c. 1999 Religion News Service

SUKHUMI, Abkhazia – For Shalom Shuminov, a 72-year-old who endured the hardships of World War II and life as a Jew in the Soviet Union, the last 10 years in this sub-tropical republic on the Black Sea have been by far his hardest.

During Abkhazia’s 16-month war to break away from Georgia in 1993, a Grad missile landed on Shuminov’s two-story home here. Neither he nor his 67-year-old wife were injured, but half the house was destroyed. Then, early one morning this August, a fire gutted what remained of the house.

For a time, the Shuminovs lived outdoors, sleeping on two iron-framed beds set up in a neighbor’s yard. As the weather turned nippy in October, they moved into the nearby home left vacant by a relative. Within days thieves broke in and robbed the couple of all their valuables, said Shuminov, a former shopkeeper.

All the same, among the 200,000 to 300,000 residents of this impoverished, half-empty republic, Shuminov is in an enviable position. He is Jewish, thus, eligible at any time to emigrate to Israel under that country’s Law of Return. He’s not budging.”I have a principle. I don’t want to leave out of fear. I don’t want to be driven out,”said Shuminov, a round-faced, sprightly man.

An estimated 1,500 other members of Sukhumi’s 1,600-year-old Jewish community also opt to stay, for a variety of reasons. Some fear moving to an unknown land and having to learn an unfamiliar language. Many elderly Jews, despite receiving a monthly pension of just 10 rubles (38 cents), say they are too old to go.

The one thing that seems to unify all of Abkhazia’s Jews, however, is a feeling of having been forgotten and abandoned by world Jewry and the aid organizations that ease the hardships of Jews living elsewhere in the former Soviet Union.

Lev Haikin, 55, a journalist and regular at Sukhumi’s synagogue, said,”The Polish community gets sent aid and there are only 80 of them here. The Armenians get it. The Greeks get it. Only the Jews don’t. It is as if we didn’t even exist.” Rabbi Mikhail Biniashvili is similarly frustrated, partly because interest in the synagogue has fallen sharply since it stopped serving as a distribution point for aid. The last shipment of food packages arrived a year ago, the rabbi said. There hasn’t been a minyan _ the number of congregants required to have a service _ for Yom Kippur in at least two years, he added.

Although the temptation to leave is strong, the rabbi says he must stay.”God doesn’t let me close this,”Biniashvili said, waving his hand at the synagogue and several outbuildings on Karl Marx Street.”God would punish me.” When the conversation in the synagogue courtyard here turns to the lack of humanitarian aid heads shake slowly, the men mutter, and one name keeps popping up: Irena Levintas.”She shamed us all,”said Biniashvili, of the 25-year-old Sukhumi woman.”Now, no one gives aid to the Jews.” Biniashvili is convinced of the link between the dearth of aid and allegations that Levintas swindled and cheated Jews and gentiles alike in connection with her work as a liaison between local residents and Israeli consular officials.

Levintas, a forceful, tall woman with jet black hair, denies it. Instead, she insists that she is the only person taking the initiative necessary to help the tiny republic’s Jewish population. First as the Jewish Agency’s sole representative in Abkhazia and now as a self-described”volunteer,”Levintas is the point person for those who wish to emigrate.”I just help people,”she said in a telephone interview from her home in Sukhumi, emphasizing she is currently negotiating an aid shipment.”I’m bringing help in. It all depends on my personal contacts.” One man who had sustained personal contact with Levintas said he was duped out of nearly $1,000 for which he said she promised him Israeli citizenship. The man, an ethnic Abkhaz who fought in the 1992-1993 war, asked that his name not be published but gave a convincing account during a recent interview in his apartment here.

Alexander Goldberg, the Moscow-based director of a Christian group that facilitates aliyah (emigration) from the former Soviet Union, said he refuses to work with Levintas after she cheated his organization out of hundreds of dollars last spring. Goldberg declines to go into details but said,”When it comes to morals, she is not a good example. I’ll put it that way.” Levintas denies Goldberg’s allegations, saying,”This is the first time I’ve ever heard of this.” (BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Asked about accusations that Levintas helped non-Jews become paper Jews, Goldberg said he has no first-hand knowledge. He added, however, that Levintas processed the documents of two ethnic Armenian brothers who emigrated to Israel but whose mother was later proven to have a fake birth certificate listing her mother as a Jew. Goldberg got to know the brothers in 1998 on the ship used by his group, Operation Jabotinsky, to transport Jews from Russian ports to Israel.

On the advice of the Israeli consulate in Moscow, which handled the matter, Goldberg declined to give the names of the Armenian brothers or their parents and sister who were later denied aliyah. From Jerusalem, in response to a query, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Amira Dotan was unable to comment on the Armenian brothers’ case but did say that in Israel’s embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia, Levintas enjoyed a good reputation.

Dotan added that the problem of fake documents being used to claim Jewishness is”unfortunately something that is very common in the whole Caucasian area. We cannot say that there is a special problem in (the Abkhazian) community.” (END OPTIONAL TRIM)

In an initial interview, Levintas claimed to be the Jewish Agency’s representative in Abkhazia. In a second interview, after being told that Jewish Agency officials in Jerusalem disputed this, Levintas reversed herself, denying having ever said she was still employed by the Jewish Agency.

Hearing of Levintas’ initial claim and of the widespread perception among Abkhaz Jews that she is the Jewish Agency’s representative, Jewish Agency spokesman Ronnie Vinnikov in Jerusalem said,”We will be publicizing in as many local publications as possible that the Jewish Agency does not have an official representative and warning everyone that anyone who presents themself as a Jewish Agency worker is deceiving people.” For four years, Levintas was the local representative of the Jewish Agency in Abkhazia. More than most such Jewish Agency representatives around the former Soviet Union, Levintas’ position was especially powerful in Abkhazia, where locals fear traveling to Georgia and, until this autumn, men between the ages of 16 and 60 were forbidden from crossing into Russia, the republic’s only other border.

In the meantime, no one has been named to replace Levintas, Vinnikov said, and those Abkhazian Jews who want to make aliyah are expected to travel to Sochi, Russia, 150 kilometers from Sukhumi.

Half in jest, the journalist Haikin blames Abkhazia’s export of gentiles to Israel as the reason for the inconvenience and lack of aid.”There are so many fake Jews there from here that now, of course, it is a problem,”he said with a wry smile.”They must be saying to themselves, `Are there any real Jews there or not? If there aren’t any real Jews, then why should we send them aid?'”DEA END BROWN