News > Soviet Jewry
Where they are now: Soviet Jewry series
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| Anya Leybovich gives credit to her sponsor for easing her family’s transition in America. |
BY: ARLENE FINE Senior Staff Reporter
Arrived as a 3-year-old
When Anya Leybovich arrived in America from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1979, her toughest adjustment was the language, even as a 3-year-old.
“I refused to speak Russian or English, so I just made up my own language that was a combination of the two,” she recalls. “My parents were very understanding and knew all this babbling would turn into real language.” Meanwhile, they “were two very intelligent people grappling with language and cultural barriers and not able to get well-paying jobs.”
Part of the reason the family was able to make it in Cleveland was due to their sponsor, Lee Silverman. “Lee and her family were so wonderful to us,” says Leybovich.
Leybovich is also grateful for the help the family received from Jewish agencies. “They did not give us handouts; they helped to teach us English and gave us the tools to adjust to American life,” she says.
After graduating from Kent State, Leybovich worked at Northern Ohio Live, Ernst and Young. She now plans events for ASM International.
When the Jewish holidays roll around, Leybovich, 30, tries to “latch onto other families for the celebration,” she says. “My grandmother and I are the only family left in Cleveland. My mother passed away, and my father moved, so I don’t have the pleasure of family gatherings during the holidays.”
Enjoys retirement at Council Gardens
As Alexander Markovich, 77, looks outside the window of the sunny Council Gardens library, he says impishly, “It is not good here ... it is great.”
That sums up Markovich’s attitude about America, particularly the Cleveland community. The Odessa native arrived here in 1997.
With the help of his two sons, Markovich moved to Council Gardens in 1999 and immediately felt comfortable and grateful for his new home.
“You would never find anything like this in Russia,” he says. “The old people are the poorest and often are on the edge of survival. They live on a small pension, and if they don’t have family to care for them, many are isolated and starve to death. I know living here has extended my life.”
Markovich, who was a teacher in a technical college in Russia, had no opportunity or interest in studying Judaism. But now that he’s here, he says, “I am beginning to develop an understanding of my religion.”
And Markovich is looking forward to an upcoming trip to Israel with other Council Gardens residents. “This is another blessing for me.”
Making the adjustment
When Siberian native Boris Kamkha arrived here 17 years ago at age 32, he had already taken medical classes at the university, but none of his credits applied here. Nevertheless, he was determined to carve out a career in the medical field.
His first job was cleaning medical offices at night while taking classes in the humanities at Cleveland State University during the day. He also became certified as a nursing assistant and worked in a nursing home, while trying to improve his English.
He then moved to Chicago, where he attended chiropractor school. “I used bank loans to pay for my education,” he says. “School was very hard because of the language and cultural differences and I wasn’t still young, but I did well and graduated with my class.”
The newly minted chiropractor then went to the Czech Republic to study with a famous chiropractor there. He spent the next seven years working as a chiropractor in Israel, Chicago and New York, returning to Cleveland to be near his wife Jackie Feldman’s parents.
The Solon resident cares mainly for Russian patients. He brought an important tradition with him from Russia n he makes house calls. “In my country many of the doctors from the medical clinic went to visit sick people who could not come out of their houses. I carry on this practice for my elderly Russian clients.”
Alcohol destroyed their marriage
At age 30 Janna Zborovsky joined a wave of other immigrants from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, who came to Cleveland in 1990. She arrived here with her now ex-husband and their two young daughters.
With the assistance of JFSA and the “dear friendship” of her English teacher Rita Mandel and her family, Zborovsky slowly became acclimated in her new country.
Her daughters received a scholarship to Agnon School.
A registered nurse in Russia, Zborovsky’s first job was as a nursing assistant at Manor Care in Mayfield Heights.
With the help of generous relatives in Florida, the family, increased by another daughter, moved into a large home in Solon. Zborovsky’s husband, an engineer, was earning good money; she was employed as a medical assistant in a doctor’s office and also worked as an interpreter. During this time, her public face was smiling, but inside, the mother of three was falling apart.
“My husband was an abusive alcoholic and a miserable father,” she says. “He would begin drinking Friday night and continue drinking until Sunday night. The rest of the week he was moody and depressed because he could not have his vodka.”
Seven years ago, Zborovksy filed for divorce. She went through a bitter two-year, $30,000 legal battle because her husband fought for child custody. He lost that battle, “and I walked away safe and with my children protected,” Zborovsky says.
“I had to take out loans to pay my attorney, and I still owe a great deal of that money, but it was worth every penny,” says Zborovsky, now a sales associate at Saks.
“It took me time to realize that here in America women do not have to stay with alcoholic husbands.”
After selling her “dream” home in Solon, Zborovsky is now living in Lyndhurst with her 10-year-old daughter.
“My family has helped me financially to get on my feet again,” she says. “I also received a lot of emotional and spiritual support from my congregation, Shaarey Tikvah.”
My life was enriched
My life was definitely affected by my experience with my Soviet students. I taught them English as a second language under the auspices of the Jewish Community Center. It made me more aware of my heritage as part of the Jewish people, the traditions, the Yiddish language, and the spiritual and ethical values. My life was enriched by being the Soviets’ teacher.
Shirley Guralnik, Stone Gardens
Gratitude made trip worthwhile
The week I left for the USSR in 1975, I met with members of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in Philadelphia. They gave me names of refuseniks to contact there. I was traveling with other students from my college, but no one knew my main reason for going.
I was given books about Israel, Hebrew-Russian tapes, a Hebrew-Russian dictionary, Stars of David, kipot, and money to leave with the people I’d meet. Our group would be traveling by train from Helsinki to Leningrad, and I was told that the customs agents would check my bags but not the clothes I was wearing.
The night before I left, my sister sewed the books into the lining of the sport jacket that I would wear. I hid the Stars of David in film canisters, and the kipot were rolled up with my socks. On the train, my bags were checked but not me, and everything arrived safely.
My first day in Leningrad, I called the family whom I was to meet. Their building number was #15, but I had been told to ask the cab driver to stop at #11 and find #15 on foot. I brought the family greetings from other friends in the U.S. and gave them the book Facts About Israel. It was as if I had just handed them a fortune.
Their daughter played the piano and immediately proceeded to play and sing “Hatikvah” for me. The feeling in her voice and from the piano was deep with the yearning of someone wishing to be free to live a Jewish life. I asked if they knew the song “Jerusalem of Gold.” They’d never heard of it. I played and sang it for them, and they immediately asked me to write down the music and words. They couldn’t thank me enough.
As I left their apartment that evening, I knew that going to the USSR on this mission was the right choice, even if I were found out the next day and sent home by the Soviet government. I also was able to meet with refuseniks in Moscow and Riga. My greatest joy was meeting one of the families from Leningrad a number of years later in their new home in Philadelphia.
Arnold Feltoon, M.D., Twinsburg
My correspondence with a refusenik
I corresponded with a Soviet refusenik in Novosibirsk, USSR, for several years until he was allowed to immigrate to Israel. We exchanged over 25 letters during that time. (One envelope I saved bears the Soviet commemorative stamp featuring pictures of the American astronauts.)
When the refusenik, Yuri Berkovsky, applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel, he was dismissed from his job. He was without work during the time we corresponded.
When he finally did emigrate, my wife and I met him in Israel.
Barry Shiller, University Heights
Passing on Sharansky’s book
In September 1988, I was a citizen delegate at the Chautauqua Conference on U.S.-Soviet Relations held in Tbilisi, Georgia. I contacted the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland before leaving for the conference and was given the name of a few refuseniks in Moscow. I was told to call them from a public pay phone, away from the hotel, to preclude snooping by the KGB and possibly causing trouble for them.
I had recently finished reading Nathan Sharansky‘s book, which he wrote after leaving the USSR, about his detention in the Soviet prison system and his fight to leave for Israel. I decided to try to smuggle the book into the USSR and attempt to get it into the hands of his family. I asked one of the officers of Chautauqua Institution to place the book in his carry-on luggage, since they would be less likely to search his luggage than mine. He readily agreed.
One of the refuseniks spoke fluent English, and he gave me explicit directions about where to meet him. I took a few other Jewish citizen delegates with me. He was at the designated spot, and he walked us to an apartment building, where we talked with him and several other refuseniks. We had tea and dessert with them and gave them moral support and gifts, including the Sharansky book. After he and a few others read it, they copied it (for others to read).
I believe that he, his wife and child eventually were able to come to the U.S.
I. Ronald Moskowitz, Cleveland/Boca Raton, Fla.
Meeting both Sharanskys
In 1967, when I was in eighth grade, I had the opportunity to hear a new Jewish author n Elie Wiesel n and I was mesmerized by his talk. A few months later, the rabbi of our Chicago congregation presented us with a copy of Wiesel’s book The Jews of Silence.
I graduated from eighth grade on June 12, 1967, three days after the end of the Six-Day War. Filled with pride over the Israeli victory, I read The Jews of Silence, and I was awakened to the plight of Soviet Jewry.
Over the next 20 years or so, I helped organize rallies and protests, led letter-writing campaigns, and worked for the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland on staff for the Soviet Jewry movement.
In the late 1980s, I took my young daughter to Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Soviet Jewry. Standing there with her and with hundreds of thousands of others was something that neither one of us will ever forget.
In the early 1980s, I staffed a meeting with Avital Sharansky, who was traveling and speaking in support of her husband Anatoly “Natan,” who was then in a Soviet gulag. She was very quiet and nervous, and we helped her get through her public presentations. For nearly five years, I wore a bracelet with Sharansky’s name on it. I remember her commenting on it and thanking me for wearing it.
The bracelet broke a few weeks before his release. With tears running down my face, I watched Sharansky dance across the bridge to freedom.
Sharansky came to Cleveland later to promote his book. I went to Booksellers and approached him with a book in hand. He asked me my name, and when I told him, he smiled and said his wife told him to thank me for the hospitality I showed her when she was in Cleveland. I reached into my pocket and handed him the broken the bracelet.
At that moment, he gave me a huge hug and whispered, “Todah rabah” (“thank you” in Hebrew). He took half the bracelet and asked me to keep the other half.
As someone who grew up just after the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement was one way for our generation to say “Never again!”
Tom Sudow, Shaker Heights
Brussels conference
I was extremely pleased with the CJN’s extensive coverage of the Soviet Jewry movement from its inception to the resettlement experience. The movement brought to freedom an amazing 1,100,000 Soviet Jews from Soviet oppression.
What was not mentioned in the CJN coverage was the 1972 multi-cultural conference held on behalf of Soviet Jews in Brussels, Belgium. It was attended by 700 activists and 700 international journalists. Included among the attendees were Elie Wiesel and world-renown artist Chaim Gross. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, joined the conference, carried in on a stretcher.
Among the Clevelanders in attendance were Al Demb, Teela and Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld and Herb Caron.
The conference and the attention it received helped prompt the Soviets to start releasing, for the first time, significant numbers of Jews.
I have had many other memorable moments in my life, but none of greater political significance than the Brussels Conference in 1972.
Al Gray, Moreland Hills
Long nights delivering items
I was in Moscow in 1985. My friends Janet and Alvin Udelson wanted to visit refuseniks and urged me to join them.
We packed all the scarce items so impossible for refuseniks to come by, and Alvin went out every night to deliver them. I kept Janet company until he returned. They were long nights!
The day before our departure, Janet and I were included in a daytime visit to Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Levich. Tanya served us tea and home-baked cookies (really bad and hard to swallow). Their spirits were unbelievably high. Such brave, bright, beautiful people. The memory of those few hours is still strong today.
They and their son reside in Israel.
Ethel Mervis, Beachwood
When Anya Leybovich arrived in America from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1979, her toughest adjustment was the language, even as a 3-year-old.
“I refused to speak Russian or English, so I just made up my own language that was a combination of the two,” she recalls. “My parents were very understanding and knew all this babbling would turn into real language.” Meanwhile, they “were two very intelligent people grappling with language and cultural barriers and not able to get well-paying jobs.”
Part of the reason the family was able to make it in Cleveland was due to their sponsor, Lee Silverman. “Lee and her family were so wonderful to us,” says Leybovich.
Leybovich is also grateful for the help the family received from Jewish agencies. “They did not give us handouts; they helped to teach us English and gave us the tools to adjust to American life,” she says.
After graduating from Kent State, Leybovich worked at Northern Ohio Live, Ernst and Young. She now plans events for ASM International.
When the Jewish holidays roll around, Leybovich, 30, tries to “latch onto other families for the celebration,” she says. “My grandmother and I are the only family left in Cleveland. My mother passed away, and my father moved, so I don’t have the pleasure of family gatherings during the holidays.”
Enjoys retirement at Council Gardens
As Alexander Markovich, 77, looks outside the window of the sunny Council Gardens library, he says impishly, “It is not good here ... it is great.”
That sums up Markovich’s attitude about America, particularly the Cleveland community. The Odessa native arrived here in 1997.
With the help of his two sons, Markovich moved to Council Gardens in 1999 and immediately felt comfortable and grateful for his new home.
“You would never find anything like this in Russia,” he says. “The old people are the poorest and often are on the edge of survival. They live on a small pension, and if they don’t have family to care for them, many are isolated and starve to death. I know living here has extended my life.”
Markovich, who was a teacher in a technical college in Russia, had no opportunity or interest in studying Judaism. But now that he’s here, he says, “I am beginning to develop an understanding of my religion.”
And Markovich is looking forward to an upcoming trip to Israel with other Council Gardens residents. “This is another blessing for me.”
Making the adjustment
When Siberian native Boris Kamkha arrived here 17 years ago at age 32, he had already taken medical classes at the university, but none of his credits applied here. Nevertheless, he was determined to carve out a career in the medical field.
His first job was cleaning medical offices at night while taking classes in the humanities at Cleveland State University during the day. He also became certified as a nursing assistant and worked in a nursing home, while trying to improve his English.
He then moved to Chicago, where he attended chiropractor school. “I used bank loans to pay for my education,” he says. “School was very hard because of the language and cultural differences and I wasn’t still young, but I did well and graduated with my class.”
The newly minted chiropractor then went to the Czech Republic to study with a famous chiropractor there. He spent the next seven years working as a chiropractor in Israel, Chicago and New York, returning to Cleveland to be near his wife Jackie Feldman’s parents.
The Solon resident cares mainly for Russian patients. He brought an important tradition with him from Russia n he makes house calls. “In my country many of the doctors from the medical clinic went to visit sick people who could not come out of their houses. I carry on this practice for my elderly Russian clients.”
Alcohol destroyed their marriage
At age 30 Janna Zborovsky joined a wave of other immigrants from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, who came to Cleveland in 1990. She arrived here with her now ex-husband and their two young daughters.
With the assistance of JFSA and the “dear friendship” of her English teacher Rita Mandel and her family, Zborovsky slowly became acclimated in her new country.
Her daughters received a scholarship to Agnon School.
A registered nurse in Russia, Zborovsky’s first job was as a nursing assistant at Manor Care in Mayfield Heights.
With the help of generous relatives in Florida, the family, increased by another daughter, moved into a large home in Solon. Zborovsky’s husband, an engineer, was earning good money; she was employed as a medical assistant in a doctor’s office and also worked as an interpreter. During this time, her public face was smiling, but inside, the mother of three was falling apart.
“My husband was an abusive alcoholic and a miserable father,” she says. “He would begin drinking Friday night and continue drinking until Sunday night. The rest of the week he was moody and depressed because he could not have his vodka.”
Seven years ago, Zborovksy filed for divorce. She went through a bitter two-year, $30,000 legal battle because her husband fought for child custody. He lost that battle, “and I walked away safe and with my children protected,” Zborovsky says.
“I had to take out loans to pay my attorney, and I still owe a great deal of that money, but it was worth every penny,” says Zborovsky, now a sales associate at Saks.
“It took me time to realize that here in America women do not have to stay with alcoholic husbands.”
After selling her “dream” home in Solon, Zborovsky is now living in Lyndhurst with her 10-year-old daughter.
“My family has helped me financially to get on my feet again,” she says. “I also received a lot of emotional and spiritual support from my congregation, Shaarey Tikvah.”
My life was enriched
My life was definitely affected by my experience with my Soviet students. I taught them English as a second language under the auspices of the Jewish Community Center. It made me more aware of my heritage as part of the Jewish people, the traditions, the Yiddish language, and the spiritual and ethical values. My life was enriched by being the Soviets’ teacher.
Shirley Guralnik, Stone Gardens
Gratitude made trip worthwhile
The week I left for the USSR in 1975, I met with members of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry in Philadelphia. They gave me names of refuseniks to contact there. I was traveling with other students from my college, but no one knew my main reason for going.
I was given books about Israel, Hebrew-Russian tapes, a Hebrew-Russian dictionary, Stars of David, kipot, and money to leave with the people I’d meet. Our group would be traveling by train from Helsinki to Leningrad, and I was told that the customs agents would check my bags but not the clothes I was wearing.
The night before I left, my sister sewed the books into the lining of the sport jacket that I would wear. I hid the Stars of David in film canisters, and the kipot were rolled up with my socks. On the train, my bags were checked but not me, and everything arrived safely.
My first day in Leningrad, I called the family whom I was to meet. Their building number was #15, but I had been told to ask the cab driver to stop at #11 and find #15 on foot. I brought the family greetings from other friends in the U.S. and gave them the book Facts About Israel. It was as if I had just handed them a fortune.
Their daughter played the piano and immediately proceeded to play and sing “Hatikvah” for me. The feeling in her voice and from the piano was deep with the yearning of someone wishing to be free to live a Jewish life. I asked if they knew the song “Jerusalem of Gold.” They’d never heard of it. I played and sang it for them, and they immediately asked me to write down the music and words. They couldn’t thank me enough.
As I left their apartment that evening, I knew that going to the USSR on this mission was the right choice, even if I were found out the next day and sent home by the Soviet government. I also was able to meet with refuseniks in Moscow and Riga. My greatest joy was meeting one of the families from Leningrad a number of years later in their new home in Philadelphia.
Arnold Feltoon, M.D., Twinsburg
My correspondence with a refusenik
I corresponded with a Soviet refusenik in Novosibirsk, USSR, for several years until he was allowed to immigrate to Israel. We exchanged over 25 letters during that time. (One envelope I saved bears the Soviet commemorative stamp featuring pictures of the American astronauts.)
When the refusenik, Yuri Berkovsky, applied for a visa to immigrate to Israel, he was dismissed from his job. He was without work during the time we corresponded.
When he finally did emigrate, my wife and I met him in Israel.
Barry Shiller, University Heights
Passing on Sharansky’s book
In September 1988, I was a citizen delegate at the Chautauqua Conference on U.S.-Soviet Relations held in Tbilisi, Georgia. I contacted the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland before leaving for the conference and was given the name of a few refuseniks in Moscow. I was told to call them from a public pay phone, away from the hotel, to preclude snooping by the KGB and possibly causing trouble for them.
I had recently finished reading Nathan Sharansky‘s book, which he wrote after leaving the USSR, about his detention in the Soviet prison system and his fight to leave for Israel. I decided to try to smuggle the book into the USSR and attempt to get it into the hands of his family. I asked one of the officers of Chautauqua Institution to place the book in his carry-on luggage, since they would be less likely to search his luggage than mine. He readily agreed.
One of the refuseniks spoke fluent English, and he gave me explicit directions about where to meet him. I took a few other Jewish citizen delegates with me. He was at the designated spot, and he walked us to an apartment building, where we talked with him and several other refuseniks. We had tea and dessert with them and gave them moral support and gifts, including the Sharansky book. After he and a few others read it, they copied it (for others to read).
I believe that he, his wife and child eventually were able to come to the U.S.
I. Ronald Moskowitz, Cleveland/Boca Raton, Fla.
Meeting both Sharanskys
In 1967, when I was in eighth grade, I had the opportunity to hear a new Jewish author n Elie Wiesel n and I was mesmerized by his talk. A few months later, the rabbi of our Chicago congregation presented us with a copy of Wiesel’s book The Jews of Silence.
I graduated from eighth grade on June 12, 1967, three days after the end of the Six-Day War. Filled with pride over the Israeli victory, I read The Jews of Silence, and I was awakened to the plight of Soviet Jewry.
Over the next 20 years or so, I helped organize rallies and protests, led letter-writing campaigns, and worked for the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland on staff for the Soviet Jewry movement.
In the late 1980s, I took my young daughter to Washington, D.C., for the March on Washington for Soviet Jewry. Standing there with her and with hundreds of thousands of others was something that neither one of us will ever forget.
In the early 1980s, I staffed a meeting with Avital Sharansky, who was traveling and speaking in support of her husband Anatoly “Natan,” who was then in a Soviet gulag. She was very quiet and nervous, and we helped her get through her public presentations. For nearly five years, I wore a bracelet with Sharansky’s name on it. I remember her commenting on it and thanking me for wearing it.
The bracelet broke a few weeks before his release. With tears running down my face, I watched Sharansky dance across the bridge to freedom.
Sharansky came to Cleveland later to promote his book. I went to Booksellers and approached him with a book in hand. He asked me my name, and when I told him, he smiled and said his wife told him to thank me for the hospitality I showed her when she was in Cleveland. I reached into my pocket and handed him the broken the bracelet.
At that moment, he gave me a huge hug and whispered, “Todah rabah” (“thank you” in Hebrew). He took half the bracelet and asked me to keep the other half.
As someone who grew up just after the Holocaust, the Soviet Jewry movement was one way for our generation to say “Never again!”
Tom Sudow, Shaker Heights
Brussels conference
I was extremely pleased with the CJN’s extensive coverage of the Soviet Jewry movement from its inception to the resettlement experience. The movement brought to freedom an amazing 1,100,000 Soviet Jews from Soviet oppression.
What was not mentioned in the CJN coverage was the 1972 multi-cultural conference held on behalf of Soviet Jews in Brussels, Belgium. It was attended by 700 activists and 700 international journalists. Included among the attendees were Elie Wiesel and world-renown artist Chaim Gross. Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, joined the conference, carried in on a stretcher.
Among the Clevelanders in attendance were Al Demb, Teela and Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld and Herb Caron.
The conference and the attention it received helped prompt the Soviets to start releasing, for the first time, significant numbers of Jews.
I have had many other memorable moments in my life, but none of greater political significance than the Brussels Conference in 1972.
Al Gray, Moreland Hills
Long nights delivering items
I was in Moscow in 1985. My friends Janet and Alvin Udelson wanted to visit refuseniks and urged me to join them.
We packed all the scarce items so impossible for refuseniks to come by, and Alvin went out every night to deliver them. I kept Janet company until he returned. They were long nights!
The day before our departure, Janet and I were included in a daytime visit to Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Levich. Tanya served us tea and home-baked cookies (really bad and hard to swallow). Their spirits were unbelievably high. Such brave, bright, beautiful people. The memory of those few hours is still strong today.
They and their son reside in Israel.
Ethel Mervis, Beachwood
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