JCRC’s delegation to Dnepropetrovsk was a seasoned and well-connected group. This trip was Beth Moskowitz’s fifth as chair and my seventh as Director of International Partnerships; it was very smooth and remarkably productive. The highlight was a post-graduate course called “Issues in Geriatric Psychiatry,” but every meeting was useful and our time was extremely well spent. Yan Sidelkovsky was at the top of his game and the logistics were nearly flawless—the only issue was that Yan’s work with the Psychiatric Course made it impossible for him to be with us on our program visits. In most cases his absence was not a problem, but at the Day School it was a real loss given the challenges facing Havayah in this year of transition. We will need to think even more carefully about how to schedule our meetings during the medical courses to make sure we have the necessary people around each table. In sum, I applaud Yan and Noga Nevel’s careful and thorough preparation of the schedule and the materials necessary to make the trip maximally fruitful.
The psychiatrists formed a fabulous team, collegial and mutually supportive. Their respect for one another and for the professionals in Dnepropetrovsk, as exemplified by the course head, Dr. Eran Metzger, was palpable and set a very positive tone for the entire visit. The Dnepropetrovsk psychiatrists and family doctors found the course extremely helpful and our delegation made a great connection with the head of the city’s geriatric psychiatry unit. In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that one of the other Boston doctors, Michele Baker, is also my wife; the other, Tanya Bolbot Taranovsky, also has a family tie to Dnepropetrovsk, as she is the daughter of Dr. Yuri Bolbot, vice-rector of the Dnepropetrovsk State Medical Academy and a long-time partner of JCRC’s Medical Services Committee. In addition, Marsha Frankel, a social worker with JF&CS, was making her third trip to Dnepropetrovsk and continued her remarkable work with Beit Baruch. The trip was also Eran’s second. These deep connections (to which I can add that Eran was among Michele’s mentors in residency) made the trip especially heimish and fun. It’s a truism that relationships based on continuity and trust make fertile soil for productive work and change, but I can’t stress sufficiently the importance of our repeated visits to Dnepropetrovsk. We will need to continue our work to bring new people to Dnepropetrovsk and to encourage, as much as possible given constraints of time and money, repeat visits and, if the economic situation improves, visits to Boston from Dnepropetrovsk.
I should also mention that the economic and political atmosphere in Ukraine is ominous. The regime of Viktor Yanukovich, who is more aligned with Russia than Ukraine’s previous leaders, Viktor Yushchenko and Julia Tymoshchenko, has begun to show signs of political repression, assigning Soviet style functionaries in regional governments, jailing political opponents (most notably Tymoshchenko herself), and making mysterious and apparently unmotivated statements about plots for armed insurrection. People complain that corruption, which had begun to level off, is again on the rise, and that young people aspire not to careers in business but to government service, since that’s where the real money is! (Not that we met any young people who expressed such an aspiration!) There is a persistent rumor, at least in Dnepropetrovsk—I saw nothing in the newspapers I read, but my reading was very limited—that the government is plotting to devalue the grivna. Such a move would further erode the purchasing power of pensioners and, we heard from Natasha Riyer, who runs our Microenterprise program in Dnepr, the rumor itself has spooked potential borrowers: some 50% of our loan fund is currently unused. We will continue to monitor the situation in Ukraine, especially since political oppression and economic adversity can coincide with a resurgence of antisemitism. As in previous, we noticed no overt antisemitism in Dnepropetrovsk and, what is more, we heard encouraging news about the place of Jews in Ukraine in general from Igor Shupak of the T’kuma Holocaust Research Institute (more about that in another post). However, we will remain vigilant.
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