Moscow’s suburb of Malakhovka was long known as a Jewish shtetl. The artist Marc Chagall once taught art there at a home for Jewish war orphans. Yiddish could be heard shouted in its marketplace as late even as the 1980s. Jews prayed in the town’s little wooden synagogue, from its construction in 1932, as Stalin’s terror began to gain steam, until its destruction in the 2000s.
The synagogue (whose original sponsors were arrested and shot by authorities) was burnt to the ground by a local drug addict, but replaced by a brand-new building, Chabad-Lubavitch of Malakhovka, in 2010. Now a yeshivah has opened in the town. Or rather, reopened.
Classes at Yeshivah Ketana of Malakhovka, geared to high-school-aged students, began on Aug. 30. The yeshivah is led by Atlanta native Rabbi Moshe Lerman and offers a personalized approach to students, who are mostly graduates of Jewish schools throughout Russia.
Malakhovka’s original yeshivah was an underground branch of Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim-Lubavitch, which lasted in this town from 1934-35. The original Tomchei Temimim was established in 1897 in the village of Lubavitch, and was soon joined by branches in other towns. Following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the yeshivah continued to function in the shadows, breaking up into dozens of branches in cities and towns throughout the Soviet Union—from Kremenchug to Voronezh, Berdichev to Kursk. The yeshivahs were usually shut down by authorities or closed on their own when pressure became too harsh, with the students leaving and reconstituting themselves in cities or towns deemed safer.
After a wave of arrests of Lubavitcher yeshivah students in Batumi, Georgia, and Kiev, Ukraine, a small group of students from those yeshivahs descended on Malakhovka, where they began to study and sleep in the town’s synagogue. Residing within 100 kilometers of Moscow required special permits, which the students worked hard to obtain.
“I am in a city together with four working laborers. One more worker will come soon, and I am the sixth,” wrote one student, Avraham Kievman, in a coded message in the summer of 1934. By the next year, the yeshivah had grown to more than a dozen students, but a police raid that fall brought the era to an end.
With its opening, Yeshivah Ketanah of Malakhovka becomes the fourth yeshivah in Moscow.
The first and oldest one in continuous operation in Russia was started some 30 years ago under the name Yeshivah Gedola Tomchei Temimim Lubavitch, operating at first in Moscow’s Choral Synagogue and the Chassidic shul in Marina Roscha. Today, it is led by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Goldberg, serving young Jewish men from Russia and the former Soviet Union. Hundreds of its alumni serve in ever-growing capacities as rabbis in the former Soviet republics, Germany, Israel and the United States.
Another yeshivah, located in Istra, near Moscow, serves mostly graduates of Moscow’s Cheder Menachem, as well as children of Chabad emissaries and rabbis from throughout Russia.
Machon Ra”N, the third yeshivah, is based in the Bolshaya Bronnaya Synagogue in the center of Moscow, with a branch in the Raminskaya neighborhood as well. Older students there specialize in becoming shochetim (kosher ritual slaughterers) and sofrim (scribes).
Malakhovka is also known for being the place where the sixth Rebbe—Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory—was hidden following his release from a Soviet prison 80 years ago, in 1927. Having been originally sentenced to death, the Rebbe’s sentence was commuted to 10 years of hard labor on a remote Far Eastern island, and then to three years of exile in the city of Kostrama, from which he was released after only 10 days.
Still, the Rebbe’s situation remained desperately dangerous, and not long after his arrest he left Leningrad and went to Malakhovka, where he stayed for six weeks. That fall, after Sukkot, he left the Soviet Union for the last time, settling in Riga, Latvia, from which he continued his battle for the spiritual life of the Jews of the USSR.
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