ODESSA, Ukraine -- The city that was once the spiritual capital of the Russian empire's Jews no longer cares much about its Jewish minority dwindling after decades of pogroms, purges and repatriation to Israel.


"There is not a single suitable working synagogue left in Odessa," said Rabbi Ishaya Gisser, an energetic Israeli citizen who has been sent back to the city of his birth to raise money for new Jewish houses of worship.


"The old synagogue has collapsed and the new one is still being built," Gisser said.


The Jewish population of Odessa has shrunk to only 5 percent of its 1 million inhabitants. Of these, only a few thousand practice the faith of their forebears. To escape persecution, many hid their Jewishness by changing their names.


On the eve of World War I, a third of Odessa's population was Jewish, with Russians, Cossacks, Greeks, Albanians and Ukrainians making up the rest. After St. Petersburg, Moscow and Warsaw, it was the largest city in the empire.


"There are another 58 former Jewish religious foundations and institutions dating from before the Revolution, but not one building has been returned to us," Gisser said.


"We have had no help from the city authorities. Never," he added with irritable emphasis.


In the last century, the thriving port was the center of the Russian empire's Jewish Pale of settlement, stretching across modern Ukraine, southern Russia and Poland.


Jews were barred from leaving the zone unless they were rich, influential or talented. While there, they were sitting targets for local Cossacks, who murdered them en masse in brutal purges at times of political tension.


So Odessa became a forcing-house for musical, literary and business talent, with anxious parents training their children with the violin or the pen to escape their homes for the courts of Europe.


Among the children of Odessa were the violinist Jascha Heifetz, the writer Isaac Babel and, later, another violinist David Oistrakh. Odessa's famous bitter-sweet humor also stems from those days.


"When the old synagogue fell apart, we asked for a new building. We got the most tumbledown old warehouse possible, which had never been repaired during the entire 70 years of Soviet rule," Gisser said.


But the new synagogue, with tall arched windows and a wooden gallery, is already taking shape amid the chaotic wasteland of pipes, charred timbers, holes in the ground and scattered litter of a post-Soviet building site.


Its appearance, Gisser says, is a triumph of mind over matter.


"God guides me every time. When we started the synagogue, we only had $1,800 in hand. It was pure adventurism," he said, laughing. Colossal amounts of money and strength have been needed to carry on building.


So far, Gisser and his team from Israel have raised up to $60,000 for the synagogue, $24,000 for a Jewish nursery school which will open within weeks, and $12,000 for a ritual bath.


"I don't care what people in Odessa think of my plans. That's nothing to do with me. If God permits, we will build more. But I can't know in advance."


Pogroms and Stalinist purges have given way to a major exodus since the Soviet Union opened the door to mass Jewish emigration to Israel in 1989.


Jews in the ex-Soviet world still face prejudices that have largely withered in modern Western Europe.


While anti-Semitism was dealt a blow in the West after World War II, as the horrors of Nazi Germany's Holocaust became public, it lingered behind the post-war Iron Curtain.


Only in 1993, for instance, did a Moscow district court declare that the anti-Semitic fabrication, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," which details a Jewish world conspiracy, was a forgery.


The court heard that the Protocols, which first appeared in 1903 as the pretext for a pogrom in Odessa, were written by Tsar Nicholas II's secret police.


The Soviet collapse has even given anti-Semitism a new twist. Dmitry Vasiliyev, the head of the Russian anti-Semitic organization Pamyat, blames Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, as Jews, for plotting to destroy their country.


Gisser refused to speculate on whether anti-Semitism motivates the city authorities of Odessa.


"You should keep out of the authorities' way, because if they do help you they'll want something in return," he said.


He lamented the loss of Jewish self-awareness which the Soviet years in particular had brought about.


"The Jewish community here has almost completely lost its national religious identification," he said. "The sense of Jewishness now comes more from negation -- people here define as Jewish anyone who is likely to suffer from anti-Semitism."