vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #152 / Social life / Reading article...

While Jewish people around the world celebrated the New Year on Oct. 2, this year’s holiday has special resonance for the Jews of Vladivostok.

It is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Vladivostok Jewish community. And this month, the congregation hopes to reacquire a synagogue which the communist government seized in 1932.

In 1993, President Boris Yeltsin decreed that all religious groups persecuted by the Soviet government could claim the houses of worship confiscated during the nationwide “liquidation” campaign against religion in the 1930s. Yeltsin’s declaration implied that local governments were responsible for not only assisting in the reclamation process, but in finding where those buildings were, said Anatoly Dmitrienko, the main expert at the krai Committee on Political Parties and Religions.

For Dmitrienko, locating the only synagogue in town meant two years of sifting through documents from libraries, universities and even a local communal housing office. There are very few records left of where the community spent the most time worshiping, he said, especially since the Jews used several spaces over a 25-year period they were active.

Officials from the Soviet period probably also destroyed a number of documents, said Dmitrienko. Complicating the picture, two buildings were in use at around the same time on the same street — Komarova 19/2 and Komarova 35. Today, 35 is a store owned by the Primorye Candy Factory, and 19/2, just up the street and behind the Vladbank building, is now a car inspection office.

Dmitrienko also spent time figuring out where the buildings actually were, since they were numbered differently before the Revolution. And what clouded the issue for the administration was the fact that there are no records of ownership: Leibe Skidelsky, a wealthy merchant, allowed the congregation to use 19/2 Komarova but did not donate it. But local Jews and Dmitrienko’s department agreed last spring to turn over Komarova 19/2. Gov. Yevgeny Nazdratenko approved the deal, and on Oct. 2 the krai asked the state Ministry of Culture and the Property Ministry to authorize the hand-over.

But Alexander Reznick, Far Eastern director of the Jewish Agency of Russia said, “There is still a question about where the synagogue actually was. They’re giving us the building that housed the [congregation’s] school.”