Connecting to Jewish Life

Boris was excited about his upcoming trip to St. Petersburg.  The director of a Hesed welfare center in western Ukraine, he looked forward to participating in a five-week course at JDC’s William S. Rosenwald Institute for Jewish Communal and Welfare Workers.  Yet, one request from his instructors perplexed him.  "We were asked to bring something with us, an object that illustrates our connection to Judaism," Boris recalled.  "I wondered why."

At the end of the first week at the institute, the organizers asked the participants to present their "Jewish" items.  One woman brought her parents’ ketubah, the Jewish marriage document, which had been clandestinely written during the Soviet era.  Another brought a pair of earrings that had been taken from her grandmother’s body after the Nazis murdered her on a Minsk street.  Years later, a neighbor had returned them, explaining only that they had belonged to her grandmother.

"One man brought an old gramophone record of Yiddish songs which his father used to listen to," Boris said.  Boris himself brought a coin that symbolized the Hanukkah gelt he had received as a boy.  "We were the poorest family in our shtetl," he explained.  "But one family always gave me a coin on Hanukkah."

Of all the presentations, Masha’s was the most poignant. "I realized that I had nothing to bring," she said.  "For the first time in my life, I understood how far I was from my roots.  I went out and bought a pair of candlesticks for Shabbat."

"Masha’s purchase was a revelation to us all," Boris said.  "Suddenly, we realized why we had been asked to bring these things, so that we could feel the special warmth of our link to other Jews.  Now that we can feel it, it will stay with us for the rest of our lives.  It will make us the kind of welfare workers only the Hesed network can enable us to be."