c. 1999 Religion News Service
YEVPATORIA, Ukraine _ Galina Sultan Pendill, an interpreter from Washington D.C., is going to extraordinary lengths to get in touch with her roots. She purchased a $6,500 apartment in this dusty Crimean resort, her father’s hometown, and plans to spend a part of each summer here.
But then, Pendill has extraordinary roots to explore. She is one of the world’s estimated 2,000 Crimean Karaites, a people with their own language, customs and faith, and, who are seemingly bound for extinction.”I don’t think the Karaims will survive more than 100 years, maximum. Because most of them marry outside,”said Pendill, who, with her parents, emigrated to the United States in 1949 at the age of 13.”We are, of course, on the endangered species list of the U.N., of UNESCO.” Yevpatoria was once a world center of Karaite culture, boasting 4,500 Karaites at the turn of the century. Now there are an estimated 200, a number slowly declining as people emigrate to Israel, where religious Karaites are set apart by their rejection of the Talmudic-rabbinical tradition.
By some accounts the Karaites are the spiritual descendants of the biblical Sadducees, a priestly sect that flourished from the second century B.C. until the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. Other scholars consider the Karaites to be a Jewish sect founded by the ascetic Anan ben David in the 8th century. Finally, in Yevpatoria, the Karaite leaders say they have nothing to do with Jews or Judaism.
As a religion, there are an estimated 40,000 adherents to the Karaite faith, most of them in Israel.
This past weekend (Sept. 4-5) Yevpatoria marked a modest, decadelong renaissance in Karaite culture with a celebration centered around the re-opening of the kenesa _ prayer house _ 40 years after it was closed by Soviet authorities.
At a recent Saturday morning prayer service, about 30 mostly elderly people practiced their prayers in the Karaite language, which only a handful can speak. At one point, their religious leader, or hasan, a construction engineer who taught himself the rudiments of the Karaite faith, interrupted the liturgy to berate his congregation for their lifeless reading of prayers. Chastened, the congregants picked up the pace in the unfamiliar tongue.
Outside, the first batch of late summer tourists were arriving at the kenesa, eager to find out more about Karaites. In shorts and T-shirts, dozens come daily to photograph the exterior of the kenesa, tour the adjacent two-room Karaite museum, retire to the Karaite cafe and ask the same question people have been asking for centuries: Are the Crimean Karaites Jews?
The standard Karaite answer in Yevpatoria, at least, is an adamant,”No.” Galina Teryaki, 44, the hasan’s wife who works in the cafe that has helped fund the kenesa’s restoration, says the tourists can be annoying in their refusal to accept that Karaites are gentiles”They still insist, as though they know better than science, or the Karaites themselves,”said Galina, during a break from making Karaite meat pasties in the hot kitchen.”They are always trying to convince us of this.” Aside from the steady flow of tourists, there is a trickle of better-informed scholars and amateur ethnographers. On a recent Saturday alone, a self-described”image maker”from Moscow was waiting to find out more about the”national costumes of this dying people,”as he explained it.
A musicologist from St. Petersburg was in town for the weekend with transcriptions of more than 40 Karaite folk and religious songs that she wants local elderly Karaites to look over.
For the local Karaites, too, whose language was forbidden in Soviet times, a top priority is to document and preserve a history going back to at least the Middle Ages.”For the Karaites here, the most important task now is to leave a good monument, just as their ancestors did for them,”says Dr. Konstantin Saraf, 57, a softspoken, thoughtful Karaite who helps curate the museum.”We should not just slam the door behind us as we leave, but leave a monument.” Yevpatoria’s Karaite community leaders, museum workers, and even the waitresses in the Karaite cafe spoke candidly, if somewhat wearily, about the likely demise of their people. The one thing they didn’t want to talk about is the most significant reason: emigration to Israel.”Now there is what you might call a mass movement to Israel,”said Rashid Kaplanov, a historian and Karaite expert in Moscow, referring to the estimated 130 Crimean Karaites who have made aliyah since the breakup of the Soviet Union.”It is not a topic they are very prepared to discuss.” A discussion would lead to questions about why the Israeli government considers Karaites as Jews under the Law of Return if, as Crimean Karaites insist, they are not. Kaplanov said that in the Middle Ages Karaites considered themselves holier Jews than rabbinic Jews but with the rise in anti-Semitism in the Russian Empire, the Crimean Karaites sought to distance themselves.”Eventually they decided it would be better not to be Semitic at all,”said Kaplanov, referring to the Crimean Karaites’s contention they are descendants of a Turkic people. Later, in the late 19th century,”to be religiously a Jew and not just ethnically was also quite embarrassing so they started de-Judaizing their religion, not only their race.” During World War II in German-occupied Crimea, the ultimate authority on the subject was the Nazi government. In 1939, responding to a query from Karaite leaders, the Nazis ruled the Karaites were not Jews and they were accordingly spared the Holocaust. Closed by the Bolsheviks, Yevpatoria’s kenesa was allowed to reopen in 1942 under the Nazis. To this day in Yevpatoria, Karaite families brandish photocopied copies, of the Nazi document as evidence of their non-Jewishness.
Within Yevpatoria’s Karaite community there is a quiet minority who believe the culture and faith may yet live on in Israel. During a break from listening to her 85-year-old mother sing snatches of Karaite songs for the visiting St. Petersburg musicologist, Maria Cheltek, 50, said she and her two siblings were discreetly preparing to leave for Israel in the coming months.
Asked if she thought Karaite emigration and their likely assimilation into Israeli culture would hasten the end of her people, Cheltek, an unemployed engineer, said,”Maybe it is the beginning of the beginning. Maybe something will get started over there and they will bring it back over here.” For the hasan, Viktor Teryaki, a move to Israel, is nothing short of betrayal. Teryaki, whose wife is a Russian Orthodox non-Karaite, said the few families that have left Yevpatoria for Israel are not pure-blooded Karaites.”They are making an economic choice,”said Teryaki, 44.”They are simply choosing a full trough over the monuments of their ancestors.” DEA END BROWN
