This is the first in a series of profiles featuring some of the more than 350 Milwaukeeans who are donating their time to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s Community Campaign 2003.
Milwaukee businessman Stan (actually Vyacheslav) Azimov, 26, has a powerful desire to help the Jewish community. And he came by it naturally, one might say.
Azimov, a volunteer for the Milwaukee Jewish Federation’s community campaign, was born and raised in Odessa. Even during the years of liberalizing and collapse of the former Soviet Union, Odessa was a place where “everybody was afraid of being Jewish.” His own family was among the last of his extended family to leave, he said in a recent interview.
But Odessa also “used to be the most Jewish city” in Russia, and everybody in the Jewish community felt “like a member of the family,” he said. “Everybody was trying to help each other.”
“And that’s the way I feel about the Jewish people in general,” Azimov continued. “When Israel is in such a need for help, I don’t think any Jew feels less desire or urgency to contribute.”
And the Milwaukee Jewish Federation is “the most effective way to help the Jewish people,” he said, for a contribution there “goes into the pool to help everybody.”
Azimov said he began his involvement with the MJF last year partly because of the crisis in Israel, partly because his business associates and his friends brought him into contact with people active in the community — among them Marty (Martin F.) Stein, whom Azimov said “has been a humongous help to the Russian community” — but mostly because “I was always interested in helping.”
And “in Milwaukee it is easier to do” than in Odessa. “It is not too big, everybody knows each other” and there is “no persecution by the government,” he said.
He began with the Super Sunday phone-a-thon last year, at which most of the Russians called ended up being referred to him. This year, he will do that as well as about 20 personal solicitations.
He was also one of the 13 participants last June in the MJF’s Visions 2002, a six-session program providing an overview of the local and world Jewish community and leadership training (see June 21 Chronicle).
And this is just the beginning of a process of Jewish growth for him, apparently. He and his wife, Kristina, and their recently born first child are observing the Sabbath, “keeping some kosher laws” and shopping for a synagogue to join, all of which are “big progress for us,” he said. “We feel we do more and more every year.”
His parents, who brought the family to Milwaukee when he was 17, are also in service businesses. His father owns a transportation company that drives elderly people to area clinics, and his mother is a manicurist, Azimov said. (His younger sister is 13 and in middle school.)
After graduating from Shorewood High School and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Azimov first worked as a financial advisor for some five years, but he became dissatisfied, again for reasons that show his desire to help.
“My goal was to help people achieve their financial future,” he said. But with the stock market being so unstable, “I got the feeling I was doing the opposite,” he said. “I couldn’t take the pain any more.”
So he went into business for himself, and chose a service field. He now owns American Dream Cleaning, a cleaning service for businesses and residences that he opened about half a year ago.
The cleaning isn’t the only service he provides. Most of his employees are Russian immigrants, who “are willing to work extremely hard” in a field marked by high turnover and low quality of employees, Azimov said. Not only are they working well for him, but he is “providing them with a start in this country,” he said.
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