Comments on: A Christmas journey part 11: Granpa Frost & Snowflake

By: AYLA

AYLA — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 09:02:02 +0000

! I thought Christmas was over, and here I find hidden gifts under the tree! I thought: 10 days, 10 parts, zay-o! I’ll admit, I thought the baseball diamond was an anti-climactic end, and I still have a secret wish for post 12, but/and, Yuval, you’d brought it all back to Channukah, and yourself, where all quests begin and end, and I’d accepted that ending, and yet! A Christmas Miracle!
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love that photo of Ashdod.
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So interesting about the Russian, Jewish immigrants, as I’m often told that many of them are not “really jewish” though I actually never realized that Christmas had anything to do with these suspicions. I grew up learning about the plight of soviet jews (at age ten, I signed up for a mini-course called ‘Soviet Jewry’; the other girls were disappointed because they’d thought it would be soviet jewelry, but I’d known ). As a result of this class (and to my now-adult knowledge, everything I learned was true), I spent years writing letters to Jewish girls my age in Russia, pretending to know them to help them get their visas out. So when I arrived here I found it really cynical of people here to roll their eyes at the Russian population. Certainly as an assimilated, American Jew, I can relate to the secular celebration of Christmas. I’ve been wondering when I would confess this: My jewish grandmother knit us Christmas stockings with our names on them and furry santa beards. Each Christmas Eve, my Jewish grandparents slept at our home, and we woke in the morning to bloody marys (theirs), gift exchanges, brunch that probably included bacon… and when we were young, yes, a tree. My grandparents are German and Hungarian, and on my grandmother’s side there’s some Spanish, but most of them came to the U.S. in the 1820′s. for Jews, that’s like Mayflower. So I get it, Russians, albeit from a very different circumstance! Happy Novy God!

By: Alexander A.

Alexander A. — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 21:34:25 +0000

Yuval, interesting piece, thank you.

For some reason you insist on calling the holiday Christmas, while your photos depict products that have “Happy New Year” written all over them and despite what your friend Yanna told you. People in the Soviet Union celebrated the New Year, on the eve of Dec 31st – a separate holiday from Christmas. The New Year does not have a strong religious connotation, it’s mostly a secular holiday as opposed to Christmas and Ded Moroz is not a Santa Claus, they have different work schedules. I agree with your point that Christmas symbolism is at the roots of the Novyi God symbols, but generations of Soviet citizens, including Russian Jews, were exposed to a different holiday narrative. In their minds it doesn’t have any religious meaning. Nothing is achieved by insisting that it does.

By: aristeides

aristeides — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 14:56:01 +0000

I ask about the Russians, and I’m answered.

Thanks, Yuval and Daiva.

By: Daiva

Daiva — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:01:57 +0000

Dear Yuval,
this is a very interesting topic indeed, and I was fascinated by the way holidays are celebrated by Russian-speakers. Some points to clarify some information for you and your readers:
1. There are indeed about a million Russian-speakers in Israel, although not all of them arrived in the 90s. Some have been there since the war ended, others arrived in the 70s, but the application was more difficult and more irreversible. As you know, the rules for aliyah allow the immigration of anyone who, basically, would have been killed by the Nazis for a Jewish connection: child, grandchild or spouse. Someone with a crypto-Jewish grandmother didn’t need to pay any bribe Just get a document. Then there are these borderline cases. If A had a family with children, got divorced and remarried with someone who has a right to aliyah, do the children from the first marriage have a right to settle in Israel too, if A has their custody?
2. Identity is always a matter of self-identification and identification by others. People learn to call themselves by what they are called by others. In Israel, wherever you come from in the ex-USSR, you are a ‘Russian’. By broad ethnic categories, some people are classified as ‘other’ in Israel and have their birth date written in Latin numbers even if their family name is Rabinovich, etc, and they have experienced a lot of antisemitism in the society they come from – if they are not halakhic and didn’t convert, nobody cares. In the end people are pushed to see that ‘Russian’ is the only identification that connects.
3. I see that the people you met told you already that the New Year is a secular holiday (which comes before Christmas in the Orthodox tradition), so nobody has to make either-or choices. The main holidays brought to Israel by those who came in the early 90s (with little experience of post-USSR statehood) are the New Year, the 8th of March (please do another tour around that time!), and the Day of Victory against Fascism, which we saw together. People don’t feel this damages their heritage in any way, just as they would be celebrating July 14 in the US. I’m glad that you don’t share the common Israeli obsession with classification and categorization, and show your readers the multitude of traditions.

By: James

James — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 07:17:57 +0000

“I feel that both of them are holidays that celebrate the triumph of a spiritual authority over a more formal political authority,” Masha said, “and both of course express our yearning for light in winter. In this sense they are both ‘pagan’ holidays, and I’m in favor Pagan holidays. Theologists may sit in universities and invent holidays without heart and soul, but people want color to believe in and to hold on to.”

That’s a fantastic quote. Masha is a wise woman.