Grand Opening of the Menorah Center in Dnepropetrovsk - October 16, 2012

Greetings from Dnepropetrovsk! I am here, along with a small delegation from Boston’s JCRC and CJP, to celebrate the opening of the community’s new Menorah Center, the largest Jewish communal building in the world, which contains a museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust, a hotel, a hostel, a shopping mall (with a kosher supermarket), and office space for community organizations.

The opening was a formal, caviar-fueled event, with dignitaries from the Ukrainian and Israeli national governments, the ambassadors of the United States and Germany to Ukraine, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, and the mayor of Dnepropetrovsk all present and accounted for. Hundreds of people from Dnepropetrovsk and from around the world stood for an hour or more outside the impressive building as various people made speeches and children from the Jewish Day School sang and waved flowers. After Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amara affixed the mezuzah, the ribbon was cut and the whole crowd poured into the building, admiring the recreated facades of the city’s vanished synagogues and historical films from Jewish Dnepropetrovsk. The halls rang with the voices of excited people and, when it came time to dedicate the new Museum of Ukrainian Jewry and the Holocaust, the strains of “Ani Ma’amim”—“I believe.” Our own Beth Moskowitz, chair of JCRC’s Committee for Post-Soviet Jewry, helped cut the ribbon to the museum (as the only woman to be honored at the opening—a great source of pride for Boston).

Afterwards, we enjoyed what our beautiful invitations called “a lavish banquet,” listening to the Day School’s klezmer band and wonderful speeches. Most moving were the remarks of John Tefft, US Ambassador to Ukraine, who praised both the Jewish community for its strength and the Ukrainian government for its support of religious diversity, the bedrock of the United States’ vibrant democracy. In conclusion, the ambassador, a Catholic who hails from Kansas, recited the Shehechiyanu, in Hebrew, to an audience that included a strong contingent of black-hatted Chabad rabbis (and this one unorthodox rabbi from Boston!). Only in Ukraine. Only, in fact, in Dnepropetrovsk.

Dnepropetrovsk, which was a closed city until the fall of the Soviet Union, boasts one of the strongest and most unified Jewish communities in Europe. Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki, the Chabad shaliach (emissary) handpicked by the last Lubavitcher Rebbe more than twenty years ago, has built a thriving religious community and an impressive charitable enterprise while developing strong ties with the national and local governments. The synagogue here is crowded every Shabbat and the community’s educational programs attract a steady stream of newly engaged Jews. The city is located in the historical pale of settlement (where Jews were allowed to live in the time of the Tsars), so even as Jews emigrate, others reclaim their Jewish identity. For the Jewish community, as for the municipal and national government (and the Ukrainian majority, at least in Dnepropetrovsk), the Menorah Center underscores the admirable status of the Jewish community and its importance to the financial and cultural wellbeing of Ukraine. This in a city and a country in which both the communists and the Nazis believed they had succeeded in destroying Jewish life forever.

The Menorah Center is the brainchild of Gennadi Bogolyubov, an industrialist who is the president of the Dnepropetrovsk Jewish Community Fund. In his speech at the opening, Bogolyubov said that he wanted to make a gift to all Ukrainian Jews, preferably in Kiev, the capital. In Kiev, however, community leaders could not agree upon a vision. In Dnepropetrovsk, where Bogolyubov was born, there was immediate enthusiasm. Dnepropetrovsk, he realized, is the Jewish capital of Ukraine and this building, its seven branches evoking the seven flames of the menorah, proves it. One can only admire the chutzpah, the self-assurance, the confidence of a community that knows its strength and is not afraid to demonstrate it with a building that evokes the past and endows them for the future.

(You can see pictures of the opening—but text only in Russian—at http://www.djc.com.ua/news/view/new/?id=8094; you can also look at my twitter feed at https://twitter.com/RabbiJimM, where you’ll find pictures, notes in English, and a record of my ongoing visit here; for information on JCRC’s Dnepropetrovsk Kehillah Project, have a look at http://www.jcrcboston.org/focus/strength/dkp/.)