Strudel, Amber, and Pikuach Nefesh

Odesa native Uriel Shtern preserves recipes and Jewish memory, transforms Ukrainian amber into Judaica, and helps women reach a doctor in places where war has made an ordinary medical exam nearly inaccessible. At first glance, these seem like separate lives. In fact, they are one form of responsibility for another person.

I should admit at the beginning what journalists usually admit in the final paragraph, if they admit it at all: Uriel Shtern is my friend. He is also an Odesan, as I am. So I will not pretend to be disinterested. Friendship, however, is no exemption from accuracy. This is an attempt to understand someone I have known for a long time, but whose life still refuses to fit inside a simple definition.

We met about twenty years ago at Rabbi Zalman Liberov’s synagogue, when my brother Dmitriy was just beginning his professional boxing career. Many faces, conversations, and events remain from that period, but Uriel stood out for a quality that is difficult to perform for an audience: the willingness not only to listen to another person’s concern, but to take that concern on as his own.

In Jewish tradition, compassion does not end with a kind feeling. Rachamim must acquire hands. It must become gemilut chasadim: concrete acts of loving-kindness. That, I believe, is what connects everything Uriel Shtern does.

Search for Uriel online and you may conclude that you have found three different people.

The first is a cook and television host. In Kyiv, Shtern hosted a program about kosher cooking on Ukrainian national television. Stars of Ukrainian show business came to his kitchen, and Jewish tradition entered viewers’ homes not as a museum exhibit but as a living culture: through conversation, humor, the aroma of baking, and food that could be made in one’s own kitchen.

A special place in that work belongs to his book Myths and Legends of Odessa Cuisine. The title already carries the right Odessa intonation: a recipe never exists apart from a story, and a story never exists apart from a little embellishment. In Shtern’s hands, Odessa cuisine is not a list of dishes but a biography of the city, composed of Jewish, Ukrainian, Moldovan, Greek, and other voices. Forshmak, strudel, and stuffed fish matter not only for their taste. Behind every dish stand a family, a street, a market, an argument over the one true recipe, and the memory of people no longer at the table.

That work later continued online: kosher baking, video lessons, Viennese apple strudel, Jerusalem bourekas with brined cheese and roasted eggplant, fisinjan, and the foods of old Odessa. Over the years, Shtern built a large audience. In Ukraine, he became known not only as a member of the Jewish community but as a recognizable public figure who could speak about Jewish life openly, clearly, and without turning it into folklore.

For him, however, this was never merely a cultural project. Uriel is an observant Jew, a baal teshuva, and a Chabad Hasid. Baal teshuva literally means one who has returned: a person who has........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)