The Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center serves members from throughout the Milwaukee area, but as of last month, its reach extends much farther — almost halfway around the world.
From Dec. 10 to 16, JCC president Jay R. Roth visited the Jewish community in Kazan, the capital city of Tatarstan, one of the republics created after the demise of the Soviet Union.
And he brought his years of experience with him. Roth was there to counsel that community’s JCC director, as part of a mentoring program that matches directors from North America, Europe and Israel, with directors of the JCCs that are “cropping up all across the FSU,” he said.
This program was created by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the World Confederation of Jewish Community Centers. In fact, the more than two-year-old overall project has a local connection also, with Milwaukeean Jane Gellman, a WCJCC board member, chairing its committee.
“It is something I think is exciting, a great project,” one that “can bring to Jews in the FSU something really important” that can “strengthen the Jewish communities there,” Gellman told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
The first group of four mentors worked with four different FSU centers in 2004-5. This past summer, the JDC picked Kazan’s as one of the centers in the second group for mentoring and, with Gellman’s encouragement, invited Roth to be its mentor.
“Jay is a perfect example of the kind of JCC director” that project organizers wanted, due to his length of experience in the field, Gellman said. “I was very happy he was chosen.”
Roth in turn sought and received approval from his JCC’s board.
“Though my plate is full here,” Roth told The Chronicle in a telephone interview, “I believed it is a challenge and an opportunity; and believing as I do in the role centers play in building Jewish community, I thought I could be of help.”
Kazan, a city of 1.2 million people, is some 900 miles east of Moscow and “really borders Asia,” Roth said.
It also has, among its 77 different ethnic groups, a Jewish community estimated at between 10,000 and 14,000 — though there may be many more unidentified Jews whose identities “disappeared” during the Soviet years, Roth said.
I mpressive community
In Kazan, Roth met that JCC’s director, Anna Smolina, and an Israel-based JDC worker, Bella Zaretzky. With Zaretzky serving as interpreter, Roth toured the community, seeing its institutions, meeting its officials and JCC consumers.
Roth said the Kazan Jewish community is much more centrally organized and located than in Milwaukee. For one, there is a community board that “runs all of the agencies,” he said.
In addition, the JCC is located in a building that was built as a synagogue in the early 1900s, had been confiscated by the Soviet regime in 1929 and reclaimed by the community in the mid-1990s. Today, a synagogue exists in that building’s first floor, while the other three floors house the JCC’s programs, Roth said.
There are two big exceptions to the central location. One is the Chesed Moshe program that serves the elderly population and that “takes place all around the community,” Roth said.
The other is the Jewish day school, educating some 400 children, located in a separate and “kind of run down building,” Roth said — though it does boast a computer lab funded by World ORT.
“It was a hard trip and a long way away,” said Roth. “But I was impressed by the community and the commitment of its staff and leadership; and also was impressed by the help they are receiving” from Milwaukee Jewish Federation and other federation donations to JDC and the Jewish Agency for Israel, which helps provide funding to the community.
“There’s a whole range of things happening because of the dollars we give,” Roth said.
This visit won’t be the end of the relationship. Smolina will visit Milwaukee in July, when she will be able to “see the Milwaukee JCC and all that we do, including the camps,” said Roth.
Then he will return to Kazan in September to “work on program ideas” and again in the spring of 2007 to discuss “how to implement” those ideas.
And while that will conclude the mentoring program, Roth doesn’t want that to be the end of the Milwaukee-Kazan connection.
“I hope some kids from Kazan can come to [the Steve and Shari Sadek Family] Camp Interlaken in 2007. It would be great if they came when the Israelis were here,” Roth said. “We would have a cross cultural experience that could be fabulous.”
Gellman also wants to help the program grow overall and in its Milwaukee connection.
“My dream is to hook it up with Partnership 2000 [the Jewish Agency for Israel program that links U.S. Jewish and Israeli communities] and do some three-way kinds of things,” she said.
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