St. Petersburg: Then and Now

Monday, December 3, corresponding this year to 19 Kislev, is marked by Jewish communities around the world in commemoration of the 214th anniversary of Chabad’s founder, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi’s liberation from Czarist imprisonment. Known by the Hebrew dates, 19 Kislev, the day has since been celebrated as the Rosh Hashana—the New Year of Chasidic thought, and the start of a new epoch in the study of Jewish mysticism.

Among Chasidim, S. Petersburg is often associated with the arrest and liberation of Rabbi Shneur Zalman. Carved out of a swampy estuary on the Baltic sea, S. Petersburg has long been the imperial and cultural capital of Russia. To Russian Jewry, the city has played an equally critical role in their history.

Named for its founder, Czar Peter the Great, the eponymous city, like the rest of the Empire, was essentially free of Jews. With the rapid expansion of the Empire in 1791, newly conquered lands, comprising parts of Poland, Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine, fell under Russian control. With these lands came the shtetlach, centuries-old Jewish settlements, and Jewish regional centers of study. Russia’s Jewish population swelled in number to some five million Jews, 40 percent of the world’s Jewish population.

Struggling to answer to its “Jewish Question,” the Russian Empire limited the Jewish population to the so-called “Pale of Settlement.” Thus, when Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, was imprisoned in S. Petersburg’s Peter-Paul Fortress on libelous charges of espionage, the city had only a small contingent of Jewish residents—mostly merchants and professionals given a special dispensation to reside there.

It was not until 1859 under the reign of Alexander II that Jews were able to settle outside the Pale. Soon wealthy Jewish merchants, physicians, and other intellectuals settled in Petersburg.

According to Professor Gennady Estraikh, the Rauch Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at New York University, the influx of Jews, however small in number, would be crucial in forming a uniquely Russian Jewish identity.

“Until Jews settled in S. Petersburg,” says Estraikh, “their cultural identity was largely defined by the legacy of the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth.”

Now however, S. Petersburg’s Jewish residents, among them famed financier and philanthropist Baron Yosef Gunzburg, formed a Russian Jewish elite.

Pulled in opposing directions, S. Petersburg’s Jews faced at once the allure of secular Russian (Western European) culture and a sense of fealty to the Jews in the Pale.

Thus, while distancing themselves from what they believed to be the “non-productive” and parochial lives of the Jews of the Pale, the Jews of S. Petersburg also assumed leadership roles in the Jewish community. Gunzburg and his colleagues represented Russian Jewry in the court of the Czar and spearheaded various social and humanitarian causes including ORT, the international educational and occupational training program.

The community successfully lobbied for a permanent place to worship, and in 1893 the Grand Choral Synagogue was opened. Built in the Moorish style, the opulent synagogue, along with the small Chasidic shtiebel in its courtyard, became the center of S. Petersburg’s Jewish life. By 1914, the city’s Jewish population numbered some 35,000.

Following the Bolshevik revolution, the communist regime began to brutally suppress religious observance. The Previous Rebbe, Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn and his clandestine network of yeshivot and Jewish communal activists soon became the target of Soviet efforts to end Jewish religious life. Having settled in S. Petersburg in 1924, then renamed Leningrad, the Previous Rebbe was regularly harassed by the Yevsektsiya, the so-called Jewish section of the Communist party.

In 1927, the Previous Rebbe was arrested on charges of counter-revolutionary activities. Taken from his home, he was held in the Spalerno prison. Pressure from the International Red Cross and governments abroad forced the Soviet regime to commute the initial death sentence to a three-year exile. On July 12, the sentence was further changed. The previous Rebbe was able to return to Leningrad before being ousted from the Soviet Union.

Professor Estraikh, himself a Russian Jew, notes the paradoxical feeling of both Jewish identity and estrangement shared by many Jews in the former Soviet Union. Like the Jewish elite of S. Petersburg a century before, Russian Jews found their fate inexplicably tied to their heritage.

“In Russia, Jewish identity was no longer judged through observance,” Estraikh recalls. “When your passport tells the world that you’re Jewish, it touches the core of your identity. You’re Jewish, and can’t change it.”

Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff, Professor of Rabbinic Literature at Yeshiva University’s Caroline and Joseph S. Gruss Institute in Jerusalem, visited the Soviet Union with his wife as part of the Mossad’s Nativ operation in the 1980’s. Tasked with teaching the Torah to members of the refusenik community, the Rakeffets worked with members of Chabad’s clandestine network of Jewish communal leaders and activists, including those in Leningrad.

“The old-timers,” Rakeffet recalls, “would light up when they spoke about the Previous Rebbe. You could see [the Torah and Chasidut] that they imbibed in their youth.”

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many of S. Petersburg’s Jews emigrated to Israel and abroad. S. Petersburg’s Jewish population has continued to shrink, decreasing from 107,000 in 1989 to 80,000 today.

In 1992, Rabbi Mendel and Sara Pewzner moved to S. Petersburg to lead Chabad’s activities in the city. They have inspired a dramatic return to Jewish practice in the history of the city of the Czars. The Pewzners, along with the 19 other Chabad representatives to S. Petersburg, run a network of some 90 Jewish schools, soup kitchens, Chabad Houses and children’s summer camps.

A newly launched Kollel program by the Pewzners offers local Jews the opportunity to study with one of two Torah scholars from Israel “virtually any time of the day or night,” in the synagogue. A new weekly Torah class launched by the Pewzners draws a crowd of 200.

According to Rabbi Mendel Pewzner, the allure of S. Petersburg has always brought with it greater trends of assimilation.

“This is where Jews went to get away from the community as far back as a Czarist times.”

But today, increased awareness of Jewish identity can be felt among many of the city’s Jews.

Serge Polotovsky, former assistant professor of film history at S. Petersburg State University and features editor at the Russian language edition of GQ magazine, is a fourth generation resident of the city. He recalls the anti-Semitism of his youth, but today feels that it’s largely “a thing of the past.”

As Polotovsky sees it, being Jewish, at least in certain circles, carries a certain cultural cache. “Today” he says, “the Jewish experience and Jewish culture are considered cool.”