Kibitzing at the Palace of Culture

With a sound system that made all the performers sound as if they were on AM radio, and an audience of white and hairless heads in a near-constant state of conversation, the recent Jewish musical program at the Automobile Workers' Palace of Culture was hardly a place for virtuosity to shine.


But it wasn't about that.


"There is a very strong desire for people to learn about the culture, not like a science or lesson, but like this," said pianist and singer Vitaly Rochko, 71, whose performance of Jewish Russian folk tunes in a plaintive, unschooled tenor earned him respectful applause from Sunday's audience of 250.


Aside from a brief explanation from Rabbi Zinovy Kogan that his reform congregation was marking the holidays Simchat Torah and Succoth on Sunday, the two-hour program at the Palace of Culture was light on religion.


For secular Jews like Rochko, a retired editor who said he "cried when Stalin died," the emphasis on Jewish culture rather than religion is important in a city where many such offerings are geared toward the observant Jew.


"It is important that we can just get together," he said.


It was a refrain repeated often not just by those of Rochko's generation, but also by the Jewish youth who come every Sunday night to the Palace of Culture for what they say is Moscow's only secular Jewish discotheque. By 8 p.m. Sunday, the staid and somewhat kitschy variety show had given way to throbbing Russian technopop danced to by dozens in their teens and 20s.


"There are a lot of us, but we don't know where each other live," said Vera Fradkina, 20, a student waiting for a dance. "So we have this. And when I have time I come here."


Maureen Greenwood, an American human rights activist who sometimes assists Kogan, said, "Young Jews need to meet other young Jews in order to fight assimilation.


"There is an unbelievably high rate of assimilation. It is said that there were 6 million Jews here in the first part of the century. And, now we are down to 1.5 million for the entire former Soviet Union, and that is mainly through assimilation."


Greenwood, who also works pairing United States Jewish communities with those in the CIS, said she has noticed that the two groups most likely to be aware and proud of their Jewishness are those who were present at Sunday night's concert and disco.


"Those who are from 25 to 55, they are really the Soviet generation that didn't have access to Jewish culture," said Greenwood. "When I talk to the 30-, 40-, or 50-year-olds, almost everybody has a real horrible anti-Semitic story to tell -- not getting jobs, not getting into schools. That is the real self-hating generation."


Emigration, too, has taken its toll on Moscow's Jewish community. From the capital city alone since 1991, some 150,000 Jews have emigrated, leaving 200,000 behind, said Kogan. From Russia, at least, the rate has slowed considerably as the economy has strengthened.


"Many of my friends have left and, of course, I miss them. But my connection is with Russia and this is where I will end my life," said Rochko, who paused and then added, "Unless the fascists come to power."


In the hinterlands, it is often a lonely existence. Galina Pozyokova-Timofeyeva had made the two-hour train ride from Vladimir to Moscow to sing and dance with an amateur quartet. She said of Vladimir's 500,000 residents, some 500 are Jews.


"I can't go to synagogue. We don't have one in Vladimir," said Pozyokova-Timofeyeva, 50, who heads the city's Family Puppet Theater. "I have no Jewish friends there. None."