1st Letter from Crimea

B”H

Chabad of the Crimea
Mironova 24
Simferopol, Crimea 95001 Ukraine
Tel/fax: 380–652–510–773

Nissan 30, 5755
April 30, 1995

Dear Everyone, a”mush (ad meah v’esrim shana – till 120 years)

I’m sorry; this is the only way I can manage to write to everyone. I hope everyone's well, had a great Pesach, has "recuperated," and still remembers us.

I'll begin at the beginning. When we headed out to JFK three weeks ago, we had just found out that the travel agent had neglected to arrange for our slightly excessive baggage. At the airport, the airline insisted that they would not let us take any extra baggage. I was quite apprehensive that our rented van might be returning to Crown Heights together with us, and the truck full of our luggage, the very same evening. We were traveling with seven of our boys, 51 medium (read "large") U-Haul boxes, one oversize suitcase, twelve pieces of carry-on baggage, and a stroller. This was the absolute minimum INTO WHICH I could pack our belongings for our move to Simferopol, the capitol of Crimea (Krym.) One box per person for clothing and personal effects, the entire Pesach works, cases of paper goods for the holiday, milchig, fleishig, and pareve kitchenware for after Pesach, and as much toilet paper and Pampers as I could stuff in. With two daughters having served as camp counselors in the FSU, we knew we had to be prepared! We were running late, but a quick stop at the Ohel was necessary to ask the Rebbe for a brocha, and a big miracle regarding the luggage.

Once at the airport, the porter started unloading our mountains of luggage. The people at the ticket desk were more than a little taken aback, to say the least. Itchie very nonchalantly handed them a letter, kindly provided by Lazer Avtzon, thanking the airline for any and all courtesies extended to us. They asked if this had been arranged ahead of time, since they had no prior knowledge of it. Itchie said he assumed it had been, he didn't know — "they'd" just given him the letter to present, and it was supposed to take care of all the overweight. I was off in a corner with the kids, all of us urgently saying Tehillim, and administering nose drops to clear stuffy noses, in the hopes that we would indeed soon board our plane. There was some running back and forth of supervisors, and passing out of "Good Cards," more Tehillim, and miracle of miracles, they only charged us for ten boxes, and no overweight, and believe me, there was plenty of that. (A week later, desperately short of money, we had someone wire funds into the account in New York, for our daughter Faigie to forward to us in Simferopol. It was a very hectic day for the banks, and it didn't get in until closing time. Faigie couldn't get out until the next morning to wire it to us. She worriedly asked, "What if another check comes in against it before I can get it out to you?" I told her I didn't think that could happen if she would be at the bank as soon as they opened. Sure enough, she called us, very upset, that a check had come in and the money was no longer available. But Boruch Hashem that check cleared, because it was the check for the airline, to cover the excess baggage! And Hashem saw to it that we got the money we needed from someone else, later in the day.)

We were cleared to leave just before the gate was due to lock, and we raced through the airport to catch the plane. After playing musical chairs with half the passengers on the plane so most of our family members could be seated in close proximity to one another, I may have dozed off, because I really don't remember too much about the flight. In Paris we headed straight for the next plane. On board, I worried aloud to Itchie, "What if the luggage isn't all transferred?" No sooner had I expressed this fear than there was an announcement over the airplane’s speaker system, apologizing for the unexpected delay, but if the passengers would look out the window to the left, they could see that the airline was making sure that everyone's luggage was being transferred to the plane. And sure enough, there was all of our baggage!

Next was the airport in Kiev. We scrambled to get all of our belongings before anyone else did. Counting and re-counting, we finally got it all together. The porter told us to go through ahead of him, and we understood that in exchange for his hefty tip, he was going to get the baggage cleared through customs quickly. After we waited for quite a long time without seeing our luggage appear, we finally sent someone back to check up on it. The porters were simply shmoozing and taking their own good time!

After about two hours we were finally "cozily" seated on our own private Intourist bus hired for the occasion. Filling up most of the bus were our 64 pieces of luggage, half a ton of matzah (literally,) and cases of oil, grape juice, and gefilte fish for another program. We squeezed into the front rows, dreams of a comfortable ride forgotten. We traveled from sometime that gray rainy afternoon until 7:00 the next morning. We were stopped no less than fifteen times by "militzia" and had to pay $60 in bribes ("fines".) While our first thought was that it’s not all that legal to travel here at night, we later understood that it was just our first experience with the unique system of lining ones pockets at the expense of others.

Entering the courtyard of the shul, we were met by Bubba and Liza -- our lovely upstairs neighbors, Reb Shimon -- the Rosh HaKahal, Rex -- Bubba's dog, Iza -- the cat who adopted the shul, and assorted others. I escaped into Bubba's dark, mildew-smelling apartment, with Shmuelie. I understood about half of her Yiddish, and felt totally lost in this place where nobody besides our family spoke English. By noon-ish we were unloaded, the Intourist bus had departed, and I finally got up the courage to check out our lodgings.

The first room you walk into is the kitchen, though it’s certainly not deserving of the name. It's about 4' by 4' with one small cabinet and two hotplates which alternately perch upon bricks on the counter, and hide in the cabinet below, depending on whether I am preparing a milchige or fleishige meal. Then is a hall with a teeny refrigerator, another cabinet, and a miniscule enamel sink with a defunct water heater hanging on the wall above it. Also located in this “spacious” hall is what passes for a bathroom. It's a boarded-off area just barely large enough to hold the toilet — your knees touch the door when sitting. We have "improved" it by adding a wire hanger toilet paper dispenser, and by getting the balabusta to add a lock to the door. Lining the corridor are boxes filled with the assorted green and flowered pots and kitchenware the bochurim had purchased. Further down the hall is a dresser for storage. Then is the living/dining/7 boys’ bedroom. Off it, another wide doorway leads to our bedroom, which features a shabby old sofa bed of sorts, otherwise known as a divan in these parts, a chair bed of the same vintage, and a freestanding closet. All around us stand our boxes of clothing. The 43 remaining boxes were packed into a building several yards away, connected to ours only by the heating duct, as the boiler is in that building. This is all situated in a concrete and mud courtyard shared by us, Bubba and Liza, Rex and Iza, the shul, and an empty apartment.

The following morning, Vitaly, our driver, took me shopping. The Central Market is sprawling outdoor affair, somewhat like a farmer's market in the states. In the center there's a raised, covered pavilion with rows of stone counters where people sell their wares. Others stand in the aisles between the counters, selling their produce from boxes and sacks on the floor. Radiating out from this are rows of tables and painted iron booths, trucks, and odd looking buildings. Here at the "rinok" I can buy eggs (sold loose, in tens), fruits, vegetables, and fish. Everything is sold by the kilo, and weighed either on a balance scale with weights, or from those old fashioned, hand-held laundry scales, like the one my mother had. I search through the produce for the "best" and take stuff I wouldn't dream of even looking at back home – if such poor produce even exists there. There are bendable carrots and wormy apples. These are last summer's crops that have wintered over in someone's root cellar. Lemons and oranges are from Turkey, across the Black Sea. No juice oranges. They've never heard of them. But beautiful burpless cukes that sell for a premium in America are cheaper here than the garden variety. We also bought our "broom" at the market. Brooms in this part of the world come without handles, probably contributing to the bent over elderly population. They're simply bunches of broom straw bound together with wire or raffia. Tradition has it that they must be dipped into salt water before using, to make them firm. We've experimented with binding ours to a stick, using electrical tape, as our American broom and mop were lost somewhere between New York and Paris.

Every block seems to have its own magazeen, or Mom-and-Pop type grocery store, which sells a dozen or two products, ranging from coarse dirty sugar and thick gray macaroni to fifty-cent vodka that Sholom Ber says tastes like wood. There are also kiosks all over the place. I haven't been to them yet, but they sell all sorts of things. The boys come home daily with awful-tasting Coke and Pepsi from Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Hungary, which they've purchased. The ritziest stores (and they definitely are not) are Solo of Australia and Bradlees of London. Mendy and Sholom Ber ride their bikes to the bakery every morning to turn on the oven and get our bread. (Seven delicious loaves for a dollar — 152,000 coupons!) Challahs are costing us about 30 cents each, and they use my recipe.

Friday (of course,) brought the discovery that, by the rule of inverse need, whenever you need the water the most is when it goes off. I didn't time it that day, but the next time it went off was Erev Pesach — for about four hours!

We asked everyone about finding a better apartment to rent, and also tried the agency, but were unsuccessful. So Itchie had the idea to rent the apartment next door. He had to be elsewhere, so off I went with Bubba to see the owner. They were speaking Russian of course, and I kept hearing the word "crisa" along with a lot of "tsk, tsk-ing". I thought they were talking about someone who got involved with a "Yushka" cult. Finally, when they finished speaking, I gave the woman the “dengi” (money) and she gave me the "klyootsh" (key). We went to explore the apartment. First the kitchen, 4' by 5' or 6', containing a decrepit two-burner stove with a broken glass window in the oven, and one cabinet. Another quaint feature of this apartment was its ceiling which had fallen to the floor. Off the kitchen was some kind of a decaying bathroom, with part of the wall still extant, with a coal furnace and coal all over the floor. Next was a small bedroom, jam-packed with ancient furniture and possessions, and a "very nice" refrigerator (almost but not quite the size of the tiny one I had in Brooklyn when I first got married.) The remaining room was a very large living room with holes in the plywood floor. I was absolutely devastated. Here it was, less than a week to Pesach and I didn't even have an apartment to start to clean! Itchie came home and saw the apartment and thought it had possibilities. But then came the clincher. "Crisa" doesn't mean "Chr..." as I'd thought; it means RATS!!! Forget it! Boruch Hashem, Itchie didn't want to deal with all of the possessions in the apartment at that late date, and boruch Hashem the woman gave us our dengi back, quite a rare occurrence in itself. We decided to remove all of the boxes from the storage room, and lo and behold, it became a kitchen of sorts. In the entrance was a locked cabinet which good neighbor Viktor jimmied open for us — my pantry. And across from it was another cabinet which he built a shelf above. And he rigged up electricity for us. The room itself had a sink sans plumbing which Victor fixed somewhat, several broken cabinets which Viktor fixed, and — just what every great kitchen needs — (drum roll) a bathtub! There is a tiny attached room which is impossible to enter. It holds an extremely leaky hot water tank, a non-functional toilet, sink, and a showerhead dangling from a hose. The floor is constantly covered with at least an inch of water, and the balabusta's efforts to have it fixed made it considerably worse. We outfitted the tub with an old hinged-down-the-middle door we found in the shul, and it became my pareve counter with easily accessible storage below. When we remove the door and stand it up it becomes a privacy screen for bathers. So this storage room became my fleishige kitchen, and I already had a place to prepare milchige in the house.

Meanwhile, the two bochurim who came to help for Pesach had arrived. I know this sounds terrible, but quite conveniently an elderly lady had just passed away, leaving her apartment available for them to use. A driver was coming to pick up one of the bochurim at 3:00 a.m., so they could be in Odessa early to pick up our meat for Pesach ($2 per kilo — plus $100 for pick-up, plus, plus, plus.) He went with Itchie looking for the address where the bochur was staying, but after an hour they came back, unsuccessful in their search. They tried the phone, but there was no answer. They went out again, this time with Sholom Ber in tow, and finally found the address, several blocks away from where it should have been. While they were in Odessa getting meat, we were out frantically searching for appliances to buy. This is not like in America where you can "let your fingers do the walking". Here your feet do the running from Univermag ("department store") to Univermag. These are really two story buildings with booths where people sell things — apparently whatever they can get their hands on to sell that day. We ran all over. We found a lovely refrigerator. "Can we get it now?" "No, this one doesn't work. Tomorrow I will have one that works." Next store... we see a good freezer, but the man who owns it isn't there. And another one, but "Sorry, we're closing, come back tomorrow." We put as much meat as we could into our tiny refrigerator, and protected the rest in a metal locker outside the building, which was designed to hold gas canisters. We prayed that the meat would stay cold. (People on the street were blaming the untimely cold weather on the Jews' Pascha. If our meat had anything to do with it, I guess they were close!) Finally the next day we found two freezers, a refrigerator, and an oven. The windows of the kitchen had to be removed to bring in the appliances, since the doorway was too narrow. Naturally, that's when the balabusta showed up, and did she ever freak out! She wants us out right after Pesach. But she finally calmed down and even gave us a rickety table to use. Well, the freezer didn't work, and the man had to take it back, so the meat was still outside. That night Rex somehow managed to pull a nice juicy roast out of the locker, and called all his friends to have a party. We heard them all howling with delight, and surmised that’s what had happened, but only found out with a certainty the next morning. The next afternoon the freezer was back, working, and it continued to work — until the last days of Pesach, when it quit on us altogether! A lot more meat went down the tubes. The oven only works when the burners are turned off. It only worked at all after Viktor and Marat fiddled with it for three days. At first it would only work for five minutes at a time. There is no gas connection in this house, and no electric stoves could be found, so we have to use a gas bahlown -- a canister of gas which is supposed to last a month, but just lasted for Pesach. Now we found out that we need a license to use it too!

Finally at 12:20 Erev Pesach we were set up and ready to start cooking at a frenzied pace — when the water went off! I quickly taught Itchie and Zushe, one of the bochurim, how to clean the fish outside. I was already a mayven, having done it myself the previous Friday for the first time. Shloima, the second bochur, and my kids peeled vegetables until the seder. At 5:00 people started coming – in droves! Now, mind you, mincha wasn't until 8:15, let alone maariv and the seder. They obviously don't know from Jewish Time here! We had just spread by word of mouth over the last three days the fact that there would be sedarim -- at 9:30. Last year there were 70 people, so we expected maybe a hundred. Soon there were a bunch of people in the courtyard who had washed up and were all hastily peeling chrain! Itchie and Sholom Ber, handkerchiefs over their noses, started grating and crying. It was almost Yom Tov when we discovered that the blech hadn't come together with the other Pesach paraphernalia. Yasha, our “butcher,” who had come to hack up our chunks of meat earlier in the day, raced home for a big, shapeless piece of unused tin, which we bent roughly to stovetop size, and boruch Hashem it worked. I lit candles in the kitchen and kept on with the preparations for the seder. And people kept on arriving — over 200 of them! I didn't make it to the seder until the very end. Sholom Ber and I held our own seder afterwards. Oh, by the way, neither Romaine lettuce nor anything resembling it is available here (among many other things) so we had to use pure fresh chrain both times. We found out that if you can manage to swallow it without chewing it or gagging on it, it's not that awful!

The rest of Pesach was also very successful, and boruch Hashem we made a nice lebedik Moshiach's Seudah for about 100 people. The people who had come to run the YUSSR programs were shocked — I mean with their mouths literally hanging open. "You have the four coolest kids in town here! We always thought you have to dress the way we do to look ‘cool’ to attract people." They found it hard to believe that these same kids have been coming here for the past year, some on a daily basis, to actually do things like putting on tefillin! I invited these teens to come back for Shabbos. They said, "OK, for the daytime, but Friday night's just too late."

Before Pesach I sent our laundry to a company to get done, but I got it back all wet and terribly wrinkled (all except the things that didn't come back, of course.) So I set aside these wrinkled things to get ironed. Then I tried to hire the "nice lady" who cleans the shul to do the laundry. She kept putting it off because of the holidays and the weather. When she finally got around to it, she tried to take the "rich Americans" for a ride with the price, telling me that 1 load would cost $25! So there I was, a few hours before Shabbos, washing our clothing in the bathtub, which luckily (at least for this purpose) is almost at waist level. I told Sholom Ber to bring me the pile of badly wrinkled clothing, and if there was more room on Bubba's clotheslines, which there wasn't, I'd do those also. Having no other alternative, and with Shabbos fast approaching, we put them aside in a garbage bag. "Make sure nobody thinks this is garbage, and throws it out by mistake!" I said. Then I took a nice icy bath for Shabbos. Sometimes the water heater works, and sometimes it doesn't. And this time it didn’t. Then, right at licht tzinden, who shows up but the 15 teenagers who said they couldn’t come. So we ran to light candles with the girls, davened, made kiddush, washed, ate, sang, and forgot about anything else. Shabbos I came down with one whopper of a cold. After lunch I went to bed and stayed there. After Shabbos the boys and Itchie cleaned up. They were great. Sunday morning I still couldn't get up, but finally forced myself, because Bubba was taking us to see her 92 year old uncle's house which is for sale. On the "main" streets here, the houses and hovels and buildings all seem to share one common outer wall, facing towards the street. They are built around courtyards which are entered through big old creaky iron doors. Then there are the little streets that look like alleys, except there are more ruts than road. The roads are like that altogether here and the drivers speed like maniacs around the potholes. We went down such an alley today to see Mironova 24. It's the best house we've seen, which definitely isn’t saying too much. It has a private walled yard with no windows facing the street, and the wall could possibly be extended about six feet closer to the street. There are 15 fruit and nut trees — actually the entire small yard is a garden; it even has some raised beds. There is a garage of sorts, and an outhouse/out-shower combo: the rainwater collects on the roof, is warmed by the sun, and voila! An instant shower! A second small building with three tiny rooms and a three-walled pierced tin structure with a table and benches (possible Tzivos Hashem clubhouse?) complete the picture. Then of course, the house itself: the “kitchen” consists of two 4' by 4' roomlets and a 4' by 6' room. At the far end are sliding doors. I thought “great – finally a house with a pantry!” But, lo and behold, when I opened the door it turned out to be the "bathroom" — a toilet and a showerhead on a hose (without any separate enclosure.) Then two tiny bedrooms off a miniscule hall, and a living–dining room. If we can break down walls, and build up and out, we will have a halfway normal house. Cost — $15,000. Renovations — $20,000 (+?)

Anyway, we came home, and I saw the boys still hadn't done everything to clean up before they could go to the park, as they wanted. I instructed each of the older boys to throw out one of the bags of garbage, “and don't forget to bring back the bags.” This is really crazy, but when we throw our garbage in the dumpster down the block, the neighbors go out and retrieve the bags, jars, etc., to wash and re-use. And while they're doing that, our garbage ends up on the street. And our American garbage is easily identifiable, so we have to clean up their mess. So even if we're not saving the bags, we have to dump out the garbage and then throw the bags in after. However, since we're learning to be "good Crimeans," we do save the bags. Bags are valuable. Nobody goes anywhere without one! And you ought to see the clotheslines here. Nice clean, freshly-washed bags from Golden Fluff popcorn, Pathmark, and Kosher Plaza adorn them. I kid you not!

Well, the kids finished cleaning up, went to the park, ate, davened, counted sefira, said Shema, and went to bed. Then I went to pack for Itchie, who is going to America today. (It's morning already now.) I picked up a wrinkled shirt, and asked, "Where's the ironing pile?" And then it all came together. In my fog of not feeling well earlier in the day, I'd told the boys to take out the garbage — only one of the bags wasn't garbage — it was the ironing that I'd put on the side before Shabbos! We lit a candle (there aren't streetlights on most blocks) and went out to see if the new shirts could possibly still be there – which, of course, they weren't. Itchie started laughing, saying, "Now we truly look like real Crimeans, going out to look in the garbage!"

And I have to think of the Michoel Streicher song that has pretty much become our theme song here: "...When things aren't moving the way you've planned, don't give up, you've got to laugh it up, you've got to put your trust in Hashem!"

Be well. Do keep in touch. Maybe we'll even be properly connected to the internet soon — but that's another story! Hope IY"H we'll see you all in Yerushalayim a lot sooner!

Love,

Leah Lipszyc & Company