Address by ECAJ co-CEO Alex Ryvchin to the “We Sing as One” event in Sydney on 5 November.
My family were part of faceless, nameless mass of people living behind an iron curtain. We arrived in Australia as refugees in the late 1980s. And through the year, I often used to wonder, were we worth it?
This community prayed for us. Raised money for us. You held candlelight vigils for us as we now do for the hostages. Set an extra place for us at your seders. Protested outside the Soviet consulate and chanted “let my people go.” Were we deserving of all that?
For hundreds upon hundreds of years we lived in those strange and darkened lands. We lived through Chmelnitsky. We lived through the Tsars and the Bolshevik Revolution, the civil war which split reds and whites, Ukrainian nationalists and internationalist revolutionaries, all opposed on everything but totally united in their willingness to dispose of Jewish life.
We survived the Einsatzgruppen and perilous evacuations that spared us from the forest pits and ravines. We survived Stalinism and the Great Terror, the Doctors Plot and the Night of Murdered Poets, the denunciation of Rootless Cosmopolitans and reactionary Zionists.
And then, it happened, like the fall of Rome, slowly and yet all at once, the gates were opened, and we were free.
We said goodbyes to family graves that we knew would fall into decay and ruin without us. We parted with relatives we would never see again. Sold possessions to speculators for kopeks and got the hell out of there.
Our journey took us to Vienna, then by train to Rome, then to a place called Ladispoli where thousands of Soviet Jewish families waited for nearly a year to learn who would take us. We were all set for Toronto but changed course for Sydney at the last minute on a whim.
When we arrived here on 10 January 1988, we literally owned nothing but the clothes on our backs and the ridiculous assortment of household goods we crammed into our canvas suitcases. Ceramic tubs with pictures of little cartoon hedgehogs, a tape measure in communist red with “Kiev” embossed on the face in gold letters, which I still have.
The Ryvchin family on the day they arrived in Sydney in 1988
My dad, who had worked as a physics and maths teacher now held a mop at Emanuel Synagogue. My mother who taught English slung pies at Dinky Di. My grandfather, a mechanical engineer, drove the Berger Centre bus as a volunteer, never spending the $5 a day lunch allowance he was given, instead bringing it home as wages. My grandmother, who had been a doctor, was now a nanny.
And when I look back at the photos from our early years in Australia, in the time before personal tragedy hit, my parents and grandparents always looked deliriously happy.
No one called us “Zhids” anymore.
And they knew that I would be able to go as far as my abilities and work ethic took me, not as far as Communist party decrees and entry quotas and sneering bureaucrats decided I could.
Still I pondered that question. Were we worth it? When we arrived, did we disappoint you? With our total cluelessness about chagim and synagogue services, with our Russian names, and our diet of herring and vinegared onions and on special occasions, salted lard on rye bread.
It took me a long time to definitively answer that question.
Of course we were worth it.
You saved us. Allowed us to excavate our Jewish identities which had been buried under layers of prohibitions and persecution. You gave us the freedom to rediscover what it meant to be a Jew beyond simply being hated and to emerge like new people.
And we were worth it not only because you saved us, but in some way, we saved you. As we have seen this past year, the Jewish people need a mission, we need a purpose, we need periodic reminding that the difference between my shul and your shul, my organisation and your organisation, they don’t matter. What matters is that the Jewish people endure, that every root that leads back to Abraham and Sarah, survives and sustains.
Today, the people of Israel are worth it. The remaining Jews of Ukraine are worth it.
I came from a place where above all else, they wanted us to believe we were worthless. That we should be ashamed to be Jews. That is how they planned to break us until we just ceased to be Jews. Killing us never worked because the survivors always cling to their Jewishness to honour the sacred dead. But through humiliation, the living willingly throw off their Jewishness and it is gone forever.
We clung on because we knew that somewhere our kinsmen were fighting for us. And so too will those who we assist today. With our help, they will hang on and live with pride and dignity knowing that they too are worthy of being saved.
