Judy Lash Balint
www.kumah.org
05 September '11
http://www.kumah.org/2011/09/the-circles-of-jewish-life-how-a-brit-milah-closed-circles/
Earlier this evening, the brit milah of Yishai and Malkah Fleisher’s second child, Elazer Menachem, took place in their apartment in Maale HaZeitim, overlooking the Temple Mount. The brief ceremony that initiated the baby into the covenant of Abraham closed circles for several of the people who crammed into the Fleisher’s home to celebrate the occasion.
Yishai was born in Israel to a family who had managed to escape Leningrad in the 1970s, a few short years before his birth. The Fleishers, like many Russian Jews, were intellectuals whose Jewish identity had been rekindled by the Six-Day War. I met many families like the Fleishers when I traveled to the former Soviet Union in 1974, 1986 and 1989.
The Fleishers were amongst the fortunate ones who arbitrarily received visas for Israel after losing jobs and waiting for years to get out. Following several years of economic struggle in Israel, the family made the difficult decision to leave for the US, where Yishai and his brother and sister grew up.
Yishai is fluent in Russian, Hebrew and English, as is his mother, who in Hebrew addressed those who came to celebrate the brit, as she held her tiny new-born sabra grandson in her arms. In a voice filled with emotion, she marveled at the fact that after all her family’s wanderings, she was holding the second generation of sabras in her family. “At this special moment, we can’t forget all those whom we left behind in the forests of Ukraine; in the fields around Leningrad and in the trenches of Russia,” she said. “My grandson will never know such wanderings–he’s at home here in Jerusalem,” she whispered.
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