From Kiev to Kiryat Hayovel

The day following the terrorist attack at the Dolphinarium in Tel Aviv, in which 21 young people perished, is one that is deeply etched in Michael Kovsan's memory.

Although he is observant, Kovsan, the spiritual leader of Kehilat Hayovel in Jerusalem's Kiryat Hayovel neighborhood, drove his car to Tel Aviv to help, deciding there would be few, if any, Russian speaking rabbis around to comfort the families.

'I decided it was a matter of pikuah nefesh,' says Kovsan, 50, referring to the principle in Jewish law that the saving of a life supersedes the Sabbath.

Kovsan, who heads the Kehilat Hayovel community, was one of eight rabbis ordained this week by the Conservative movement's Schechter Institute for Judaic Studies, the largest class of graduating rabbis the Israeli institute has had in its 15 years of existence. In addition to Kovsan, the first graduating rabbi from Ukraine, the class includes Yeffet Almo, its first immigrant from Ethiopia to become a Conservative rabbi. Last year the first Russian rabbi, Michael Rivkind, graduated.

Kovsan, who immigrated from Kiev 10 years ago, grew up in a totally secular home. He became a lecturer in literature at a teachers' institute there. When the liberating wind of glasnost blew through the former Soviet Union, he suddenly found all sorts of new vistas opening up before him. He could publish articles he had written years before. However, by that time he had become involved in Zionist and Jewish activity. When he first became interested it was illegal, then it became semi-legal, and finally permitted. He was no longer interested in his old life in Ukraine. So intense was his identification with Judaism, he says, that when he came on aliya it was not to the Land of Israel, but to Jerusalem.

'I knew I wanted to live in Jerusalem,' he says.

Kovsan says that this interest in Judaism came to him from the last member of his family who was religiously observant, his great-grandmother, who died at the age of 96. Until her death, he says, she would gather her contemporaries around her and teach them the little she knew about Judaism.

When she could still go to the synagogue, she would collect money for Jerusalem. Kovsan says with a smile that he is not sure if the money actually got to Jerusalem, but for him it was of symbolic importance. She was something of a family legend, he says.
He also speaks of an earlier relative, a rabbi who came to Kiev from Poland in the mid-19th century. If one believes in transmigration of souls, Kovsan muses, perhaps he himself is the reincarnation of this earlier rabbi.

When Kovsan did come to Jerusalem, he first attended a program for scholars in the humanities at the Shalom Hartman Institute, which he remembers with great warmth. He was very lucky, he says, to have been able to take part in the program. He then began working at the Jerusalem Institute, which is devoted to adult education in Judaism for immigrants. The institute is, in theory, independent, he says, but in fact it is very much connected with the Schechter Institute and the Conservative movement.

In the course of his work, he writes a commentary on the Torah portion of the week, and he has written a number of books in Russian on Jewish themes. His latest book, not yet published, is about Rabbi Akiva.

The movement, he says, is very much in accord with his own views. On the one hand, he says he has a very deep commitment to tradition and Halacha. On the other hand, he is a scholar and investigator and feels the need to question, to look for reasons and explanations. The combination, he says, is to be found neither in the various branches of Orthodoxy nor in Reform.
'It is not an easy path. It is much easier to say one only observes what one wants to observe. I can't do that,' he says, referring to Reform. On the other hand, he says, Orthodox friends of his seem to feel that there is no need for inquiry.

However, it is a path that fits in very well with his role as the spiritual leader of the community in Kiryat Hayovel for more than two years. The community has members from every conceivable part of the globe. It is small with 40 families, but there is a much larger public, a public which he says does not know how to pray. It is a community, he says, where he does not ask what mitzvot a person observes or does not observe.

'We say, 'come and learn,'' Kovsan says.

With such an approach, Kovsan says, his decision to drive to Tel Aviv on Shabbat and help the bereaved families after the Dolphinarium suicide bombing was the right one. Since he does not watch television or listen to the radio on Shabbat, he had been unaware of the June 1 attack, until someone told him about it at services the following morning. When he arrived in Tel Aviv, he went to the municipality and asked who needed help the most. They sent him to the worst case, the Nelimov family.

The family had consisted of the mother and infirm grandmother, two daughters and a son. Both girls, Yelena, 18, and Julia, 16, were killed in the attack. Now only the son, 14, is left.

'It was a family of five and now it is a family of three,' Kovsan says.

Their mother, Ella, had taken all sorts of jobs just to survive.The family lived in the Hatikva quarter of Tel Aviv, a neighborhood which Kovsan describes as a symbol of poverty in Israel.
The plight of the family, he says, is not just that of victims of terror. It also serves to show that people in Israel do not place enough importance on the social gap.

Kovsan notes that there are often discussions within and without the immigrant community as to whether they are really a part of Israeli society. At the funeral he told them that if they had not been until then part of Israeli society, they were now. If they had had any doubt that this land was holy, it was holy for them now.

Ella Nelimov had said that in the former Soviet Union they were not allowed to be Jews, while here in Israel, they did not have the time to be Jews. It was, he says, an expression of the dire poverty which had beset the family. Nelimov had not had the time to think about being Jewish.
'Israeli society should have seen to it that the mother would have the time,' Kovsan says.