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March 23, 2007
The wandering storyteller
Epstein travelled the world in the service of Jewish tradition.
LEVI BARNETT
Seymour Epstein is not a spy. He doesn't let the fact slow him
down, though. During the 1980s and '90s, his job took him overseas,
avoiding armed revolution in the Baltics, using "Texas"
as a code word for Israel in telexes and living in a country where
the newspapers labelled his employer a front for the CIA and Mossad.
Epstein spoke to a small audience at the Vancouver Jewish Community
Centre March 11 on behalf of the Florence Melton Adult Mini School,
with whom he now works. In a lecture titled From Couscous to Kasha,
he recounted his experiences as an agent of the American Jewish
Joint Distribution Committee, also known as "the Joint."
Formed in 1914 by Jewish-German bankers in New York, the Joint helps
Jewish communities around the world that have fallen on hard times.
Today, this means organizing social programs and supplies for elderly
pensioners, sending books and ritual items to Jews worldwide who
need them and helping non-Jews stricken by war or crisis back to
their feet.
A young man fluent in Hebrew but speaking hardly a word of Arabic,
Epstein began his career at the organization with a posting to Morocco
in 1981, staying until 1983. For him, Morocco was "a kind of
Jewish rainforest," whose traditions were lost to much of the
greater Jewish world, yet filled with wonderful secrets.
In one of the many stories he told, Epstein recounted a visit to
rural Jews who lived in caves in the Atlas Mountains in northwest
Africa. While there, he used a translator to speak with a local
hacham, or wise man, who broke down in tears during introductions.
Epstein didn't understand, and asked the man to explain.
"I knew that the Diaspora was far and wide, but I didn't know
it went all the way to New York," lamented the man, upon learning
of Epstein's relationship to that city. For the locals, this was
a shock, as the Berber Jews had seen themselves as the final outpost
of Judaism, the religion's farthest point west in the world.
Epstein's lecture offered insight into a Jewish tradition that has
moved away, as most of Morocco's mountain Jews have since emigrated
to Israel, which Epstein said is because they believed that the
messianic era was underway. According to him, Morocco's urban Jewish
population commonly went further abroad, to Paris, Venezuela and
Canada.
This Diaspora twice-removed loses something in its displacement,
he said.
"The Moroccan Jewish culture doesn't transfer easily, primarily
due to the cemetery rituals," said Epstein. Moroccan Jews made
pilgrimages to the graves of martyrs and saints, going so far as
to build small vacation huts in the cemeteries in order to be closer
to them. These huts were then sometimes used for Jewish summer youth
camps.
Eventually, Epstein's time in the sun came to an end. Transferred
to the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Epstein found the
region "a kind of polluted river experience." He saw it
this way not because he didn't enjoy his time there, but because
he found that 70 years of communism had poisoned Jewish communities
and ruined some of their vibrancy. Luckily, he was able to be a
part of changing that situation.
Among his new acquaintances was Mordechai Levinson, the matzah baker
of Irkutsk, who supplied matzah to all of Siberia.
Levinson told Epstein of a woman who once came to him. She said
her husband, a Soviet commissar, had revealed his Jewish identity
on his deathbed. His final wish was to be buried in the local Jewish
cemetery. Levinson agreed to bury him, but demanded a few supplies
from the commissar's wife, who had access to special stores open
only to party apparatchiks. She agreed, and for many years, he had
access to the most important item for a matzah magnate – craft
paper.
Craft paper? Yes, because even if Levinson could make enough matzah,
he had to ship it somehow to the scattered Jews of the Russian Far
East.
On another occasion, Epstein reluctantly allowed a camera crew to
follow him as he checked in on seniors receiving aid from the Joint.
He returned to his hotel at the end of the day and had begun to
relax in the bar, when he saw the day's TV news come on with his
profile. A friend translated and the coverage was fair. What came
after the initial report, though, was surprising.
"Would that we Russians learn something from these Jews, who
come to help their brothers across the oceans," commented the
Russian TV reporter, who described the activities of the Joint.
For Seymour Epstein, it was all in a day's work.
Levi Barnett is a student at the University of British
Columbia.
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