A WEEKLY LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF |
A WEEKLY LETTER FROM OUR EDITOR IN CHIEF |
She first spotted him on Tu B’shvat, the Jewish holiday for the trees, back in 2011. It was across a crowded Hillel event at Tbilisi's Great Synagogue, and she was taken by his appearance, which she described as “very rare, like from movies about Ashkenazi Jews and Jewish history.” He first noticed her two months later at Hillel’s Purim celebration, when she was cast as the villain in a spiel. “She had these huge earrings to make Haman ears,” he recalled. “I was like ‘what the hell, why is the most beautiful girl in the group playing Haman?’” They became friends, hanging out at Hillel on Friday nights. It was not until early 2013, when she was in Israel for four months on the Masa service and study program, that they understood it was more. She brought him back hummus. He asked her to a movie, then to be his girlfriend. He became executive director of Hillel of Georgia — the country, not the state — then she did. They married and had two kids, who they brought to those same Hillel Shabbat dinners where they fell in love. While Hillel is best known in the U.S. for its work on college campuses, internationally it also serves young adults. In Georgia, a former Soviet Republic where the Jewish community that once counted 100,000 people is down to about 3,000, Hillel has about 400 members these days across the country, 29 of them very active. The couple, Misha Grishashvili and Keti Chikviladze, are still very much together. But this summer they broke up with their beloved Hillel, because of pressure from Tbilisi’s Orthodox establishment over their participation in a nascent movement to bring egalitarian, liberal Judaism to their traditional, conservative country. Theirs is a sweet Jewish love story marred by unnecessary Jewish infighting, gossip and threats. |
Misha proposed to Keti on her birthday, Aug. 30, 2015, in Borjomi, a nature reserve in central Georgia. (Courtesy) |
Misha and Keti, both 33, were two of the nine young adults whose historic b’nai mitzvah at Tbilisi’s nascent Peace Synagogue I attended this spring. Keti was one of the first women in Georgia’s 2,600-year Jewish history to read from the Torah. That, and the fact that the Peace Synagogue is part of a complex that includes a church and a mosque, sparked the ire of Georgia’s Orthodox rabbis. Critics accused the b’nai mitzvah of heresy on social media, made veiled threats against their security at a government meeting and sent KGB-style videos tracking their movements to their phones. Keti, as an employee of Hillel International, bore the brunt of it. At a conference of Hillel directors from the region in July, she said, her boss told her she’d have to find a way to make peace with even the most unreasonable among the Orthodox leadership or find a new job. After some soul-searching, she — and her three part-time employees, all of whom were also part of the b’nai mitzvah — decided to quit. “I’m so tired of this stupid war,” she told me. “Hillel is my family, my friends, Hillel is in my bones. I tried not to cry, but it was really hard.” When I called Osik Akselrud, Hillel’s regional director overseeing Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Moldova and Georgia, he was dealing with the fallout from Russian rockets having hit a Hillel facility in Odesa. Which is to say: The internal dramas of Tbilisi’s Jews is not his top priority. Akselrud had nothing but compliments for Keti and her leadership of Hillel since 2014, but said the organization simply could not abide alienating other elements of Georgia’s Jewish community. “The whole community doesn’t want to communicate with them, that’s the problem,” he said. “Hillel is a pluralistic organization. For me it’s not a problem what synagogue our students attend. I don’t care, it’s up to them, but they have to live inside the community. “The head of organization must be a little bit politician,” he added. “My concern is that she can’t do this. I have to protect Hillel, it’s my task.” Though Akselrud said he had discussed the situation with Hillel’s top leadership in Washington, a spokesperson for the organization declined to answer basic questions about the situation, including Hillel’s position on the Peace Synagogue, the b’nai mitzvah, the Orthodox backlash and Keti’s resignation. Meanwhile, Keti, Misha and their friends — the core of Hillel in Tbilisi for more than a decade — have created a new organization, which they’re calling the Center for Progressive Judaism. “When God closes one door, it opens a window or something like this,” Misha said, invoking a concept rooted in the Book of Isaiah and popularized in The Sound of Music. “It’s opening this huge gate to another dimension, where Keti and all the staff of Hillel, and all the b’nai mitzvot, this is the moment we will go after our dreams.” |
“Hillel is my family, my friends. Hillel is in my bones. I tried not to cry, but it was really hard.” |
– Keti Chikviladze, director of Hillel in Tbilisi 2014-2023 |
Keti has spent the last month closing out her work at Hillel — her last day is Aug. 31 — and applying for grants to support the new organization. Its first event will be Sept. 10, joining an international “reverse tashlich” event cleaning beaches organized by the Israeli environmental group Tikkun Hayam, Hebrew for “Repair the Sea.” She said they have a tentative commitment from the Schusterman Foundation’s ROI Community, which gives money to support Jewish and Israeli “changemakers;” have applied to the National Center to Encourage Judaism; and are looking for other potential sources. The couple is planning a trip to the New York area in October to raise money and visit synagogues and other Jewish institutions that could be models or partners. One of the things to work out is the new group’s relationship with the Peace Synagogue, which also lacks funding — as well as a full-time rabbi or a clear constituency. Misha, who works as an engineer at a petroleum company, plans to lead services there on Rosh Hashanah. He told me about an email that recently came into the Peace Synagogue account from a woman named Micaela Cohen, who grew up in Thailand, is a British citizen, and moved to Tbilisi last year. Misha said she had discovered that her great-grandfather was a Jew from Poland, and asked about converting to Judaism through the Peace Synagogue. “She said it’s just something I feel like is mine,” Misha recalled of their conversation. “I took her to the Peace Synagogue, and explained we’re at the moment without a rabbi. So we are working with her. We already are reaching people from different parts of the world.” The battle with the Orthodox establishment continues on social media, but Misha and Keti now feel freer to fight back — and have been gratified to find support in the comments. Keti got her last Hillel paycheck this week; the organization has not yet announced her replacement. “We said goodbye to our students,” she told me. “We are very, very sad, some of them are crying and so on. We said, it’s OK, because we have new goals. They are waiting for us.” |
Keti’s last Kabbalat Shabbat as head of Hillel in Tbilisi, Georgia, earlier this summer. (Courtesy) |
Thanks to Talya Zax for editing this newsletter. Shabbat Shalom! Questions/feedback: rudoren@forward.com |
YOUR WEEKEND READS STORIES TO SAVOR OVER SHABBAT AND SUNDAY |
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Flowers for Shabbat. (Reuven Dattner) |
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WATCH: THAT NEW GOLDA BIOPIC |
Oscar-winning director Guy Nattiv talked with our Laura E. Adkins and Benyamin Cohen about why he cast Helen Mirren to play Golda Meir; his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who joined a cult; and the political turmoil roiling Israel over a plan to overhaul its judiciary. “This is the Yom Kippur War of democracy,” he said. “It makes me miss the leaders that I grew up on: Rabin, Shimon Peres, people with integrity.” |
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After receiving letter after letter about Jews seeking connections and community, our signature advice column decided to crowdsource some ideas for combatting loneliness. Among the winners: show up often, throw a potluck, try a book club, sing along and build-your-own. The High Holidays, advises our Beth Harpaz, are a good time to start. |
(Graphic by Beth Harpaz/Canva) |
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