Growing up in the Soviet Union, I never needed a rabbi to tell me I was Jewish. The state took care of that. It was stamped in your passport, whispered by neighbors, broadcast in the way certain doors closed when you approached them. Jewish identity wasn’t a choice or a lifestyle or a set of High Holiday habits. It was a fact of your existence — reinforced daily by a system that wanted you to feel it as a weight.

That weight was not abstract. It followed you into school, where certain paths closed before you reached them. It followed you into the workplace, where certain promotions went to others without explanation. It followed you into conversations that fell silent when you entered the room. The Soviet state did not need to say the word “Jew” out loud. It had subtler instruments. And those instruments worked precisely because they were constant — a pressure so steady you eventually stopped noticing it, the way you stop noticing the cold when you’ve been outside long enough.

I thought about that weight recently, standing in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum at a gala celebrating 25 years of Chabad of Chestnut Hill. I thought about how strange and magnificent it was — Jews gathered openly, proudly, without apology, in one of America’s most storied civic spaces, at a moment when Jewish identity across universities, media, and even parts of the Jewish world itself is once again under pressure.

The venue was not incidental. Kennedy’s words still inhabit that building: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Rabbi Mendy Uminer and his wife Grunie have spent 25 years answering that question — not for America alone, but for the Jewish people.

What they built at Chabad of Chestnut Hill was not inherited. There was no founding endowment, no established congregation handed down from a predecessor. There was a couple, a mission, and the stubborn belief that Jewish belonging could be offered without conditions. Over a quarter century they built something rare: a community that holds space for the fully observant and the barely affiliated alike — for Jews who light Shabbat candles every week and for Jews who walk through the door for the first time in years and aren’t sure why they came. That open door is not a small theological gesture. In a moment when Jewish communal life is contracting in many places — when institutions are merging, congregations shrinking, young Jews drifting — building a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)