Heavy snow covers the river flowing beside the Klyzma resort, not far from Moscow. Everything is frozen. A few squirrels flit from side to side. A few youngsters are engaged in yoga in a hall dubbed “Beersheba.” Everyone is waiting for the lectures to start: Judaism and Jewish culture - Jewish identity, Russian style.

Sasha Pyatagorsky, one of the founders of Limmud FSU in Moscow is very busy. He has no time for yoga – he is too deeply involved in the organization of Limmud together with its co-founders, Chaim Chesler and Sandy Cahn. His Hebrew is extremely good – even sabra-like at times. But he does not foresee his future with us in Israel. He recently became a father and together with Yulia his wife, they maintain a Hebrew-speaking home, although its roots are purely Russian. On his Facebook page is a picture of himself as a child wearing the hat of a Russian policeman. Today he works in a local high-tech enterprise and his wife has a senior position in a well-known company.

Professor Viktoria Mochalova

The Pyatagorskys are a high-profile couple. It is difficult not to be impressed by the quality of the people like them who run Limmud. They are the best of the best. 800 such people came from all over the city, like the skins of an onion they unpeel, and as they do so you can only but be impressed by the depth of released intellectual strength, not of a religious nature but deeply involvement in a phenomenon called “Jewish identity” On that there is no compromise: for them Limmud provides the fuel for a whole year for which they are more than willing to pay.

Klyzma was once a dilapidated building used in the early 90s to house families on their way to Israel. Today it has been completely refurbished. Times have changed. The new winds blowing are those of a Russia which has undergone a series of seismic earthquakes. As indeed we all have – except in Russia, maybe more.

Anton Nossik, is considered one of the most important creators of internet sites in Russia. He explains to me that the notion that Russian immigrants to Israel were lied to, as reported in the Israeli press is a fallacy, “What did they think? That we Jews of the Former Soviet Union are sheep?” Nossik, who studied Hebrew clandestinely before the fall of the Iron Curtain, is the son of Professor Viktoria Mochalova, an expert in Polish-Jewish history and a lecturer in the “Sefer” project, headed by Professor Mikhail Chlenov. Her son sees his future here in Russia although members of his family live in the USA and Israel. He is bringing up his small child in Russian, but hopes he will learn Hebrew.

There is an enormous appetite here in Klyzma for everything that is redolent of culture in general and Jewish culture in particular. It is Pyatagorsky’s feeling that Russia is bursting into flower. The path to economic success seems much more certain from here than it appears in the West. In his mind and in that of his colleagues, Limmud is the way to bring the Jewish community together. One a year at least, for Pyatagorsky, the atmosphere is that of a grand reunion – almost a sentiment reminiscent of the days of the Palmach – and remember that most things in the Palmach were clearly of Russian origin.

I wait by the lakeside until the bottles of water we bought at the local grocery thaw out, because the water in Klyzma is of very low quality. For dinner we are served Zhirkoya, ( a dish of meat with potatoes) with a beetroot salad like my mother used to make. In an adjacent room, people are waiting for the performance of “Tatiana” a group of charming female musicians. I am reminded of the poems of the Hebrew poet, Chaim Lensky who met his death in Stalin’s labor camps, and who never stepped on the soil of the Land of Israel. I thought of him when I looked over the lake below. Lensky was last heard of in 1942 in the Kansk isolation camp in Siberia.  In my head reverberates the words of the poet who wrote in 1933, “for those whose thirst is unquenchable, the dream of sustenance is ever open.”

Photos & Story: Nathan Roi, Moscow 

Translation: Asher Weil