Stuart Kaminsky - Tarnished Icons

“One hour and forty minutes,” Karpo agreed, and scientist and package disappeared through the door.

“What if he blows it up accidentally?” said Iosef.

“Then we shall certainly feel the tremor,” Karpo responded with no trace of sarcasm or humor. “If we feel no such tremor and we go to Paulinin’s laboratory, you will accept his offer of tea.”

“Fine,” said Iosef.

“You will not want to accept his offer,” Karpo said, “but you will overcome the impulse to refuse.”

“I am not expecting blyeenchyeekee s vahryehn’yehm, blinis filled with jam. I have drunk suspicious brown water from the bleached skull of an Afghan tribesman and eaten small rodents,” said Iosef with a grin. “I was a soldier. We often had such interesting experiences.”

“We shall see,” said Karpo heading for the door to tell the mail room staff that it was safe to come back.

The building on Balakava Prospekt in which the Congregation Israel met had been purchased with Israeli money in the form of German deutsche marks. The building was small and the price unreasonable, but it suited the needs of Avrum Belinsky and his small congregation recently decimated by the murders of six of its members. The two-hundred-year-old building had been a Russian Orthodox church. It was basically an anteroom and a large open room. During the Communist reign, the cross on the single turret of the building had been taken down. Then the building had been used for a while as an office of the automobile licensing bureau, then as a meeting hall for party members who also belonged to the construction workers guild, and later as an unsuccessful tourist site where copies of icons were sold and a few hung on the walls.

The church had been purchased from the Russian government by a German businessman who traded a variety of services, primarily intervention with the government and appropriate mafias, to foreign investors for hard currency. He had planned to use the church as a storage space, but it had proved inconvenient. The space was too small, and the traffic was often heavy during the day with no place to park and unload a truck, even a small one, without being noticed. There were too many prying eyes among the neighbors. The businessman decided to move his storage space outside the city. He would have sold the building for half the price he got from the Jews if they had chosen to haggle. Jews were supposed to haggle. The serious Israeli rabbi who spoke perfect Russian had simply asked the price and, in the name of some Russian members of the congregation, purchased the church.

When Avrum moved in, it held nothing more than a small wooden table and a single badly scratched folding chair. The large high-ceilinged room featured a warped wooden floor lying over frozen earth. There was no heat, and the first order of business, after properly blessing the new synagogue, had been to heat the space before the winter came. Building the bema-the small wooden platform where the rabbi conducted the services-was easy. Getting a podium was easy. He had brought his own ark and two Torahs, all relatively new and waiting for the congregation to give them a history of prayer, tears, determination, devotion, and hope. He had no trouble mounting the ark on the wall behind the podium. Even getting chairs had proved far easier than Avrum had anticipated. He bought fifty-the synagogue could hold no more-from a man who claimed to have a right to them since they had been used for Communist neighborhood study meetings and he had been custodian of the building on Narodnaya Prospekt where the meetings had been held for almost half a century. Nor did Belinsky have great trouble attracting a small congregation, which had continued to grow in spite of the first two senseless murders of young men. Only one of the twenty-four people who came when word circulated that a synagogue existed in this part of the city could speak a bit of Yiddish. None could read or write Hebrew. Only two of the males had been circumcised. Few had read the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, from which he would read at each weekly service in Russian and Hebrew. Their sense of the trials of Abraham and Moses were mythic and distant, not powerful lessons in endurance and faith that could sustain their lives.

The greatest problem to overcome among the Russian Jews was that they did not want to be clearly identified as practicing Jews. Anti-Semitism was always an issue, one they had learned to live with by presenting themselves as atheist Soviet citizens who did not practice their religion. Many had changed their names so they would not appear to be Jewish. That Belinsky had been prepared to cope with, and he did so far better than he had anticipated. But he had not been prepared for murder. Perhaps a beating, swastikas on the door, or even a few acts of desecration, but not murder.

Heating had been a serious problem. Belinsky could not find reasonably honest contractors to do the work. He could tell instantly which ones were frauds, and he knew after a moment or two of questioning which ones were completely unreliable. Finally, though he knew nothing about heating, Belinsky had decided with the help of volunteers, three of whom had now been murdered, to construct his own heating system. He had settled on four metal wood-burning stoves, one to be placed in each corner of the chapel. They would vent through holes made in the roof. He bought the four identical stoves through an old man who was a member of the congregation and refused to tell where he was getting them.

Belinsky had helped build roads, railroad lines, buildings, bunkers, and houses on three kibbutzim. But he knew nothing about heating, the winter had come quickly, and the stoves worked only minimally. Congregants still appeared on Friday nights and Saturday mornings and occasionally for discussions, Hebrew language lessons, and Torah studies, which were conducted during the week, but the wood-burning stoves were far from adequate.

Belinsky had been able to reach all but a few of the remaining members of his congregation to urge them to come to a meeting that night to discuss the killings and to pray for the dead. The congregation barely had a minion -the ten men needed to conduct the morning prayers. Fourteen men in the congregation had been bar mitzvahed so that a minion was possible. Five of those men were now dead.

Belinsky stood at the closed door of the synagogue to usher each reluctant, frightened, or angry member inside. At eight-thirty, half an hour after he had called for the meeting, he moved down the center aisle past the wooden chairs and up to the bema, where he stood in front of the podium. There were thirty-one people seated before him-young and old, even a few children. There were more people than he expected, even some new faces, which he examined carefully without looking directly at them. The new faces were angry, determined. They were not there to make trouble. They were Jews who had been brought out by the very acts of horror and violence that had been designed to send them hiding in fear. Everyone kept their coats or jackets on. All wore hats or black kepahs, which were kept in a wooden box just inside the synagogue door. All who entered the house of worship were required to cover their heads as God had commanded. The rabbi himself wore slacks and a black turtleneck sweater. This was a meeting at which prayers would be said, but it was also a meeting at which work would be discussed. He had decided not to wear his suit and tie.

Belinsky saw eyes looking around but heads not moving. There would be spies in the room, perhaps even the murderers, perhaps the police. There was not a person in the room who did not fear for his life. Yet they had come.

“Chaverim,” Belinsky began softly. “Friends. For almost five thousand years, oppressors have risen to murder us by the millions, the dozens, and individually because we are Jews. Sigmund Freud, a practicing Jew, said that the Jews had been the scapegoats of the Western world. He said that there was an animal need in civilizations to have a group to blame for the failure of crops, the outbreak of plagues, and their inability to make a living, and to satisfy their need to feel superior. This anti-Semitism was not only among Christians. It existed thousands of years before the birth of Christ. It was present not only among the ignorant and uneducated but among those who feared the determination of the Jews to survive and even under the worst of circumstances, to prosper and take care of each other. We have been blamed for most of the problems of Western civilization, and we have been hated because God proclaimed us the chosen people. An American poet once wrote, ‘How odd of God to choose the Jews.’ But through Moses and Abraham he did choose us. He tried us, tested us. We prayed for protection and salvation, and God always answered and sometimes the answer was no. We have been tested, but we survived. We have our own nation. We have a renewed respect in the world, and with that respect has come fear.”