Staff of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee knew there were Jews in communities along the infamous Gulag rail line to Siberia, which was used to transport political detainees to Soviet prisons there. But they had no idea where or how many. So they sent a team to find out.
On reaching Verkuta, a mining town 135 miles north of the Arctic Circle, they sought out the mayor, whom they knew to be Jewish. Since he was in Moscow, the JDC team met with the deputy mayor. After listening skeptically for about an hour, he admitted that he also was Jewish.
In pursuit of other local Jews, the deputy mayor called the director of the Youth Palace, a nonsectarian youth center. She, too, eventually admitted that she was a Jew. Both she and the deputy mayor were shocked by their revelations: “I’ve known you for 15 years and you never told me you were Jewish,” they exclaimed to each other.
Subsequently the JDC staff discovered about 500 Verkuta Jews, who, with the JDC’s help, are in the process of discovering their Jewishness and building a community. The Youth Palace now dedicates one of its evenings to Jewish gatherings, and Jews receive material on Judaism and have begun to celebrate holidays.
“Ten years ago, if we had gone, we wouldn’t have found anybody to admit they were Jewish,” said Steven Schwager, executive vice president of the JDC, during a visit to Milwaukee on Oct. 15.
“We wanted to see if they wanted to be connected to the Jewish people and, of course, they did,” he said. Schwager and JDC president Eugene J. Ribakoff spent the day in Milwaukee meeting with Jewish leaders and communal workers as part of a mini-mission to several Midwest cities.
“We came here,” said Ribakoff to a gathering at the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, “to thank you. We really feel that we represent federations in the work you want done overseas.”
The JDC serves as the overseas arm of the American Jewish community and is funded primarily by United Jewish Communities, the umbrella organization of North American Jewish federations.
According to Ribakoff, it was founded on “a temporary basis some 88 years ago” to provide programs of relief, rescue and reconstruction to Jews throughout the world.
“The hope at the time,” he said, “was for the JDC to go out of business. But we’ve been here ever since, and the United States is the only country in the world in which we do not have a program.”
Three main areas
Today the JDC’s work concentrates on three areas: Israel, the former Soviet Union and Argentina.
In Israel, the JDC aims to strengthen Israel’s own capacity to care for its most vulnerable citizens, such as children, youth-at-risk, the elderly and new immigrants at the margins of society. It develops model programs for these populations in partnership with the Israeli government, turning them over to the Israeli partners once they are successfully implemented.
“This work has become all the more important,” said Ribakoff, “because of the current drain on social services caused by the security situation.”
This past summer, in cooperation with the UJC/federation system, JDC developed “Keeping the Children Safe,” which provided a series of three-week summer camp experiences for some 125,000 low-income children who live in areas that have been vulnerable to terror attacks. The program received $25 million from UJC’s national Israel Emergency Campaign.
In the former Soviet Union, said Ribakoff, some 15,000 JDC volunteers are working to re-establish Jewish community life, as in Verkuta, while attempting to alleviate the desperate economic and social circumstances of 265,000 elderly Jews scattered across thousands of miles.
Among the estimated 1 to 2 million Jews living in this third largest Jewish community in the world, said Ribakoff, “JDC is building community town by town, city by city, helping Jews to know their heritage and Israel.”
It does that, he said, by developing Jewish community centers, libraries, kindergartens, Hillel centers and academic programs, and by running some 80 Hesed or welfare centers for the destitute and isolated elderly. “And we’re very encouraged by our progress in building long-term vibrant communities there,” he added.
JDC’s most current focus, continued Ribakoff, is the economic crisis in Argentina, “where we will be for several years to come.” Describing a portrait of national instability, Ribakoff said some 60,000 former middle-class Jews are now poverty-stricken, and many of the day schools that characterized this formerly vibrant community have closed.
The JDC, in partnership with the local Argentina Jewish federation, is providing welfare to about 30,000 of Argentina’s 200,000 Jews, and is helping others build small business and networking opportunities.
Its work in all these areas and elsewhere, said Schwager, epitomizes JDC’s mission: “With the help of the federation community, we’ve created, in our time, the ability to reach out throughout the world to save the Jewish community, one Jew at a time.”
The Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s major overseas partners —the JDC and the Jewish Agency for Israel — received $2,465,000 from the Community Campaign 2002, which was forwarded to them by United Jewish Communities.
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