THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 4, 1994 TAG: 9412040045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ESTHER DISKIN, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 169 lines
The homemade videos bring the Yusufov family back to the life they left in Azerbaijan.
The camera roves inside their apartment - a living room brightened by crystal chandeliers, crimson-patterned Oriental rugs on the walls, a family's joyous dances at a wedding.
What the videos cannot show is the whispers, lies that fueled prejudice against them, as Jews. In Azerbaijan, a former Soviet republic, to live openly as a Jew brought certain discrimination and the threat of violence.
So the Yusufov family, like other Jews, hid their faith. ``We always had the feeling we were growing up different from other people,'' said 40-year-old Rita. ``It was always that feeling - we had our secrets.''
Tonight, three generations of her family - 20 people in all, including her parents, five siblings and their children - will gather in apartments in Norfolk and Virginia Beach to light the candles for the last night of Hanukkah, an eight-day celebration of the Jews' victory over Syrian oppressors in 165 B.C.
For the Yusufovs, the holiday story and rituals reflect their escape from intolerance in their native country. By the late 1980s, the religious and nationalist hatred that had simmered for generations in Azerbaijan erupted into organized massacres. They fled.
The Yusufov family is one of 114 Soviet Jewish families who have settled in South Hampton Roads over the past five years.
The Jews of the former Soviet Union come to this country as refugees, fleeing religious and political persecution. The 271 Soviet Jews who have moved to South Hampton Roads are sponsored by the area's nine synagogues, through a local program coordinated by the Jewish Family Services.
The resettlement program, funded by a combination of government and private money, is designed to give them a boost on life in the United States. They get help securing a furnished apartment, lessons in English and advice in survival skills, like finding a job.
The synagogues give them an instant community. Suddenly, they have friends with whom they can openly share the holiday traditions. After years of secrecy, that feels wonderfully strange.
``I couldn't believe I was in a synagogue,'' says Rita's mother, Dinar, in lively Russian that must be translated by her daughter. ``It was like a movie, the cinema.''
The Yusufov family's story unfolds like a movie script, driven by loneliness and terror. They tell those memories in spare, unadorned English, with short bursts of Russian, and their faces reveal more sorrow than they can explain in their new language.
They came looking for a home. For them, it is simple to define: ``A place where we would be free in our religion,'' said Rita's 39-year-old sister, Nelli.
Their homeland was not such a place. The Yusufov family lived in Azerbaijan's capital city Baku, in a large apartment building where the children of Muslims, Russians, Greeks, Armenians and Jews played together in the yard. Parents exchanged friendly gossip as they hung laundry out to dry on lines.
But the Yusufov family's identity arose from their struggle to live as Jews, in a nation where the official doctrine was atheism and other religious groups viewed Jews with suspicion.
Inside their home, the transfer of Jewish heritage relied on storytelling and a good memory. The Orthodox synagogue near their home - which could hold only 50 people - was open only to men. Children rarely went.
So Dinar Yusufov passed on to her seven children - including her eldest daughters, Rita and Nelli - the stories her father had told her from the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. She taught them the story of creation, the Ten Commandments and the tradition of ``mitzvah,'' the biblical commandment to do good deeds.
Holidays were celebrated with subdued joy and improvised tools. Jews never openly spoke holiday greetings. Rita remembers making their Hanukkah menorah - the nine-branched candelabrum that is the most prominent symbol of the holiday - by sticking a row of candles in a sand-filled box.
On Passover, her father went to the synagogue at 3 a.m. to stand in line to buy boxes of matzo, the unleavened bread eaten during the seven days of the holiday. But even this simple tradition aroused fear among their neighbors: Rita says that many Muslims believed that matzo dough was made from the blood of non-Jewish children.
Outside the apartment, they pretended they were not Jews. At school, they silently studied social theory based on the absence of God. They heard cruel jokes about Jews and they did not protest.
When they applied for university education and then for jobs, they lied about their Jewish roots. If they told the truth, the opportunities would evaporate amidst excuses, Rita said.
She remembers when the university's faculty director spoke to her about her excellent grades.``He checked my paperwork to see that it was written, `not Jewish' on them,'' she said. ``So then he told me, `OK, you will get the honorable diploma.' ''
The land she called home began to feel hostile. ``From the beginning, as kids, we maybe felt it was home,'' Rita said. ``But in high school and at the university, we began to understand that we didn't belong in that country. We felt like foreigners.''Always, the Yusufov family thought about leaving. In 1972, they finally lined up the visas they needed to move to Israel. Rita remembers her father hiding the paperwork, fearing a raid from the KGB.
Those visas never got used, a decision that Rita and Nelli now regret. Fear that family members would not be able to complete their education or find jobs in Israel kept the whole family in Azerbaijan for nearly two more decades.
When former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev began a national liberalization program in the late 1980s, religious rivalries dating back for centuries exploded in Azerbaijan. Muslim Azerbaijanis and Christian Armenians clashed over territory and loyalties. Jews were caught in the middle.
The whispers of prejudice grew louder. In the streets, the two sisters - now raising children of their own - sometimes overheard remarks: ``Jews should go to Israel. They don't belong here.''
Then came pogroms - house-by-house killings, mainly of Armenians and Muslims. The news came by word of mouth or radio broadcasts of Voice of America, while the state-sanctioned news sources said nothing.
Then the killing moved close to home. Across the hall from the apartment where Rita lived with her husband and two sons, an Armenian family was killed and their belongings stolen. Militants came to her sons' school classrooms and took Armenian children away.
Fearing that Jewish students would be kidnapped too, Rita and Nelli kept their sons out of school. The exodus of Jews began. ``Everywhere Jews met after these events, they spoke about leaving the country,'' Rita said. ``The only topic of conversation was leaving.''
The Yusufov family came to the United States in three stages, as family members settled and reached out to help the new arrivals. Rita and her husband, Jacob, first went to Israel, because they could get visas more quickly. In May 1993, she joined the rest of her family in South Hampton Roads.
Rebuilding their lives has not been easy. Though several in the family were highly trained professionals in Baku, the language barrier has prevented them from finding work that matches their training. Rita, who was an English teacher in Baku and in Israel, is still searching for a job.
For her mother, who has not yet learned to speak English, there is a sense of isolation in a strange land.
But all the practical struggles are balanced by a new freedom, which instills them with wonder. Each week, they go to Temple Israel on Granby Street for Shabbat - the Hebrew word for Sabbath. After living in a country where women were barred from the synagogue, they have not lost their delight at the sight of women helping lead the services.
Most important to them, their children are getting a Jewish education. Rita's two sons, 11-year-old Roni and 14-year-old Tomer, and Nelli's 12-year-old son, Daniel, attend the Hebrew Academy of Tidewater.
There, in addition to their academic classes, they study the words of the Torah and regenerate their family's Jewish heritage, tied to a new sense of freedom.
``We could not completely understand what it means to be Jewish. We heard from grandparents and parents, but we couldn't read the Torah,'' says Nelli. ``They can learn it every day. They can learn how Jews were a people who survived all this hardship.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/Staff
Dinar Yusufov, center, and her daughters Rita, left, and Nelli are
free to celebrate Hanukkah since they settled in the South Hampton
Roads area. In stages, three generations of the Yusufov family left
the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan.
Photo
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT/Staff
Left to right, Roni Yashaev shares a laugh with his cousin Daniel
Shabataev and brother Tomer. The family left Azerbaijan, a former
Soviet republic, when persecution of Jews intensified.
Map
STAFF
by CNB