Abstract
Drawing on the theoretical concept of collective memory and migration, and politics of belonging, this article explores performative belonging enacted in the series of holidays and commemorative rites organized by young Russian immigrants in Israel’s major metropolis. Our ethnography is based on 18 months of participant observation at the cultural association Fishka in South Tel-Aviv. As part of our field work, we documented public celebrations of Jewish and Russian-Soviet holidays organized by Fishka as acts of public performance seeking to elevate the prestige of Russian culture in Israel. These events reinforced visibility of Russian Israelis in Israel’s cultural capital and helped reach out to other urban communities, both native and immigrant. The article discusses the unique contribution of these bicultural young adults to Tel-Aviv’s diverse and dynamic urban scene. Our main argument is about the importance of collective memory in migration, whereby holidays and commemorative rites reinforce feelings of belonging and fortify the immigrants’ claim on the respectable place in the receiving society.
Keywords
Introduction
Young adults of immigrant background are increasingly in the spotlight, allowing migration and ethnicity scholars a fascinating inquiry into transitional forms of social identity and cultural expression. Although definitions somewhat differ, the 1.5 generation usually embraces adolescents and young adults who moved to the receiving country in their formative years (roughly between the ages of eight to ten and eighteen to twenty), usually with their families. Linguistically and socially, the 1.5-ers are located at the crossroads between their home and host cultures: some of them opt for expedient assimilation; others (the majority) emerge as competent bilingual/bicultural individuals; and yet others may fall in the cracks between the two cultures, living in a chronic limbo (Steinbach 2001; Remennick 2003a; Waldinger 2005; Niznik 2011). Many young immigrants have lived through mixed scenarios, seeking rapid inclusion and rejecting their home culture at the outset, but later (typically by their early twenties) discovering the attractive sides of their origin culture and getting back to the fold (Remennick 2003a, 2012). In any case, cultural scripts adopted by young immigrants are often hybrid, an admixture of languages, forms, and content borrowed from both sources.
Because of the size of the ex-Soviet immigrant wave of the 1990s (forming 20% of the Jewish population), Israel is particularly interesting for the study of 1.5-ers, who now comprise a “critical mass” among its young citizens. After spending fifteen to twenty years in Israel and sharing common experiences and narratives, young Russian-speaking adults apparently feel the need to connect and express their specific forms of activism and creativity. This article casts light on one civic association that reflects the drive of young Russian Israelis to organize and establish their common (hybrid) identity—a club and community center called Fishka in Tel Aviv. Our empirical analysis is informed by several theoretical perspectives: performance’s role for immigrants’ self-assertion in the receiving society (Bell 1999; Berg and Sigona 2013), collective memory and migration (Creet and Kitzmann 2011; Glynn and Kleist 2012), and the politics of belonging in the urban space (Fortier 1999; Yuval-Davis 2011). The article will present and discuss the spatial and temporal dimensions of public events organized by young Russian immigrants, their specific locations and meanings, and their role as a vehicle of social recognition and visibility of Russian-Israeli subculture in Israel’s most fashionable and trend-setting city. We argue that holidays serve as an important vehicle of collective memory imported by immigrants from their homeland and sustained in the host society. Holiday celebrations evolve and attain local cultural elements, expressing immigrants’ hybrid identity and enabling their feelings of belonging in the new urban space.
Theoretical Background
Performance Theory
Performance studies are at the epicenter of today’s cultural anthropology and certain strands of sociological analysis. Their emergence is linked, among others, to the names of Victor Turner (1988), Richard Schechner (1988), and Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen and Jason Must (2006), who contributed to the novel analytical framework of social performance theory. Turner defined performance as a practical mode of behavior, an approach to lived experience expressed in various forms—as a play, a sport, an aesthetic trend, a ritual, a theater play, and other genres of experience. Cultural performance is a dynamic and reflexive process, a complex sequence of symbolic acts.
Drawing on this framework, we will examine the public events sponsored by Fishka—a cultural association of young Israelis of Russian origin (to be described in more detail below)—as cultural performances of these immigrants in an urban arena of Tel-Aviv. We will examine the symbolic meaning of these events focusing, in particular, upon the construction of collective memory and identity of its participants. We explore the events and festivals organized by Fishka participants as manifestations (or even celebrations) of both their belonging to and difference from the “mainstream” Israeli urban life. From a wide array of the club’s activities, we chose to present four recent public events and holidays: International Women’s Day Parade, Passover Seder, Memouna celebrations, and Holocaust Memory Day ceremony. These events typify various facets of Fishka’s agenda; they are to be read as a collage rather than an organized plot. Some of these events were relatively small-scale (twenty to fifty participants) while others included a few hundreds. All events were noncommercial and supported by different donors; some were free and others involved a symbolic fee. As performative acts, these events constitute signifying practices of self-representation and belonging of the immigrants in the host society.
Collective Memory and Migration
Collective memory is shared by the members of a community, constructs their identity and heritage, differentiates them from members of other communities, and defines the key events of the collective past. The classical study by Halbwachs (1992) showed that collective memory is a dynamic concept: as collectives change, so does their memory, as performed expression of group identity.
Two recently published books (Creet and Kitzmann 2011; Glynn and Kleist 2012) have significantly advanced our understanding of the connections between migration and collective memory. In the past, scholars have rarely combined migration studies and memory studies, to consider, for example, how perceptions of the past affect migrants’ social incorporation or how they identify with the new society that has histories and memories markedly different from their own. Both books strongly claim that memory in all its forms plays a crucial role within the context of migration. Moreover, by contrast to the assertion by Nora (1989) that memory is usually a product of stability, they claim that migration gives a strong impetus to new memory formations. Resettlement makes a potent imprint on how and what we remember, and displacement intensifies our investments in memory. Memories contribute to and are used by migrants to negotiate belonging in the receiving society. Collective memories are relevant to migration in several ways, and in this article we explore how they may influence belonging and the ensuing relationship with the receiving society.
All public events presented below are holidays—vessels of collective memory that can be described as “temporal rites” from Russian-Soviet, Jewish, and Israeli calendar. These calendrical rites occur periodically and predictably in different cultures, giving socially meaningful definitions to the passage of time. Calendrical rites can be distinguished in terms of seasonal and commemorative celebrations (Bell 1997). Seasonal celebrations are usually rooted in the annual cycle of agricultural and pastoral activities, while commemorative ones explicitly recall important historical events, whether or not the date is accurate. The holidays analyzed in this article are mainly celebrations of ancient Jewish, modern Soviet, and Israeli collective memory, although some of them, such as Passover Seder and Memouna, had a seasonal meaning in the past. Commemorative ceremonies are frameworks provided by the group to individuals, within which their memories are contextualized, mapped and transferred to next generations. Social images and recollected knowledge of the past are conveyed and sustained by canonical ritual performances (Connerton 1989).
We consider holidays organized by Fishka as public forms of expression of their memory and identity-building process in the context of migration. The aspect of place has to be added to the discussion of memory in migration (Creet and Kitzmann 2011). Place matters in shaping our memories, “as memory is always migrating, generating its own topological demand” (ibid., 11). The belonging of recent immigrants is expressed in their forming attachment to a new, real place, like the city of Tel-Aviv in our case. We will argue below that the hybrid seasonal holidays and commemorative rites invented and performed by the young immigrants reveal the process of exploration and gradual domestication of the new urban space and eventually help them claim their own stake in belonging to it.
Performance of Belonging in the Context of Urban Diversity
Applying another analytical lens, we analyze public events organized by Fishka participants as urban festivals (Giorgi, Sassatelli, and Delanty 2011). According to Boissevain (1992), the recent explosion of festivals in European cities is connected and stimulated by secularization, immigration, democratization, and in general by increased mobility and change. In global terms, the presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities is evident in every metropolitan area; they became an integral part of social landscape in capitals as in suburbs. Therefore, studies about Russian immigrants’ presence in Jerusalem and Haifa, Israel (Roberman 2007; Fialkova and Yelenevskaya 2011), Pakistani immigrants in Manchester, England (Werbner 1996), or young Turkish immigrants in Berlin, Germany (Soysal 2002), etc. are examining the immigrant’s participation in public spaces of these cities. A key question in this context may be “how diversity, in its various dimensions, is experienced locally, and what new forms of local belonging emerge in contexts where places are closely connected to so many non-proximate ‘elsewheres,’ either through migration, trade links or other ways” (Berg and Sigona 2013, 5). The politics of belonging “comprise specific political projects aimed at constructing belonging to particular collectivity/ies which are themselves constructed in these projects in very specific ways and in very specific boundaries” (Yuval-Davis 2011, 10). These boundaries are often spatial and relate to concrete locality and place.
Researchers pointed to the importance of the cultural sphere in the period of dramatic global transformations spearheaded by economic and humanitarian migrations currently occurring around the world. They examined the relevance of popular art forms, such as music, cinema, theater, dance, literature, rituals, urban festivals, and street shows in diverse post-migration urban settings (Salzbrunn 2014; Sievers 2014; Martiniello 2014; Delhaye and Van de Ven 2014). The idea is that the cultural sphere and specifically street-level arts can help to build bridges, facilitate the encounters among different populations sharing the same urban space, and reinforce the immigrants’ belonging to the new place. In other words, arts, culture and rituals can become a means of communication and dialogue between different individuals or groups sharing the city or its neighborhood, facilitating integration and social cohesion (Martiniello 2014; Vanderwaeren 2014). Moving from the margins to the center, migrants sustainably influence mainstream artistic culture and public sphere; however, this cultural power does not necessarily lead to profound political changes. For example, Salzbrunn (2014) wrote about the participation of immigrants in the events of Cologne carnival in Germany that leads to a blurring of boundaries, whereby mainstream popular culture becomes more and more influenced by multicultural elements. This festive event offers migrants different ways to express themselves on a local, global, and trans-local level. Delhaye and Van de Ven (2014) underscore public recognition of cultural pluralism in Netherlands, analyzing the practices of two Amsterdam-based cultural institutions. Sievers (2014) found that despite the minimal funding invested in the cultural activities of immigrants and their descendants, the visibility of artists of immigrant origin has increased in Vienna over the last decade. These new artists have explicitly criticized Viennese cultural life for excluding immigrants and their descendants, both as artists and as audiences. Often their works envisage cultural change by including multicultural teams of artists and re-writing traditional Austrian culture to include the voices of immigrants and their descendants.
Following this line of research, our article examines public events initiated by young Russian immigrants in Tel-Aviv as performative acts of belonging and as localized forms of ethnic diversity that are likely to become a means of intercultural dialogue.
Urban ethnographers are increasingly interested in the spatial dimensions of the politics of difference, showing how belonging and diversity relate to social and spatial practices of inclusion and exclusion (Berg and Sigona 2013; Martiniello 2014). The public events examined below illustrate how young Russian Israelis negotiate their unique place in the complex social mosaic of Tel-Aviv. We assume that the aspiration of young Russian immigrants is to belong to the urban Israeli landscape (or rather its specific Tel Aviv brand), to become independent and active agents within it, thus creating and sustaining their visibility (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2010) . The term “belonging by criticism" ” introduced by Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport (2012) describes the dual mechanism of belonging and challenge. It relates to the duality of immigrant locations, whereas their belonging doesn’t imply unconditional adoption of the local ethos, while criticism doesn’t mean its total rejection. The new approach of Israeli sociologists posits that the belonging of Russian immigrants in Israel is a complex process full of contradictions that is founded on a nonbinary epistemology, breaking the dominant dichotomy in the older Israeli literature on immigration between assimilation and segregation (Roberman 2007; Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2008, 2012; Lerner 2013).
Bhabha (1994) used a concept of cultural hybridity that described migrants’ position as in-between cultures. By means of live public events, holidays, and their extended online presence, new, hybrid forms of Russian-Israeli culture are created by young Russian Israelis at the intersection between Russian cultural legacies and Israeli realities that surround them. Before describing our field work, a brief introduction on the Russian Israelis of the 1.5 immigrant generation is due.
Young Israelis with Russian Roots
Most young adults of Russian origin resettled in Israel over the past twenty-five years as “reluctant migrants,” due to their parents’ decision to emigrate from the deteriorating post-soviet states. Because of the soaring costs of living in Central Israel, many immigrant families had settled in the outlying towns with poor educational resources and occupational opportunities. Many youths had a difficult time learning Hebrew and adapting to Israeli schools and local peer culture. Their parents were often of little help and guidance during this painful transition, immersed in their own problems, socially disoriented, and working long hours (Remennick 2012). The studies among young Russian immigrants during the 1990s have signaled multiple problems of inclusion: uneven performance at school, high truancy and drop-out rates, lack of enthusiasm for the military service, and troubles with the law (Mirsky 1997; Fishman and Mesch 2005).
By the early 2000s, most young “Russians” have outgrown these “pains of adjustment,” learned to navigate Israeli institutions and play by the local rules (Rozovsky and Almog 2011). Reflecting the forces of social stratification and variable economic mobility of their parents, the 1.5-ers with a Russian accent are found in all social strata (Remennick 2011). The majority of those raised in the families of ex-Soviet intelligentsia, followed their parents’ “ethnic script” of social mobility via higher education, and by the time of our research found themselves in the ranks of Israeli creative or professional class. Thus, this research can be seen as a follow-up on the earlier Israeli studies among Russian immigrant students, for example, by Rapoport and Lomsky-Feder (2002); Remennick (2003a); Lerner, Rapoport, and Lomsky-Feder (2007).
The story of Russian 1.5-ers in Israel is rather unique because of the size of this community and the existence of a thriving Russian subculture. It can be argued that such a “critical mass” of same-origin migrants in a small country, where their language and culture have gradually gained higher acceptance and social status, may by itself lead to sociocultural retention. Yet, similar tendency has been found among Russian immigrants in other host countries, where they comprise a much smaller minority. The studies among the former Soviet 1.5-ers in the United States, Germany, and other Western countries (e.g., Steinbach 2001; Kasinitz et al. 2001; Remennick 2007) have found a tendency to preferential social networking with coethnics, regardless of the extent of socioeconomic adjustment in the new country. Because many of these immigrants are partly Jewish (e.g., from a paternal side) and are not recognized as Jews for religious purposes, they have a tense relationship with the Orthodox rabbinical authorities (Ben-Porat 2013). Most Israeli Russian 1.5-ers are bicultural (or intercultural); typically, they are breaking their own distinct pathway between the home and host cultures, augmented by the new transnational opportunities (Horowitz 2001; Remennick 2013). As a result, a new hybrid cultural bubble has emerged in Israel, typified by a hyphenated identity (Russian-Israeli), lifestyle (rock bands, clubs, and fusion musical genres), and a mixed lingo called HebRush (Remennick 2003a; Niznik 2011).
Our Field-Work at Fishka
We focused on one nonprofit cultural association of young Russian Israelis, by the name of Fishka, meaning in Russian a game token (dice) also symbolizing luck. Fishka appeared about eight years ago on the social scene of Tel-Aviv, first as an art-cinema club, then as a framework for the (secular) study of Jewish heritage, and since 2010 as a full-fledged NGO with a multifaceted agenda and its own premises in South Tel Aviv. This NGO is supported by a mix of private donors, one of which is the Genesis Philanthropy Group founded by a Russian-Jewish business mogul. Because Fishka was not funded by the municipal authorities, it did not get a solid material basis and permanent staff and was never really institutionalized.
Fishka’s projects included community volunteering (e.g., visiting Russian-speaking elders in local senior homes), novel forms of celebrating Jewish and Russian holidays, and a range of interest-based classes and groups (Russian drama troupe, tango class, Hebrew–Russian literary translation group, etc.). In 2010–2013, Fishka rented a building in South Tel-Aviv’s Eilat St. near the sea shore. The neighborhood is rather poor and rundown, dominated by small trade shops and warehouses but with the signs of nascent gentrification. The club’s premises featured a hall for events and dances whose walls are lined by the bookshelves containing hundreds of Russian books—classic and modern fiction, history, biography, philosophy, Jewish Studies, etc. An opposite wall was used for temporary art exhibits. There was also a patio with coffee tables, a conference room, a small kitchen, and staff offices. The premises featured modern pragmatic design pasting in multiple elements of the local, Middle Eastern flavor (furniture, fabrics, etc.)—merging with the spirit of its renovated Ottoman-period building and the adjacent mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhood of Jaffa. In May 2013, Fishka had to abandon its house on Eilat St. because of rental and financial problems, and since then it had been looking for a new permanent home, while holding its club activities in various city locations. 1
Fishka is a typical grassroots association, that is, is locally based, significantly autonomous, run by volunteers, and nonprofit (Smith 2000). Immigrant cultural activities are examined from both a grassroots perspective and a policy-institutional perspective, although there is no sharp distinction between the two perspectives (Martiniello 2014). Our article privileges a grassroots perspective, describing the initiatives taken by the migrants themselves to organize calendrical holidays and street events in Tel-Aviv. At the same time, it is important to mention that Fishka’s sponsors (especially Genesis foundation) encouraged them to be involved in the field of Jewish identity, holidays, and traditions. The directions of Fishka’s activities did not always took shape easily and compromises often had to be reached between the sponsors, leaders, and other participants. Since Genesis and other Jewish foundations offered their support specifically earmarked for Jewish education and leadership projects, Fishka’s leaders had to find creative ways to introduce traditional Jewish content to the club’s agenda, for example, by celebrating Jewish holidays in novel ways. Some of Fishka’s leaders who had studied in religious schools and still observed some Jewish traditions gladly embraced these initiatives, while the secular majority of Fishkers were less interested in these projects. Usually consensus was reached by splitting ways: different participants chose for themselves alternative projects and events that reflected their outlook and interests.
Our field work with Fishka’s staff, project leaders, and patrons included eighteen months of participant observation of its various events and activities, as well as twenty-three in-depth interviews with the key informants. The goals of the study included understanding the rationale for Fishka’s appearance, the characteristics of its audience and activists, the evolution of its projects (including the reasons for their success or failure), and a close study of the hybrid cultural forms created by Fishka’s participants. These semistructured interviews highlight the personal intercultural journeys of the immigrants, the reasons of their attachment to the Fishka community, and their roles in creating the new forms of cross-cultural expression. Since both authors are Russian-Hebrew bilinguals, all interviewees had been offered the choice of language, and two-thirds opted for their mother tongue. Yet, all of these interviews featured fragments of Hebrew idioms to enable more efficient expression. One third felt more comfortable speaking Hebrew, but still pasted in multiple Russian words and expressions. Thus, in the best tradition of the 1.5 generation of Russian Israelis, our interviews were conducted in the language locally known as IvRus or HebRush (Hebrew+Russian) and could only be transcribed and analyzed by the community insiders. Most informants are quoted below under their actual names (unless they asked to use an alias) because they are publicly known via Fishka’s events and online forums.
Our analysis of this rich ethnographic data was informed by several different theoretical frameworks and goals. One article was about cultural capital in migration based on the biographic interviews with Fishka participants (Prashizky and Remennick, 2015) and another one about alternative weddings performed by Fishka’s leaders in the streets of Tel-Aviv for its members who cannot have a religious marriage in Israel (Prashizky and Remennick, 2016). The present article is focused on the performative aspects of public events (holidays, rituals, and festivals) organized by Fishka’s leaders and participants. We start presenting our ethnography from explaining the specific relevance and meaning of Tel-Aviv as the scene of Fishka’s performances and then turn to the analysis of the four selected events that typify different facets of the association’s agenda.
Fishka in Tel-Aviv’s Urban Landscape
Why Is Fishka Located in Tel-Aviv?
Greater Tel Aviv is the second most populous city in Israel and its largest metropolitan area. Tel-Aviv City has several symbolic connotations in Israeli public imaginary (Azaryahu 2007, 2012), reflecting different phases in the social history of Tel-Aviv. Its founding myth focuses on the “first Hebrew city”, which lasted from its foundation in 1909 through the 1950s. According to it, Tel-Aviv was the first modern Jewish urban space and Hebrew-speaking city in Palestine founded by the Zionist settlers from the Russian Empire and later receiving waves of Jewish refugees before, in between and after two world wars. The key period figures included the first Tel-Aviv mayor Meir Dizengoff, the poet Haim N. Bialik, and actors of the Habima Theater.
The second chapter unfolds in the 1960s and 1970s when the city’s central commercial venue named after Dizengoff became a metonym of Tel-Aviv as a large and modern city. The third one originates in the 1980s and 1990s, when the celebration of Tel-Aviv as a “city that never sleeps” or a “non-stop metropolis” represented the hype around the new, vibrant Mediterranian cosmopolis, the liberal, secular, and free city. The fourth trope addresses the “White City” as a contemporary expression of Tel-Aviv’s architectural heritage. In July 2003, UNESCO announced the listing of “the white city of Tel-Aviv” as a world heritage site because of its dominant Bauhaus architecture (introduced by German Jewish immigrants in the 1930s). The “white city” brand invested Tel-Aviv with the prestige of a prominent cultural center on the global scale (Azaryahu 2012). In the local Israeli lore, Tel-Aviv is often likened to Paris of the 1930s or New York and London of the 1980s. The young and fashionable crowd (including multiple tourists) appreciates Tel Aviv for its stylish cafes, elegant seaside promenade, music and art festivals, and thriving night life. It is the most multicultural city in Israel: in addition to native and immigrant Jewish residents and Arabs from Jaffa, most labor migrants from Africa, the Philippines, Eastern Europe, etc. have also settled there.
As we will see, Fishka participants use all four mythical tropes of Tel-Aviv in some pragmatic way, even if unconsciously, to reinforce their legitimacy as Russian immigrant residents of the city. Most Fishka participants had moved to Tel Aviv from Jerusalem and Israel’s peripheral towns after finishing their education, in search of professional and personal advancement in the big city. Most live in rented apartments in central Tel-Aviv or in suburban Gush-Dan towns. Fishka organization became the setting of the symbolic encounter between the values and practices of the previous generations of Russian intellectuals and artists and their current reincarnation, as young migrants in Israel. The “ethnic script” of Russian Jewish intelligentsia (Remennick 2007; Lerner, Rapoport, and Lomsky-Feder 2007) includes urban lifestyle; higher education (most are professionals in the high-tech industry, medicine, education, and a range of creative areas—journalism, design, theater, etc.); broad cultural literacy (including history and philosophy); and the love for Russian and European high culture with concomitant attempts at artistic self-expression.
A couple of successful Tel Aviv fashion designers (Frau Blau label) are among the club’s participants and patrons, who also supply the stage costumes and clothes for project leaders, concert anchors, etc. Altogether, these manifestations make a claim at these young immigrants’ special place in the ranks of Tel-Aviv bohemia, their stake in creation of the city’s high culture, and at least parity (if not superiority) with other young creators who are native Israelis. This elitist attitude is also supported by Fishka’s donor—the Genesis Foundation for Russian Jewry. Here is an excerpt from an interview with Sana Britavsky, head of Genesis Tel-Aviv branch.
This initiative [Fishka] looked unique from the outset, that’s why we decided to support it. It attracted young and trendy Tel Aviv crowd that was interested in its Jewish and Russian roots. Not the ardent Zionist kind that you find in Jerusalem but a bohemian kind, professional, confident, and well adjusted in Israel. These were not the people crushed by immigration and looking for a shoulder to cry on. Most had received their degrees from good universities and started promising careers. . . . Even if they hadn’t made it in Israel yet and worked as janitors or guards, they aspired to become film directors and artists and found here the outlet for their creativity. From the outset, Fishka’s leaders kept a certain standards that resulted in self-selection: the rogue folks interested in loud music and a glass of beer dropped out quickly.
Later, she mused: In fact, Fishka is a post-migration phenomenon; its patrons are very much the locals now . . . they remind me of the 2nd and 3rd generation of the White Russian immigration in Paris. Already French, but of a special kind, they cherished their Russian roots, sang Russian songs and dined in Russian restaurants. . . . Now this “ethnic” tweak became fashionable also in Israel, so it attracts young Sabras of a certain kind who like hanging out with Russian 1.5ers. . . . Thus Tel-Aviv slowly recovers its historic Russian roots—most of its founding creative class had come from Russia and built the city from scratch . . . this lingering imprint helps young Russian Israelis feel at home here.
Sana’s words evoke two elitist associations: one with the noble White Russian émigrés in Paris who never severed their ties with the Russian culture, and the other with the Russian Jewish founders of Tel-Aviv in pre-state Palestine—the iconic figures like poets Chaim Bialik and Alexander Penn actress Hanna Rovina, the reformer of modern Hebrew Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, and many others, whose names carry multiple Tel-Aviv streets. She notes with pride that, thanks to Fishka and other similar groups, Russian-ness came into vogue among some Tel Aviv’s natives, which helps redress previous negative stereotypes toward the immigrants and bridge the remaining social gaps.
Several projects at Fishka aim at building intercultural bridges by introducing contemporary Hebrew culture to the 1.5-ers. One of them is called Chronicus (from chronos—Greek for “time”); it includes readings of Hebrew writers and poets, meeting Hebrew stage and film directors, etc., as well as field trips to culturally important sites in Tel-Aviv and beyond. Chronicus’s leader is Nadia Greenberg (thirty-three), one of the key figures at Fishka who came to Israel twenty-two years ago from Moscow, graduated from a theatre school, and works as teacher and stage director. Nadia shared her thoughts on intercultural learning.
Most Fishka guys speak fluent Hebrew and feel Israeli, but they are not always familiar with contemporary Israeli culture and its evolvement over the twentieth century. Chronicus seeks to fill in the gaps of their knowledge and help them feel more connected to Israel. . . . We started from the trips to several important museums and memorial homes (e.g., of H. N. Bialik) and proceeded to learning urban history and architecture in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. We used any opportunity to invite different men of letters, working both in Hebrew and in Russian, and the translators of drama and poetry, like Peter Kriksunov who translated Bulgakov’s “Master and Margarita” into Hebrew and Ro’i Chen, a Sabra who learned Russian perfectly; he translates and adapts Russian drama at Gesher theatre. All of these events were sold out and some resulted in new projects, for instance, poetry translators’ workshop.
Nadia added later: One of our activists is a professional tour guide who works in both languages and she really made us look at the city we live in differently. Our field trips in Tel Aviv made a deep impression on the Fishka guys. The stories of young Russian-Jewish pioneers who had built the city in the 1910s-1920s remind them of their own journey almost 100 years later: back then, as now, the city scene is in flux and we can contribute our fair share to its current history and cultural scene. . . . These pioneers also felt being in the gap between the two cultures and slowly learned to fill it with the new content. This historical parallel makes you feel more relevant in this place on the map. . . . You realize your own entitlement for it and your role in creating its current history. Tel-Aviv’s young intellectuals of the 1920s were also new to Palestine and had to invent themselves and the town from scratch. We can follow in the same path—to do new things that are interesting and inspiring for us, and nobody can tell us, this city isn’t yours, you don’t belong here. . . . We do belong and we want to inhabit Tel Aviv in the ways that suit our own cultural and mental tastes. [authors’ emphasis]
It is not coincidental that the first mythical meaning and memory of Tel-Aviv as the first Hebrew city is dominant in the stories of Sana and Nadia who compare Fishka participants to the first Tel-Avivians. This symbolic association is loaded with prestige because it refers to the mythical beginnings of the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Tel-Aviv’s growth as the Jewish urban center was inseparable from the creation of a vernacular Hebrew literature, fine arts, architecture and photography by Jewish practitioners (Mann 2006). This historic aspect of life in Tel-Aviv is relevant to the cultural activity of Fishka participants and is actively reinterpreted by them. Nadia’s reflections underscore the role of Fishka in the fortification of young immigrants’ feelings of belonging to this country and city, their stake at and entitlement for a fair part in its ongoing creation. The parallel between the earlier waves of Aliya from Russia and today’s Russian 1.5-ers helps cement the intergenerational ties and a common vision of Israel’s history and its culture as a complex tapestry with a significant Russian thread running across it. They claim their unique place as creators of Israeli, locally embedded cultural capital drawing on the Russian language and traditions. This is one example of how the collective urban memory of Tel-Aviv is adopted and used by Russian immigrants in order to negotiate their belonging to this place.
Other leaders of creative projects at Fishka also stressed that Tel-Aviv attracted them as a cosmopolitan, secular, and culturally diverse city where everyone is different and therefore can be what they want. Most informants stressed that they felt at home in Tel-Aviv much more than in other Israeli towns where they grew up. Despite drastic economic gaps between the poorer Southern and wealthy Northern Tel-Aviv neighborhoods, an immigrant feels much freer in Tel-Aviv than in Jerusalem, with its holiness, religion, and the breath of history at every corner (“you can never live up to this Holy City’s standard of virtue, especially as a non-believer,” said one ex-Jerusalemite). Tel-Aviv is also the hub of creativity where many young talents are showing their work, meet their peers, and support each other. While dozens of cultural events take place in Tel-Aviv every night, every venue is full and booming in the “city that never sleeps” because Tel-Aviv residents are ardent consumers of music, theatre, stand-up comedy, the club scene, etc.
That’s why the group like Fishka could only emerge in this city, where like-minded young adults of Russian origin got together to build novel venues for their bicultural creativity. Because of Tel-Aviv’s multicultural modus vivendi, Russian Israelis could legitimately claim their own place in the diverse urban landscape and see their unique contribution accepted and appreciated by the natives and other immigrants alike. “Together we are a force, a Russian-speaking intellectual magnet of Tel-Aviv,” summed proudly one female informant.
In sum, Fishka participants are members of the educated and productive stratum of generation 1.5 who abandon the peripheral areas of the country and flock to Tel-Aviv in search of better employment opportunities and a more vibrant cultural life. Along with their move to the center, they are experiencing rapid bourgeoisification and integration into the mainstream consumer society (Rozovsky and Almog 2011). This process reflects changes in patterns of their leisure-time activities, for example, socializing in the cafes of the Greater Tel-Aviv area, visits to art exhibitions, theaters and cinema festivals, organization of and participation in cultural urban festivals. Fishka manifests its orientation toward the country’s Ashkenazi elite, to which many of its leaders aspire to belong. In their outreach efforts, the association’s leaders wish to attract a higher tier of the Hebrew-speaking patrons whom they construe as their social peers—the young professional and artsy Tel-Aviv crowd. Thus they adopt, use, and reinterpret symbolical and mythical meanings of Tel-Aviv as a cultural center, “White city”, and modern metropolis, all of which are widely accepted in Israeli mainstream (Azaryahu 2007, 2012). On the other hand, the image of the “Black city”, the term that Rotbard (2005) uses to describe the adjacent Arab town of Jaffa that was partly annexed and rebuilt by its expanding “White city” neighbor, is almost absent in the discourse of young Russian immigrants, as is the general reference to the Israeli -Palestinian conflict in their activity.
Public Events
International Women’s Day Parade
International Working Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8 in many countries, especially those with socialist legacies. It started at the dawn of the twentieth century in the United States, Europe, and Russia in the form of demonstrations demanding equal rights for women in the workplace (Kaplan 1985). March 8 was an official holiday in the Soviet Union, but during the last decades of State Socialism it lost its ideological pitch and became, ironically, a general Women’s Day celebrating femininity, beauty, and motherhood, that is, rather traditional gender values. On March 8, Russian men congratulated their mothers, wives, daughters, and coworkers with chocolates and flowers and symbolically relieved their house workload (one day a year) by washing the dishes and taking out trash. As opposed to FSU, in Israel, March 8 is not an official holiday and public awareness of the event is very low. Its proxy in Israel is Mothers’ Day (also called a Family Day) celebrated in early February. According to the typology suggested by Bell (1997), March 8 is generally a calendrical celebration (it is neither fully seasonal nor really commemorative) and is a salient part of a collective memory of former Soviet citizens.
A group of Fishka activists decided to refill the Women’s Day with its original political load and organized the street march to foster contact between different ethnic and social layers of Tel Aviv’s working women. On the early Friday afternoon of March 8, 2013, a few dozen Fishka activists, most of them female, met at the heart of old and wealthy Tel-Aviv, the Habima Theatre Square. Their plan was to march from that area through Rothschild Boulevard, one of the fanciest streets with restored Bauhaus buildings, large trees along the promenade and beautiful cafes, to the Old and New Tel-Aviv Central bus stations, representing the opposite end of the socioeconomic scale, the refuge of many illegal African immigrants and the domicile of the working poor. From there, the group proceeded to the adjacent Hatikva neighborhood, with its old houses with peeled walls, piles of trash, and general neglect. The young women wore beautiful summer dresses, high heels, and makeup. Some carried bunches of balloons that they gave out to oncoming women. One woman brought her two little dogs tied together with belts and colored balloons. A couple of Fishka participants holding huge bouquets of red carnations joined the crowd later, giving out flowers to women in the streets. They also offered stickers with Fishka’s logo to the curious onlookers. The interactions of this colorful young company with the people in the streets were cheerful: people, especially women and children, enjoyed receiving flowers and balloons, smiled back, and asked questions about March 8 and the purpose of Fishka organization. All of them were invited to join the march, and some indeed joined for a short while. Greetings and conversations that occurred during the parade were at least in three languages—Russian with Russian tourists and immigrants, English with migrant workers from Africa and Philippines (especially near the bus stations), and Hebrew with other Israelis (even two ultra-orthodox women dressed in long black dresses received flowers with smiles). Typical questions asked time and again by the people in the streets were: Who you are? What holiday is it today?
We interpret this public appearance of young Russian immigrants in the Tel-Aviv streets as their claim for social recognition and a wish to contribute their own strand to the rainbow of local traditions and street events. The Women’s Day Tel-Aviv parade served as an arena of immigrant identity politics, public visibility and to some extent a pride in their ex-Soviet cultural heritage and collective memory with its strong emphasis on women’s equality and universal employment.
This is how Marina, thirty-five, a journalist and an event participant, commented on it: For me it was a celebration of women’s power in Tel-Aviv: all the women who live and work here, from upscale Ashkenazi ladies of the Rothschild Boulevard all the way down to female African migrants in the Bus Station area. All our girls wore beautiful outfits to attract glances in the streets, and they proudly carried their beauty from Tel-Aviv’s North to South, to make a statement on the continuity of Tel-Aviv’s urban space from poor to rich areas, to brighten up the day of poorer residents and migrant laborers in the rundown parts of town. African women were particularly moved by our gifts of flowers and smiles because they don’t get much attention, let alone congratulations with a Women’s Day . . . they have bleak lives here and we wanted to show solidarity with their cause and human rights. A few local men also joined the march and we had a chance to explain them its meaning. . . . By this act we make the voice of young Russian Israelis heard in Tel-Aviv. [authors’ emphasis]
Thus, Fishka participants construed the importance of this event on several planes that were both pragmatic and ideological. One was overriding the socioeconomic gradient between wealthier and poorer segments of Tel-Aviv’s residents and inclusion of refugees and migrant workers in the urban fold, building a live bridge between the upscale and neglected Tel-Aviv domiciles and thus creating symbolic continuity of the urban space. The other was reclaiming the working women’s rights agenda in the neoliberal age and solidarity with the ploy of illegal migrants in South Tel-Aviv (a hot issue on Israel’s internal political agenda).
In the informal conversations between the participants, this event has often been praised as a success. The colorful, flamboyant beauty of this women’s group created a strong presence in the cityscape and led to positive encounters with passersby in the streets of Tel-Aviv, thus causing the feelings of high self-esteem and pride among the participants.
Passover Seder
Passover is a high Jewish holiday celebrating the Exodus of ancient Hebrews from Egypt; it symbolizes the emancipation of the Jewish people from slavery to freedom and sovereignty and hence clearly resonates with the Zionist paradigm. The traditional ritual (Seder Pesah) includes reading of the Agadah (a poetic depiction of the Exodus events originally written in Aramaic), drinking four cups of wine, eating matzoth, tasting symbolic foods placed on the special Seder plate, and singing traditional chants. In the full-scale religious Seder, the ritual part can take hours, and only after it’s over are the participants allowed to proceed to festive dinner. It is an enduring cultural rite rooted in both seasonal and commemorative traditions. The holiday is the combination of two ancient festivals, the pastoral festival of Pesah and the seven-day spring agricultural festival of matzah. The core of the Jewish identity is established by the reference to a sequence of historical events, one of which is the Exodus.
Seder Pesah is celebrated in all but few Jewish homes, but secular Israelis typically modify the ritual elements using an adapted Agadah and proceeding to dinner more quickly. Most Russian immigrants came from a secular and assimilated background, and few of them were familiar with Passover rituals before coming to Israel. Thus, teaching Russian newcomers how to celebrate Pesah was seen by the hosts as an important element of their Israeli resocialization (Remennick and Parshizky 2012). Since reinforcement of Jewish heritage among young Russian Israelis is one of Fishka’s declared goals, novel forms of Jewish holiday celebrations gradually took the shape of the Mahogim (clock hands) project.
In the Passover Night event of April 2013 at Fishka House, about fifty Russian immigrants were present. Most were Fishka regulars, their friends and family members, but some were accidental immigrant visitors who wanted to celebrate Pesah at the club. Since Pesah celebrations symbolize Israeli family-centered culture, Fishka wanted to serve as a proxy family to lone Russian immigrants having no relatives to celebrate with. One of the Mahogim coordinators explained the concept behind this event: Mahogim is about celebrating together Jewish holidays—in novel ways that make them enjoyable and meaningful for our secular patrons. . . . Most folks disliked tedious reading of the Agadah before the meal, making everybody edgy. The compromise was not reading the Agadah itself but discussing instead the major issues it raises—slavery, the cost of freedom, and leadership—in the form of a brainstorm game, with two competing teams tackling the questions. . . . How did we handle traditional Seder songs in obscure Aramaic language? As a kind of karaoke—we posted the words on a screen so that everyone could follow. Soon we switched to singing familiar songs of Russian bards (Vysozky, Okudzhava, Vizbor)—mainly those devoted to journeys, roads, and personal transitions, and there are many such songs in the familiar Russian repertoire. So everybody could connect to the deeper meaning of Passover and also enjoyed themselves, including my 70 year-old mother. . . . Thus we ended up having a Jewish holiday that everyone could internalize as their own.
This story evokes the theme of cultural translation. It isn’t accidental that so many of Fishka’s events revolve around translation—of drama, poetry, bilingual city guides, etc. Lerner (2013, 35) argues that the whole process of immigrant integration in Israel can be seen through a metaphor of intercultural translation, combining both symbolic and pragmatic elements bridging between immigrants’ past and present. Immigrants employ their “old” knowledge and frames of reference as a lens to scrutinize and interpret new realities of Israel, thus creating unique cultural hybrids, products of intercultural translation. The act of translation occurs both literally, in the events and workshops discussing Hebrew–Russian literary translations, and metaphorically, for example, interpreting Jewish and Israeli holidays into the cultural and symbolic language understandable to ex-Soviet immigrants. Apparently, the Seder night at Fishka stood rather far from its traditional Orthodox format, but its symbolic message was clearly delivered by means of familiar cultural genres—a brain-storm game and singing Russian songs about freedom. This act of cultural translation made an ancient Jewish tradition more legible and meaningful to the secular patrons of the club, both young and old.
The relevance of Jewish religion and its rituals and holidays is not a unique question for Russian Israelis at the beginning of the 21st century. Back in the 1920s, Zionists who built the first agricultural settlements in Palestine faced the challenge of suitability of Jewish traditions to their secular, collectivist way of life (Zeira 2002). We interpret the creative modification of Seder rituals by young Russian immigrants as another expression of Israeli secular culture in the modern urban context.
As already mentioned, the Mahogim project was supported by the Genesis Foundation and targeted communal celebration of holidays, both Russian-Soviet (e.g., March 8) and Jewish. During our study period, these celebrations included Hanukah party, Purimshpil, Shavuot festival, and the Passover Seder described above. Placing the issue of Jewish identity at the center of Fishka’s agenda caused disputes between its members. Some informants (e.g., Misha, one of the coordinators of the drama project) said that they were uninterested in this subject and attended Fishka’s Jewish events because they were held in a special Russian cultural space. Others spoke about the importance of Judaism for them: these included Nadia, one of the club’s leaders, who received religious education in Israel and used to be observant. She was a central node of the pro-Jewish identity group, with most of its participants formerly religious (including Galina, a tourist guide and co-coordinator of Chronicus, and Masha, a former coordinator of Mahogim). Another round of arguments around Mahogim was caused by the Genesis’s 2014 decision to cut down its funding to a single Jewish holiday—the Shavuot festival and study of the related Jewish texts. Masha quitted her position as Mahogim coordinator in protest against this policy change, while many others welcomed it. Generally, our field observations indicate that Fishka’s Jewish festivals and holidays succeeded to attract secular Tel-Aviv audience because of their entertainment aspects. Those events typically included food, music, dancing, and poetry readings, thus moving far away from the Orthodox customs.
Culinary Workshop and Memouna Celebration
Food—taste and smell, tangible signs of ethnicity—plays an important role in the encounters between immigrants and locals in the host society. In the multicultural reality of contemporary cities, they are a part of the sensory experience of difference in the urban space. As a universal human need, cooking and food-sharing rituals also help bridge social gaps and broker friendships between neighbors and coworkers belonging to different cultural traditions (Rhys-Taylor 2013). Israeli Jews coming from dozens of different countries use their ethnic cuisines as salient identity markers and social boundary signifiers. Hence, promoting Russian-Jewish cuisine and getting to know and like the cooking habits of “other Jews” was seen by Fishka leaders as an efficient way of transcending local ethno-social boundaries.
When Vova (thirty-one), a professional chef, joined the club’s volunteer group, a decision was made to start an intercultural cooking workshop named “NOT in MY Grandma’s Kitchen.” At every meeting, the fifteen to twenty participants were taught a new recipe from one of the many Jewish cooking traditions—Moroccan, Yemenite, Iraqi, Greek, Polish, and, naturally, Russian. The workshop was subsidized by a Tel-Aviv municipal grant to Fishka, so that amateur chefs had only to cover the costs of cooking ingredients. In the beginning, Vova introduced the dish of the day, its cultural origins as part of local geography, history, and lifestyles of various diaspora communities. Although most participants were of Russian origin, Vova encouraged local residents to join classes with their unique know-how learned at home. He saw this workshop as a vivid expression of Fishka’s intercultural mission: I see myself as a chef and a culinary entrepreneur, a sort of cultural broker . . . so this workshop aimed at breaking the barriers between Russian, European and Middle-Eastern culinary traditions. People are often prejudiced against other groups’ food, mainly because they know little about it . . . cooking and tasting each other’s dishes is the easiest way of bringing strangers together, fostering interest and mutual trust. Me as a host and my guests tried to show the participants how rich and wonderful are different Jewish dishes and how many of them are essentially versions of each other.
The pivotal event at the end of the workshop was a walk-in, free Memouna celebration at Fishka. It is a traditional festival of North African Jews held at nightfall on the last Passover day marking the return to eating chametz, that is, leavened bread and pastry forbidden throughout the previous week. Its central ritual is kneading of the first bread dough—marking the separation from the Passover—with subsequent eating of traditional sweet butter-and-honey pastry called Mofleta. In the Arab countries, Jewish families invited their Muslim neighbors to sweet Memouna party, thus cementing their good neighborly relations. In recent decades, the increased social inclusion and upward mobility of Eastern (Mizrahi) Jews has redefined Memouna from a tribal Mizrahi custom to part of Israel’s national holiday canon, with televised Memouna parties attended by politicians and celebrities. During the 1990s, families of recent Russian immigrants were invited to Mizrahi Jewish homes to celebrate Memouna together as part of their “acculturation project” (Sharaby 2009).
At the nightfall on the last Passover day of 2013, about one hundred guests gathered in the courtyard of Fishka building, young Russian immigrants joined by their native Israeli friends and local residents invited to join free of charge. In the yard with installed tables and ovens, cooking workshop participants made Mofleta side by side with traditional Russian bliny (blintzes) and served both to the guests. Everyone could see that the two foods belonging to very distant Jewish cultures (Russian and Moroccan) are in fact very similar in look and taste. Vova orchestrated over the cooking workshop. A variety of Russian, Israeli mainstream, and Mizrahi-style music was pouring from the loudspeakers. Augmenting the Mizrahi flavor, the evening was concluded with belly dance performed by Julia Kislev, a Russian immigrant who was earlier on Fishka’s staff. She studied belly dance in Israel, fell in love with the Middle Eastern culture and nowadays produces commercial parties in this style.
An interesting confrontation occurred during and after the party when some Russian immigrant women in the audience complained that the belly dancer became too provocative by the show’s end. They felt embarrassed in front of their native Israeli friends whom they invited to the party. This exemplifies an intercultural conflict, when an Eastern cultural genre is construed as indecent by ex-Soviet women (especially when performed by a fellow Russian). They may have a more feminist (or puritanical?) perception of women’s decent public appearance and their role as entertainers exhibiting their semi-naked bodies.
Reflecting over the nature of this successful cultural project, Vova said, We are doing Memouna party for the 2nd year now and it’s only getting better. I think that it reflects the very core of Fishka’s vision and purpose: demonstrating that Russian Israelis are an indispensable part of the Israeli social makeup. It feels very good to change the role of guests and newcomers to Israel to that of the hosts and masters of the place. The Russian community that was known for its inward orientation is widely opening its doors to invite everyone to join us on our own turf, to try our foods and compare them with your own. . . . We are no longer strangers in the strange land but full-fledged owners of the place.
Thus, playing generous hosts to the diverse crowd in Fishka’s courtyard helped foster immigrants’ self-confidence and build bridges to the local urban community. The event’s novelty was in combining two different culinary traditions—Russian/East European and Jewish/Middle-Eastern that are often perceived as antagonistic, thus creating a new hybrid and local form of Russian culture in Israel.
A more critical opinion was expressed by Dasha (an alias), a former Fishka member now connected to another immigrant group named Generation 1.5 (www.facebook.com/dor1vahetsi/). She interpreted the Memouna celebration at Fishka as an attempt to pass as locals, to put a show of well-integrated “good Russians,” which she saw as forced and artificial. Instead, she wanted the 1.5 generation to demand from the Israeli society to accept Russian immigrants as they are, without trying to convert or localize them.
The connection to Jewish holidays in the spirit of secular Judaism is not incidental on Fishka’s agenda and couldn’t be explained only by the donors’ funding policies. Fishka’s activity started from cooperation with Bina—the secular Yeshiva (which offers unorthodox Torah study) in Tel-Aviv, and its first events were held in Bina building. Today Tel-Aviv is the epicenter of the so-called “Jewish renewal movement” or “Jewish renaissance” (Azulay and Verzberger 2008). Israeli prayer house, Bina-secular Yeshiva, Alma-center for Hebrew culture, and Havaya–Israeli Center of Life Cycle Rites are among the central organizations of this movement, all located in the Greater Tel-Aviv area. Young, secular, middle-class Israelis attend Jewish secular prayers, study groups, and festivals in Tel-Aviv. Fishka’s secular Jewish events in Tel-Aviv and its cooperation with other similar organizations can be interpreted as an additional expression of belonging to the current urban zeitgeist. Notably, after her recent resignation from Fishka, Rita Brudnik (Fishka’s cofounder and head) was hired as the head of Bina, a secular Yeshiva in Tel-Aviv.
Holocaust Memorial Events
Holocaust Day (Yom Hashoa) is an official memorial day in Israel. It falls five days after the end of Passover and a week before two other state holidays—Fallen Soldiers Day and Independence Day. This day commemorates the murder of 6,000,000 Jews by the Nazis, the destruction of Jewish life in Europe, and the heroism of the Jews who struggled against the Nazi oppressors. The opening ceremony is held at Yad Vashem—the Memorial Holocaust Center in Jerusalem—and is televised live. During the ceremony, Holocaust survivors light six torches symbolizing the six million Jewish victims and Rabbis recite prayers. Smaller ceremonies and services are held at schools, synagogues, and community organizations while all entertainment venues are closed. Synchronized sirens sound throughout the state at 10
For Russian Israelis, this Memorial Day is very meaningful, as most families have lost some of their members during the Great Patriotic War, the Nazi occupation of the USSR, and mass killings of the Jews in the occupied Soviet lands (an estimated 2.7 million). At the same time, about 700,000 Soviet Jewish soldiers fought the Nazis in the ranks of the Red Army, many Jews joined the partizans in the woods of Ukraine and Belorussia. Thousands among the elderly Russian immigrants took active part in the combat or military industry, many being awarded medals for their heroism and work effort. The Russian World War II veterans association is spread across Israeli towns; among other activities, it organizes an annual Victory Day parade on May 9 (when it was celebrated in the USSR/FSU). The pride over the Soviet-Jewish soldiers’ contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany, and through this, to the founding of the Jewish State, forms a salient component in the collective identity of older Russian immigrants. This pride is often transmitted to the younger generations through family events and memories.
The ceremony at Fishka took place on the eve of the Holocaust Day of 2013 and was conducted mostly in Hebrew (with a few parts in Russian) to cater to a broader local audience. The event was scripted around the story of Russian Jews during the Holocaust, their suffering, resistance, and contribution to the victory of the Soviet Army. The audience consisted of bilingual Fishka regulars, their friends and family members, as well as some local residents and a few tourists. The ceremony was opened by a minute of silence in the remembrance of the victims with the audience (around forty people) standing up. After this, six Fishka participants lighted six candles symbolizing the six million murdered Jews, and each of them read excerpts from poetry, stories, and memoirs of Russian Jewish survivors. The ceremony ended by singing of the Israeli anthem Hatikva. It was followed by the monodrama “The Apples” based on a short story by Russian-Israeli writer Dina Rubina, staged and directed by Fishka’s leaders—the director Nadia Greenberg and actress Anna Glantz-Margulis. The play invoked the war memoir of an elderly Russian-Jewish veteran told to a young author; it was previously staged in Russian and now for the first time in Hebrew. The play was followed by Nadia’s talk about the history of Russian Jews, their destiny during the War, and a personal family story of resistance and survival during the war.
Members of the audience asked questions, commented on the lecture, and some joined in telling their family’s wartime stories. Thus, this event merged between elements of the familiar Israeli script with the added layers of Russian-Jewish historic and personal narrative. Through the theatrical representation of the unique facets of the Russian-Jewish war experience, young Russian immigrants added an important perspective to the collective Holocaust narrative. This grand narrative makes a solid foundation of Israel’s very existence and legitimacy among other nations; it is based on the twin images of the victim and the fighter. Yet, the six million Jewish victims (among them 2.5 million children) form the core of this narrative, while partisans and ghetto fighters represent the resisting minority. Multiple books, movies, museums, and ceremonies reiterate and fortify this narrative of victimization and heroic (yet futile) resistance attempts.
By contrast to Israel and the West, the notion of the Holocaust did not exist in the official Soviet discourse on the Great Patriotic War (June 1941–May 1945) that was dominated by the collective memory of the Nazi army atrocities on the occupied territories toward all Soviet civilians without referring to their ethnicity or religion. The postwar attempts to document Jewish victimization by the Nazis and their local collaborators were banned by soviet censorship for political reasons. The heroic combat effort and the final victory of the Soviet army over Nazi Germany formed the core of the Soviet war narrative, and most elderly Jews prefer to underscore this side of the story rather than Jewish victimhood (Roberman 2007; Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2012). In Israel too, the role of the 1.5 million Jewish soldiers fighting in the Allied armies of World War II has been marginal in the official historiography until the early 1990s, when elderly Soviet veterans started annual Victory Day Marches on May 9 (Roberman 2007). The synthesis of these two aspects of Jewish history during World War II in the collective memory of Israelis characterized the Holocaust Remembrance Day event at Fishka. By changing the accents in this familiar tale, the young Russian Israelis asserted their right to reshape the foundational narrative in light of historical truths previously overlooked in Israel.
The Victory Day 2014 was also celebrated by Fishka members together with the elderly war veterans, underscoring the strong intergenerational ties among Russian Jews. The young immigrants walked with colored balloons and posters side by side with the veterans wearing their military regalia. The parade started from Tel-Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard and finished at the Russian Cultural Center on Geula St. with collective singing of the old wartime songs beloved by most ex-Soviets.
Summary and Discussion
Focusing on a group of young Russian immigrants living in Tel-Aiv, this ethnographic study examines their quest for active belonging in the host society. Their association Fishka, which was founded as an in-group social and cultural venue for the Russian 1.5 generation (Prashizky and Remennick, 2015), has gradually expanded its vision to embrace active outreach efforts that would place this immigrant cohort on the national and local map, making it visible and appreciated by other Israelis. The young immigrants manifested great creativity in designing the tools—performative and artistic—for this public outreach, both in terms of content (Jewish and Russian holiday celebrations, food festivals, street shows and wedding parties) and forms (in-house vs. street marches, large and small, in Hebrew, Russian, English, and their admix). These public events, rituals, and festivals can be seen as affirmations or even celebrations of belonging and diversity in their adopted and beloved city of Tel-Aviv. The events discussed above attest to the ongoing processes of cultural hybridization, whereby young Israelis fully embrace the cultural and historic legacies of their adopted homeland but also take pride in their Russian-Soviet heritage, want to make it known to a broad local audience and elevate the prestige of Russian culture in Israel. As many 1.5-ers came of age trying to hide or downplay their Russianness (construed as a negative social label in 1990s Israel; Remennick 2003a), after reaching adulthood and greater self-confidence in the new country they are willing to reassert their cultural roots and make all things Russian a legitimate (and attractive) part of Israeli and especially Tel-Aviv identity. Designing hybrid scripts for celebrating high Jewish holidays with Russian immigrants is one example of self-assertion. Redressing the historic balance in presenting the Russian-Soviet version of the “Holocaust versus Resistance” narrative is another. This process of cultural hybridization is not always seamless and smooth and has a potential for conflicts over the club’s agenda and modus operandi. The controversy and polemics voiced by some participants, even if relatively mild, around the Memouna celebration and other Jewish holidays at Fishka, show the diversity of its membership. The key issue at stake is the proportion between the Russian, Soviet, Jewish, and Israeli components of these public events and celebrations, which are often intertwined and not easily separable, as they are in the identity of these young immigrants.
The events described in this article are holidays and commemorative rites that convey the collective memory of Jewish, Russian-Soviet, and Israeli identity and represent the new forms of a hybrid calendar. Cultural hybridization clearly occurs as relatively new Russian immigrants in Israel try to negotiate the competing demands of staying connected to their culture of origin and embracing their new environment. These new holidays enable young immigrants to keep simultaneous connections to Judaism and Russian-Soviet culture and to become locally based Israelis. In this sense, holidays and commemorative rites become chief anchors of their collective memory, playing a decisive role in the context of resettlement and integration.
These experiments with cultural forms also reflect an ongoing search of contact and understanding with other large communities inhabiting Tel-Aviv’s urban spectrum – veteran Israelis of Middle Eastern origin and labor migrants and refugees from Asia and Africa who live side by side in South Tel-Aviv. Judging by their recent public activities, most Fishka leaders share democratic and human rights agenda and try to build social bridges to other Tel-Aviv residents, especially those living on the margins, in the pooper part of town where the club is located. The Women’s Day march and Memouna open-door party merging Russian and Mizrahi tastes are two examples of this trend to build new cross-cultural coalitions. Thus, most events sponsored by Fishka have two components: one inbound (targeting fellow Russian immigrants of different ages) and the other outbound (reaching out to Israeli natives and other migrants).
Fishka participants are experiencing rapid bourgeoisification and integration into the consumer society, manifesting orientation towards the country’s Ashkenazi elite and fashionable groups of Tel-Aviv cityscape. As homecomers (Lomsky-Feder and Rapoport 2008), they aspire to belong to the Jewish majority in the urban space. This aspiration, in a sense, neutralizes their subversive voice and reduces their capacity to undermine the constitutive national values. In this sense, the public events organized by Fishka are welcomed as performances of belonging to the host society and are not considered a public threat (e.g., compared to recent demonstrations of African and Asian labor migrants). Proof of that is the patronage of Tel-Aviv municipality given to most of their public events (Parshizky and Remennick, 2016). The cultural and festival character of these events has the potential of attracting diverse street crowds; it rather neatly aligns with the new urban lifestyle of Israel’s educated middle class.
By performing public manifestations of their belonging and claiming their place on the urban diversity scale, Russian Israeli 1.5-ers emerge as creative agents of their identity. While Fishka’s public events involve certain separation between the performers and other immigrants as audience (more so vis-à-vis native Israeli spectators), their aspiration is to embrace the spectators and create some level of performative interface. The immigrant performers address the audience as a community and not as a number of individual strangers. The goal of these events is both education and fun (edutainment), while temporally erasing boundaries between the performers and the audience. The resulting events are in fact new genres of collective celebration, enacted both within the Russian immigrant community and outside it, including Israeli natives and other urbanites. These spontaneous public encounters foster mutual cultural curiosity and may eventually foster greater trust. They create a unique hybrid between the Russian customs and holidays, Jewish traditions, and modern Israeli realities and civil rituals, using a range of performative, theatrical, musical, and artistic means. Together, they redraw the established social boundaries and declare a new calendar of urban events initiated by Russian-Jewish immigrants in Tel-Aviv—now as hosts rather than guests in this young and fashionable city.
One of the central characteristics of Fishka is its apolitical agenda and the focus on the cultural and creative domain, including the meaningful organization of leisure for its patrons. Fishka’s leaders try to avoid clear political identification with either the Right or the Left and to not take sides in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Public celebrations of Russian, Jewish, and Israeli holidays were aimed at intercultural education and high-quality entertainment for its members rather than expressing any political agendas. Avoidance of clear political identification can be explained by the wish of organization’s leaders not to lose potential members. The only project that could be construed as a political or protest-driven action during our observation period was the project of “city square weddings” directly connected to the very current problem of marriage rights for non-Jewish Russian immigrants in Israel (Prashizky and Remennick, 2016). However, during the last years of Fishka’s activity, and especially after its suspension in 2014, several other grassroots associations of young Russian Israelis that emerged in its wake (e.g., the online platform “Generation 1.5”) took its cultural agenda further, touching upon interethnic conflicts, discrimination of Russian speakers in Israel, and other issues that extend to the domain of the social and political rights.
We believe that this research contributes to current theoretical debates on the intersections between memory and migration (Creet and Kitzmann 2011; Glynn and Kleist 2012). Collective memories, expressed in the form of holidays organized and celebrated by the young migrants, are invoked to negotiate their belonging in the mosaic and immigrant-based Israeli society. On the one hand, the imported memory ensures continuity of the immigrants’ social identity and family legacies (e.g., by challenging the balance between Jewish victimization and resistance during WWII), and on the other, the newly adopted memory of their resettlement enables their feelings of belonging. The new hybrid calendar adopted by these immigrants incorporates the Victory Day on May 9 in the series of Israeli memorial days; it thus emerges as an anchor of belonging and a symbolic home for these Russian Israelis. We hope that our findings will stimulate future research on the place and meaning of holidays and collective memory in the context of immigration. After Fishka, several new organizations of young Russian Israelis emerged that, among other issues, discuss Russian and Soviet holidays, for example, the Gregorian New Year on December 31 (as opposed to the Jewish one in September). Our follow-up study will focus on the salience of holidays as markers of immigrants’ identity, collective memory, their old and new belongings.
More generally, this study adds empirical reinforcements to the importance of the cultural sphere in the period of dramatic transformations spearheaded by economic and humanitarian migrations around the world (Martiniello 2014).
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to the founders and leaders of Fishka (particularly to Helen Buchumensky, Rita Brudnik, and Nadia Greenberg) for their welcome and support of our field work. We appreciate the time and cooperation of our informants, who frankly shared with us their immigration stories and experiences at Fishka. The responsibility for the interpretation of these narratives rests with the authors alone.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Sociological Institute for Community Studies at Bar-Ilan University.