‘Before, we felt like we were alone. But now it is different’
Long-neglected Jewish communities in Belarus are enjoying a new lease of life, thanks to the work of British students
SMILING FACES fill the screen as I am introduced to the Polotsk community’s new student leaders over Skype.
Polina, Larisa and Rina happily chat about the Hebrew classes and Sunday school they run in the sun-filled community centre they are calling me from. Colourful posters of Hebrew words adorn the walls, similar to any you would find in a cheder in the UK.
Five years ago it was a very different story for this community in northern Belarus: there was no community centre, no funding and their children’s summer camp was being held in the basement of a block of flats furnished with patio furniture.
But thanks to a community twinning programme, their plight came to the attention of Finchley Reform Synagogue member Debra Brunner, who became invested in helping the forgotten communities of the former Soviet Union country rebuild themselves.
“Communities in Belarus are in a real state,” explains Mrs Brunner. “People know they are Jewish but they don’t know what it means.
“They lack support. In all the communities I visited, I found people meeting in pokey basements, not knowing how to be Jewish.
“I figured it couldn’t be that difficult to help them become Jewish again.”
The former company director first began visiting Belarus in 2008. She saw a need for Jewish education within the Belarus community and realised it could also be an opportunity to fill a gap at Finchley Reform, where young adults were disappearing from shul activities at the age of 18 as they had no further leadership opportunities. So in 2010 she travelled to Polotsk with her daughter Samantha and six other madrichim [student teachers]to run a summer camp for the children of the community — and the Youth 4 Youth project was born. According to Mrs Brunner, there are an estimated 50,000 Jews in Belarus. So far, through her charity The Together Plan, she has set up a n n u a l summer camps in Polotsk, Samantha Brunner with one of her Belarusian pupils where there is a community of 300, and Bobruisk, where numbers reach 500.
Daughter Samantha Brunner, 25, was volunteer number one in a network that now numbers 117 youth leaders, both British and Belarusian. Having spent her teen years as a madricha in the Finchley Reform youth team, she was surprised by the inexperience of the Belarusian camp leaders at her first camp session.
She says: “There was zero sense of hadracha [leadership]. One student teacher smoked in the middle of a programme.”
At the end of the first day, the British madrichim gave their Belarusian counterparts a “long list of everything that needed to be improved and they said ‘thank you so much’”.
The new leaders learned quickly and this year they are running the Polotsk summer camp without any help. Ms Brunner remembers the poverty of the children as one of the first things that struck her, and recalls how excited they were to receive gift bags filled with everyday items, such as toothpaste.
“I have never seen the look of appreciation so much — that was something