue of Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn of Lubavitch from War Torn Europe in 1939-40 (Brooklyn: Kehot Publica-tion Society, 2002).

Mordechai Altshuler, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941-1964(Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2012). https://doi.org/10.26812/9781611682731

M. Avrum Ehrlich, "The Unique Relationship between Habad Hasidism and Russia," in Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Volume 3 (Countries, Regions, and Communities), ed. M. Avrum Ehrlich (Santa Barbara, CA: ABO-CLIO, 2009).

Maya Balakirsky Katz, The Visual Culture of Chabad (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Elissa Bemporad, Becoming Soviet Jews: The Bolshevik Experiment in Minsk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

Robert J. Brym, "Jewish Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union in Canada," East Europe-an Jewish Affairs 31, no. 2 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1080/13501670108577948

Sarah Bunin Benor, Becoming Frum: How Newcomers Learn the Language and Culture of Orthodox Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

Valeriy Chervyakov, Zvi Gitelman and Vladimir Shapiro, "Religion and ethnicity: Judaism in the ethnic consciousness of contemporary Russian Jews," Ethnic and Racial Studies 20, no. 2 (April 1997). https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.1997.9993962

Glenn Dynner, "A Jewish Drunk is Hard to Find: Jewish Drinking Practices and the Sobriety Stereotype in Eastern Europe," Jewish Quar-terly Review 104, no. 1 (Winter 2014). https://doi.org/10.1353/jqr.2014.0003

Menachem Friedman, "Habad as Messianic Fundamentalism: From Local Particularism to Universal Jewish Mission," in Accounting for Fundamentalism: The Dynamic Character of Movements, ed. Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

David E. Fishman, "Preserving Tradition in the Land of Revolution: The Religious Leadership of Soviet Jewry, 1917-1930," in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1992).

Zvi Gitelman, "Introduction: Homelands, Diasporas, and the Islands in Between," in The New Jewish Diaspora: Russian-Speaking Immigrants in the United States, Israel, and Germany, ed. Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Zvi Gitelman, "Jewish Identity and Secularism in Post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine," in Religion or Ethnicity? Jewish Identities in Evolution, ed. Zvi Gitelman (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009).

Zvi Gitelman, Jewish Identities in Postcommunist Russia and Ukraine: An Uncertain Ethnicity(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139150989

Rebecca Golbert, "In Search of a Meaningful Framework for the Study of Post-Soviet Jew-ish Identities, with Special Emphasis on the Case of Ukraine," East European Jewish Affairs 28, no. 1 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1080/13501679808577867

Steven J. Gold, "Community Formation Among Jews from the Former Soviet Union in the United States,"in Russian Jews on Three Continents: Migration and Re-settlement, eds. Noah Lewin-Epstein, Yaacov Ro'i and Paul Ritterband (London: Frank Cass, 1997).

Sascha L. Goluboff, "Fistfights at the Moscow Choral Synagogue: Ethnicity and Ritual in Post-Soviet Russia," Anthropological Quarterly no. 2 (April 2001). https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2001.0014

Sascha L. Goluboff, Jewish Russians: Upheavals in a Moscow Synagogue (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812202038

Boris Gordis, "All is not in the Family: Thoughts on 'Integration' of Russian Jews and Other Jewish Ethnic Groups in the US," Sociological Papers 17 (2012).

Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, The Rebbe: The Life and A!erlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400834273

Samuel Heilman, Synagogue Life: A Study in Symbolic Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1976).

Samuel Kliger, "The Religion of New York Jews from the Former Soviet Union," in New York Glory: Religions in the City, eds. Tony Carnes and Anna Karpathakis (New York: New York University Press,2001).

Fran Markowitz, "Jewish in the USSR, Russian in the USA," in Persistence and Flexibility: Anthropological Perspectives on the American Jewish Experience, ed. Walter P. Zenner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

Fran Markowitz, "Rituals as Keys to Soviet Immigrants' Jewish Identity," in Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry, ed. Jack Kugelmass (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

Fran Markowitz, "If a Platypus is Both a Reptile and a Mammal Can a Person Be Both a Russian and a Jew? Post-Soviet Teenagers' Constructions of Russian Jewish Identity," East European Jewish Affairs 26, no. 2 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1080/13501679608577828

Alice Nakhimovsky, "You Are What They Ate: Russian Jews Reclaim Their Foodways," Shofar 25, no. 1 (Fall 2006). https://doi.org/10.1353/sho.2006.0136

Simon Parizhsky, "Jewish Studies in the FSU: From Scholarship to Social, Cultural and Educational Construction, Regeneration and Growth," in Educational Eclectics: Essays in memory of Shlomo(Seymour) Fox, eds. Shmuel Wygoda and Israel Sorek (Jerusalem: Mandel Foundation, 2009).

Sharrona Pearl, "Exceptions to the Rule: Chabad-Lubavitch and the Digital Sphere," Journal of Media and Religion 13 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1080/15348423.2014.938973

Tamar Rapoport and Edna Lomsky-Feder, "'Intelligentsia' as an Ethnic Habitus: The Inculcation and Restructuring of Intelligentsia among Russian Jews," British Journal of So-ciology of Education 23, no. 2 (June 2002).

Larissa Remennick, "From State Social-ism to State Judaism: 'Russian' Immigrants in Israel and their Attitudes towards Religion," Sociological Papers 15 (2010).

Larissa Remennick, Russian Jews on Three Continents: Identity, Integration and Conflict(New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2012).

Russian, David Schehter, Soldaty na pereprave: Vospominani-ya hasidov Chabada, sobrannye iliteraturno obrabotannye D. Schehterom (Moscow: Knizh-niki, 2014)

Suzanne D. Rutland, "Jews from the Former Soviet Union in Australia: Assimilating or Maintaining Jewish Identities?" Journal of Jewish Identities 4, no. 1 (January 2011). https://doi.org/10.1353/jji.2011.0000

David Schehter, Soldaty na pereprave: Vospominani-ya hasidov Chabada, sobrannye i literaturno obrabotannye D. Schehterom (Moscow: Knizh-niki, 2014).

Joseph Isaac Schneersohn and Alter B. Metzger, The Heroic Struggle: The Arrest and Liberation of Rabbi Yosef Y. Schneersohn of Lubavitch in Soviet Russia (Brooklyn: Merkos L'Inyonei Chinuch, 1998).

Sebastian Z. Schulman, "Undzer Rebenyu: Religion, Memory, and Identity in Postwar Moldova," in Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse, ed. Jeffrey Veidlinger (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana Uni-versity Press, 2016).

David Shneer, "The third way: German-Russian-European Jewish Identity in a global Jewish World,"European Review of History 18, no. 1 (February 2011). https://doi.org/10.1080/13507486.2011.543585

David Shneer, Yiddish and the Creation of Soviet Jewish Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Anna Shternshis, "Kaddish in a Church: Perceptions of Orthodox Christianity among Moscow Elderly Jews in the Early Twenty-First Century," The Russian Review 66 (April 2007). https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9434.2007.00442.x

Shternshis, "White Piano in a Shtetl: Material Culture and Ethnic Identity in the Post-Soviet Jewish Urban Community," Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (Winter 2010). https://doi.org/10.2979/jss.2010.16.2.111

Anna Shternshis, Soviet and Kosher: Jewish Popular Culture in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

Zeev Vagner, Vosemnadtsat (Jerusalem: Shamir, 1989).

Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

Hillel Zatzman, Samarkand: The Underground With a Far-Reaching Impact (Chamah, 2015).

"Slice of Life: Rabbi Zalman Abelsky OBM," Jewish Community of Kishinev and Moldova, last modified July 27, 2014, http://www.kishinev.org/en/slice-of-life/rabbi-zal-man-abelsky-obm.

Yoseph Y. Zaltzman and Izzy Greenberg, JRCC Programs and Mission: JRCC Operations Handbook, Part 1 (Toronto: Jewish Russian Community Centre of Ontario, 2010).