For High Holiday services this year, Jewish inmates in northern Russia’s Ertsevo prison made history when they prayed in the sprawling country’s first on-site synagogue, a worship space they helped build. And as they turn their eyes to the fast-approaching holiday of Sukkot, plans in the works call for similar inmate-built synagogues to pop up at correctional institutions in the near future.
Synagogue Ushers in New Era of Services for Russia’s Inmates
For High Holiday services this year, Jewish inmates in northern Russia’s Ertsevo prison made history when they prayed in the sprawling country’s first on-site synagogue, a worship space they helped build. And as they turn their eyes to the fast-approaching holiday of Sukkot, plans in the works call for similar inmate-built synagogues to pop up at correctional institutions in the near future.
According to Rabbi Aaron Gurevitch, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who directs the Federation of Jewish Communities’ Department for Cooperation With the Military, Ministry of Emergency Affairs and Law Enforcement Agencies, the new synagogue is significant, given the diffusion of Jewish prisoners across a correctional system that spans the continent of Asia and part of Europe. Although he estimated the Jewish inmate population at around 1,000 people, any one prison, on average, has no more than two or three Jewish inmates. At Ertsevo, located in the remote Arkhangelsk region close to the Arctic Circle, there are 11 such prisoners.
“We managed to give Jewish prisoners the perfect gift for Rosh Hashanah,” remarked Gurevitch, who also leads FJC efforts on behalf of Jewish soldiers in Russia. The prisoners “built everything themselves: a prayer stand, menorahs, benches, anything from wood.”
The inmates even painted colorful murals on the synagogue’s walls.
Chabad-Lubavitch rabbinical students from Moscow conducted services at Ertsevo for Rosh Hashanah, but the prisoners led their own Yom Kippur services eight days later using prayer shawls and books sent to them by the FJC.
In an interview Wednesday, Gurevitch stated that other prisons are keen to get their own synagogues.
The desire stems from “various reasons, [from] regular correspondence with prisoners, the desire to communicate with local rabbis and community leaders, and prisoners’ interest in meeting regularly for prayer and dialogue,” said Gurevitch.
In the next few months, the prison near Krasnoyarsk, a Siberian city about 15,000 kilometers from the Russian capital, is slated to finish construction on a synagogue to serve its 20 Jewish inmates, the largest such population in the country.
