A late September sun glints off of our rusty green Soviet Zhiguli car as we pull up to the Holodnaya Gora Penal Colony No. 18 on the outskirts of Kharkov, Ukraine. The first images we see are high walls of dusty white brick, looming guard towers, and long coils of barbed wires stretched along every possible flat surface. Chabad Rabbi Levi Raices makes a call, and a minute later we are handing our U.S. passports over to a prison official, who, looking more like a kid than a correctional officer, had shuffled out towards us from behind the prison’s wooden doors.
We are there to pay a pre-Rosh Hashanah visit to the medium security camp’s Jewish prisoners. No matter that it has been prearranged; we expect that we will be forced to wait. We wait because that’s what bureaucrats make you do, especially ones anywhere in the former Soviet Union. We also wait because the previous cooperative head of extracurricular activities has just been transferred to a better position in Kiev, and his acting replacement might have something to prove. So for now, we wait, leaning against our car.
Originally from New York, Raices has been visiting Kharkov’s Jewish prisoners since he arrived in Ukraine two decades ago, and by now is all too familiar with the ins and outs of the Ukrainian prison system. Forty-five minutes tick away, followed by another few phone calls to find out what’s going on. Then the youthful official shuffles back out, and hands us each a stamped registration paper before showing us in.
Inside, a woman behind a barred reception window takes the registration papers and our passports. After scrutinizing them, especially mine, which does not include Raices’ local residency papers, we’re finally waved in.
“Make sure you have the registration paper when you come out,” the woman warns me.
“She’s serious,” Raices, a usually jovial fellow, says to me in all seriousness. “You lose it and they might not let you out of here.”
A Direct Line of Contact
Rabbi Levi Raices first arrived as a rabbinical student in the Soviet Union in the early 1990s as the great monolith gasped for its last breaths of air. During the nearly 70 years of Communist rule in the Soviet Union, Chabad-Lubavitch had always kept a direct line of contact with Jews trapped behind the Iron Curtain, providing both material and spiritual support through various clandestine channels.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe—Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, himself born in Nikolayev, Ukraine, and whose father perished in Soviet-imposed internal exile in Kazakhstan—took a personal interest in the reports he received of Jewish activity in his former homeland.
Lishkas Ezras Achim was founded in the late 1960s to assist Soviet Jews and under its aegis, rabbinical students such as Raices, as well as young couples, were dispatched with Jewish books and supplies hidden in their luggage to be delivered into the USSR. With the onset of Perestroika in the mid-1980s, such trips became more commonplace as the burgeoning Jewish revival taking hold in the heart of the dying empire came out of the shadows.
Many of the rabbinical students who made those initial trips ended up becoming permanent Chabad emissaries in the newly independent countries of the former Soviet Union, with Raices joining their ranks shortly after he married his wife, Esther. “The first night of Chanukah 1993 we lit the menorah in New York, and the second night we lit it in Kharkov,” he recalls.
In Kharkov, they began working alongside Rabbi Moshe and Miriam Moskovitz, who had moved to Ukraine three years earlier.
Invigorated by the historical sense of mission that animated the world of post-Soviet Jewry in those days, Raices recalled the words of the Rebbe encouraging his emissaries to bring Judaism to Jews stuck in hospitals and behind bars, and so could not access it on their own. On his first Purim in Kharkov, Raices—along with Moskovitz and the head of the Jewish community Alexander Kaganovsky—traveled to Colony No. 18 (the very same place I visited with him) and read the Megillah for 10 Jewish prisoners.
Shortly thereafter, an official agreement was signed between the synagogue and the prison ministry in Kharkov region, giving the rabbis the right to visit Jewish prisoners. In the 20 years since then, Raices has visited the vast majority of Kharkov region’s prisons—ranging from pre-trial detention centers to a prison designated for inmates with contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis—some 15 in all.
Inmates—known as zeks in Russian slang (derived from the word zakliuchyonnyi, or incarcerated)—are officially identified by religion in their prison files. Because anti-Semitism, among other abuses, is rampant in the Ukrainian prison system (as it is in much of the former Soviet Union), few Jews volunteer that information for their files, often making it difficult to seek out the Jewish prisoners. Sometimes, however, requests for visits do come in to Kharkov’s synagogue office.
“I once got a request from a Jewish prisoner from Vinnitsya [western Ukraine], who had tuberculosis, to visit him,” recalls Raices. “He was in a special prison about an hour outside of the city, and he was in quarantine; I could only talk to him only through glass.”
The prisoner had among his belongings a Tanya, a central Chassidic text penned by Chabad’s founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi. The Tanya, a small but complex work, was gifted to the man by the Chabad emissary in Vinnitsya. “When I visited him, he told me he likes the book very much and asked that I get him the second volume. He ended up getting transferred back to Vinnitsya and now has a very strong relationship with the shliach (Chabad-Lubavitch emissary) there.”
Another time, Raices congratulated a prisoner on his bar mitzvah after helping him put on tefillin for what Raices thought was the first time. “This is my second time,” the prisoner replied to Raices in English. “The first time was on a mitzvah tank in Manhattan.”
“That happened on the 11th of Nissan, the Rebbe’s birthday,” remembers Raices. “It struck me then that the Rebbe will find a way to reach someone, even when he is locked up on the other side of the world.”
A Look From Inside
The day we visit the Jewish prisoners have not yet been gathered for us, so we are forced to wait again. In a smoke-filled office staffed by inmates, one of them searches through a computer system, guessing who is Jewish by last name. “How about him?” he asks, reading a suspicious last name. “He has to be Jewish; there’s no way he’s not Jewish.”
The difference between a camp and a prison is that in a camp, the inmates are forced to work, producing various products, while in a prison they are locked up and given nothing to do. Colony No. 18 produces heavy boots and shoes; samples are prominently displayed behind a glass case inside of the prison building.
The camp does not actually look as bad as I had expected, and the giant assembly hall where we eventually met the prisoners is a large, relatively well-maintained Soviet-era hall with wooden seats, and walls brightly painted with Ukrainian scenes of fields and Cossacks, some on horseback. In the front of the giant room, members of the prison orchestra are cleaning and polishing a trombone and a set of drums. Although I was somewhat impressed, I was later assured that the cells and food leave much to be desired.
There’s a roll call going on in the courtyard below the assembly room window, with lines of shaved men standing in ill-fitting black uniforms. The clothes a prisoner receives is standard issue, and if a prisoner wants even a basic level of comfort, he must rely on packages brought from home.
“A lot of times the people I visit don’t have any family at all, for whatever reason,” offers Raices, “so I have to bring them literally the basics: underwear, shoes, pants.”
Helping Those Who’ve Been Released
Over the years, Kharkov’s Jewish community has affected thousands of Jews, and whether it is a former student in the Ohr Avner Jewish Day School, a child in Gan Israel summer camp or a parent, it’s not unusual for Raices to recognize some of the Jews he ends up visiting.
Raices tells me the recent story of Shlomo (a pseudonym), a 25-year-old man who attended Kharkov’s Gan Israel summer camp years ago. Born in a broken home—not uncommon among Ukraine’s Jewish community—his father was never around, and his mother got sick and passed away when he was in his teens.
“He was a very nice boy, but he messed up at some point after his mother passed away,” explains Raices. “He got involved with the wrong people, drugs, theft, and he ended up here in No. 18.”
Raices began visiting Shlomo regularly, bringing him food and clothes, and encouraging his Jewish observance. On his end, Shlomo was a popular inmate, and was soon finding fellow Jews throughout his prison and gathering them together for Raices’ regular visits.
Often, the Jewish inmates Raices visits are released into the care of the Jewish community, which attempts to help them acclimate to life outside bars. Shlomo had been sentenced to three-and-a-half years but was released before the summer, having served for a bit more than two years. Raices helped him find a job and a place to eat, and today, Shlomo is studying in a Ukrainian yeshivah.
“Not everyone ends up like that, of course,” Raices says, “and we try to help everyone clean up their life and get a fresh start. But Shlomo’s is a special story.”
Over the phone, Shlomo tells me that when he was first imprisoned—he was jailed for a year in detention, even prior to his trial and sentencing—he felt that Raices would somehow find him. “When he first came, it was so wonderful to see him, you can’t imagine,” he relates.
Shlomo continues, telling me of his former life as a prisoner, and the drastic changes that have occurred since. “In prison, it’s the same people as outside of prison, but there everyone is trying to figure out how to be smarter than everyone else, how to gain the upper hand over you in some way. Most people are anti-Semites, too, so to survive you have to on the one hand be at their level, and on the other hand be bigger than them. You need character.”
![This separate lineup of inmates is for the "freshman," who just arrived and will take part in an orientation of sorts. (Photo: Dovid Margolin)](https://w2.chabad.org/media/images/854/pqDR8543798.jpg?_i=_n32DD4A5CE5B405756B86D11830CBE5B1 "This separate lineup of inmates is for the "freshman," who just arrived and will take part in an orientation of sorts. (Photo: Dovid Margolin)")
Shlomo quickly climbed the inmate hierarchy, getting himself a position as a worker, and then being elected by his fellow inmates to be their brigade foreman. Few suspected that this young leader of theirs was Jewish. “Reb Levi brought me tefillin for the first time, and my cell mates could not believe I was Jewish; they thought I was joking.”
They soon got used to it. Shlomo mentions that one day he didn’t feel like putting on tefillin, yet as sunset approached, one of his decidedly non-Jewish cellmates came over to him and whispered: “I think you need to go upstairs and put on tefillin.”
After Shlomo requested a Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, a summary of the entire Code of Jewish Law, he began to ritually wash his hands when he woke up in the morning. “It’s seemingly a small thing, but it had a large effect on me,” he says. “The guys around me were shocked. They were shocked that someone who was, I guess you could call it ‘with it,’ cared about his religion at all. These are people with no morals at all, but then some of them started calling their relatives and asking them to bring books on their religion.”
Now in yeshivah, Shlomo says he is starting his life anew, and hopes to one day marry and raise a Jewish family. “I know I’ve lost a lot of time, and I know that G‑d placed me in that position for a reason. If I want to have a Jewish wife and children, which is very important to me, I need to learn first how to lead a Jewish life.”
Shofar, Apples and Honey
With lineup over outside, two tired-looking inmates are finally led into the assembly hall. Raices knows them both from before, and he speaks to them about the month of upcoming Jewish holidays as I help put tefillin on one of the prisoners, a man named Kuperman. We hand them small packages of apples and honey, honey cake and some literature before Raices blows the shofar, its simple sound resounding through the great hall.
“I hope to visit you in a few weeks for Sukkot,” Raices tells them, “or, better yet, you come to synagogue if you’re released by then.”
Kuperman smirks, a sort of resigned smile appearing on his weary face. “I’m pretty sure I won’t be out by then,” he quips.
As we walk together down the stairs and towards the exit, Raices tells the men that he has just spoken to Shlomo, whom they know as Sasha, and that he is doing well. “That’s great to hear,” says a second prisoner, Ponamarov. “Send Sasha our regards next time you speak to him.”
We hand out some of the remaining holiday packets to the prison officials, who seem especially happy with the cake and the large Jewish calendar they find inside. At the front counter, I produce my registration paper and receive my passport back. Soon, we’re outside.
A few days later, Raices forwards me an email he received from the youthful, shuffling prison official who had guided us around the whole time:
Thank you for the packet. I apologize, but I couldn’t wait until the holiday and ate the honey cake already; it was delicious. Can you please send me the recipe?
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