Our First Days in the Baltics

Friday we all met up at the Tallinn International Airport…which was probably the size of one terminal in any of the capitol cities in the US…there were people coming in from all over… some from Prague, some from Greece, some from other Baltic cities… The “Estonian” that we all expected to greet us at the airport was actually from Canada, a former JDC Jewish Service Corps Volunteer in Poland who now works for JDC as the community representative in Estonia… so her English was impeccable and she was able to tell us how she perceived the country and the people from a North American perspective which was cool… our hotel in Tallinn was ridiculously fabulous… we later learned that it is owned by a member of the Jewish community who majorly hooked JDC up pricewise so we were first classin’ it for sure. So as most of you know, we arrived on Shabbat, and considering that we were at an International Jewish Conference, it was natural that we celebrate it. The conference was called OR and is part of JDC’s Jewish renewal work in the Baltics. It brought Jews together from various Eastern European countries to celebrate their Jewish identity and to be together as Jews. So, as tired, exhausted, jet-lagged, and zombie-like as everyone was… we pulled it together, freshened up, and observed Shabbat. We got to sit with students of differing nationalities… compare cultures, compare opinions, compare countries, compare ideas, compare reasons for being here, and all other various sorts of comparisons… as interesting as all of these conversations were, the real thought provoking conversations began the following day (after a full nights sleep). We concluded the night with a Tish… a post-dinner period of wine-drinking, relaxation, and singing in rounds—campfire style—guitar included.

On Saturday, we walked to synagogue in the rain… and attended the last hour or so of the Shabbat service. The synagogue was fascinatingly beautiful. There was a pomegranate tree theme carried on throughout… beautiful wooded walls with carved out pomegranate trees, pomegranate trees painted on the walls on the dining room, and on the ark. The only thing that was surprising for me, that made this service different from any other I had been to (maybe I just haven’t been to too many or don’t have enough to compare it to) was that this was a Chabad service, where the women (including myself) had to sit upstairs… we couldn’t sit with the men downstairs. I personally have never been segregated like that before… but I rather enjoyed watching it all from above. And one of our very own group members actually participated in the putting of the Torah back into the Ark. We were proud.

That afternoon, we were spoken to by the JDC manager from Latvia… Moni… he was a Jew from Bulgaria… which I learned is a country in which the Jewish population was safe during WWII because the Bulgarians as a people were not anti-Semitic and the Germans couldn’t really make it there because they were part of the USSR. He gave us an amazing Baltics history review as well as some other interesting anecdotes… for example…. and this is probably the group’s favorite analogy thus far… “History is like a woman that takes money for sex” … obviously this statement grabbed the attention of everyone, even the nodder-offers…. What he meant by this was that the history of the Baltics (and history in general) is different depending on who it is written by and what their motivation for writing it was. Depending on if they wrote it by their own free will or if it was their job to record the history or if they were writing to please the people that are making the history or even how much they are being paid to record the history (just as a woman being paid for sex is motivated by the amount she is being paid, her current need for the cash, whether this is her job as a personal choice or if it is forced, as well as where she and the customer are personally at in their lives).

Further… he provided us with some answers to the question: why were the Jews in the Baltic region so utterly wiped out during WWII? “Well,” he said….. “the Baltics were occupied by the Soviets prior to German occupation… the Baltic people saw Germany as their liberators from the cruel and culture-inhibiting Russians… thus, when the Germans told the general population that the Russian occupation could be attributed to the Jews, they took the opportunity to scapegoat and actually helped the Nazi’s by shooting the Jews themselves (even before the Nazi’s began to do this as well) in the streets… Baltic Christian neighbors shooting Baltic Jewish neighbors… not a happy ending: 95% of the Jews in the Baltics were murdered. There were, according to Moni, mass graves of Jews every 12 miles throughout the Baltic region.

Amongst ourselves (in organized group discussion) we had some pretty interesting, passionate, and personal conversations. One of our major topics included the question: What makes a person Jewish? This was sparked by the realization that most of the Baltic Jews are considering themselves Jewish even with as little of a connection as one Jewish grandparent, a Jewish great grandparent, as well as many other questionable (in the eyes of some) ties to the Jewish religion/culture. Amongst our group, all similarly aged college students from California, the varying opinions on this matter were staggering… let alone the varying opinions of all the Jews at the conference from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, and the US.

After such an intense, thought-provoking, and self reflecting day… we all just really wanted a drink. And for the ones that don’t drink… maybe a nap, a long bath, or a full body massage would have sufficed. Thankfully, organizers of the conference arranged for us all to have a night out… they rented an entire club out solely for the conference attendees. It was awesome…! An entire nightclub full of Jews… that’s gotta be every Jewish parent’s dream party scene for their Jewish offspring. The music was good, the people were friendly, the transportation back to the hotel was arranged for…basically all the bases were not only covered, but they were completely hidden from sight. Two of our very own group members even came in second place in a dance contest where the dancing couple had to keep a CD pressed between them while dancing… without letting it drop.

Sunday we all got to sleep in a bit… after a long night… thankfully… and we scoped out the lovely old town of Tallinn… got a tour… had some free time… Tallinn is not only beautiful, but it is romantic and creative-looking as well. Narrow cobblestone roads, tall buildings all touching each other yet crazy amounts different looking from each other: a pink building with red window panes with flowers draping from the mini-decorative balcony next to a dark green building with stone carved dragons climbing up either side of the building next to a decaying wooden building with broken windows and a bright blue door next to a pearly white building with a metallic gold and green fish design bordering the entire building right through the middle… not to mention this is all surrounded by a fortress from medieval times.

Today, Monday, was our first day of manual labor… we broke off into groups and were all assigned different tasks… some moved bricks, some dug up roots with a pitch fork, some cleaned and painted the fence that surrounded the school, some trimmed the hedges…as a group we accomplished a lot, and the best part about it… is that we were all in such good spirits about it… looking around I saw that everyone was genuinely excited and happy about doing the physical work…we were all feeding off of each others energy level in a very positive way.

Before the manual labor began, we visited the Vilnius JCC, where we met with Simon, the Executive Director of the Lithuanian Jewish community… we were shown a presentation which really put the community that we would be involved with in perspective. We were told about the number of active members in the Jewish community, what sorts of activities are most participated in, which members of the community are in the most need of help, as well as the goals that the JDC has for the Jewish community in Vilnius. Having this as a precedent for our work at the Jewish school helped us to understand where we stood and exactly who and what we are contributing to.

When we got to the school, the principal welcomed us along with several other graduates of the school. The school is the only Jewish school in Vilnius and it serves grades K-12, and there are approximately 250 students in all… that’s a fraction of the size of my Northern California graduating class just of High School—in other words… that’s really, really small! The school is the tenth best school in the country and it is very hard for people to get into and there is a constant waiting list. Students of the Jewish community that want to attend the school are automatically accepted, despite lack of funding and crowded classrooms … students not of Jewish descent undergo an interview process and only a number of openings are available… the reason for the acceptance of any of the community’s Jews and the interview process for any non-Jews is simply because the Jewish school has a moral obligation to provide to the Jews of the area not only a safe place but the opportunity to utilize the resources provided for the Jewish community as a whole. The school received 60% of its funding from the JDC… a very active role… but as the presentation informed us, one of the goals of the JDC here is to find ways for the community to depend on the JDC less and less and eventually become completely self supporting.