While teaching a mother-daughter retreat in the Ukraine for Project Kesher, I began to experience nights so filled with dreams of terror that I was afraid to sleep. It felt as though rivers of raging hot blood were filling the land. My spiritual experiences generally occur while awake, so this was most disturbing and with the jet-lag complications, undesirable.

I trudged from the retreat center into the town to use the ancient telephone system, which only four years ago, still required an operator to place the call to Kiev and only then would a connection be made to America. Just sit there - the operator motioned to a bench. I’ll let you know when your call has gone through. Two hours later, she motions me toward a set of wooden booths, "chitieri [four]" she tells me in Russian. My beloved Barry comes on the line. I fill him in on the dreams, needing a guiding voice and grounding. I know he doesn’t buy much of this "spiritual stuff", he’ll set me right.

"Goldie, you are so sensitive to the ambient energy around you. Could it be something from the Holocaust or the Stalinists that remains in the area that needs resolving? Can you do some research on the history of the area?" "

Oy. He’s getting too used to me," was my thought.

Later that day I went to meet with the director of the sanatorium where we were holding our retreat. [Today these function as low-budget health spas in many parts of the FSU as a way of supplementing their income for patient care.] A young physician, we chatted about post-traumatic stress syndrome, over 300 children of Chernobyl were occupying the facility for treatment during our visit. "Speaking of which," I inserted my agenda, "Would you know about any Jewish history in this region? Any special events or traumas?" "No, I am not acquainted with such things, though it could be the case. Why do you ask?" I told him about my sleeplessness and dreams, he made a generous suggestion. "Take my car and driver, bring your translator, go into the town and ask around, you may find your answer."

We stopped at the town hall to seek out the mayor. "There have never been Jews here," he said tersely. "You must be mistaken." Was it my imagination? The old man who was sweeping the office floor seemed to have frozen for a moment at my words.

I exited confused, senses still alert to .... to what? The old man reappeared in the parking lot."You are looking for Jew?" he asked in Yiddish. "I am the head of the Jewish community here, perhaps you would join me at my home for a while?"

"We are all from The Death Loop." he said, standing under a portrait of himself in full Russian military regalia. "Death Loop?" I often reflect on the perils of working through translators. Tanita, my translator, paled considerably as she received the explanation. "A small Nazi Death Camp was here. They made a soldiers' and townspeople's net around us. Encircling the whole district and walking inward to the center of town, looping in all the Jews, tighter and tighter. At the end of the war we were thirteen surviving. Eleven live here. One has died, one lives in Israel."

"I will call the others to come." He got on the phone, then made tea. One came bearing a manuscript, her handwritten memoirs of her time in the camp.

They inquire after my life, asking probing questions as though to judge my character. Then my host inquires, a warm shift in his voice.

"Reb Goldishkeh, can I ask you one last thing?"

"Of course."

"Can a woman rabbi read from a Torah?"

"We are trained just as any rabbi would be."

He pulls up floor boards and opens a crate from which he lovingly lifts a Torah. Her cover is tattered, yet the text is beautifully intact. "We gather each week to kiss her. But none of us can read even one word. We open the Torah and look in. That is all. We know no prayers, no words, we just look."

I thought he would then ask me to read Torah for them. Instead he asked: "Could you teach us to read a few words? We could memorize them and open to the right place and fulfill the mitzvah of reading the Torah. Could you do that?" Would you read for us? Could you teach a few words that we might read even the same thing each week?"

My turn to lose it emotionally. I see boxes of food from the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in his kitchenette. Clearly they do receive support from the international Jewish community. He catches my glance.

"No. We don't want our Torah taken away to a larger community. We don't want to move to Israel. We are caretakers for this site, to us this is holy ground too."

For hours we practice one line of Torah, the Shema. Tanita writes out transliterations. It is not enough, they want to chant it properly. We practice and practice.

The sun is setting. Highway robbers are no longer uncommon in the dissolving FSU, it is time to leave. In my pocket dwell a few hundred dollars for tzedakah, dollar bills given to me by my rabbinical students for charitable distribution during the trip. I offer it to help the little community.

All recoiled visibly in refusal. "We live modestly, we have food and shelter, we care for each other...Save it, there are those in greater need. Now we can fulfill the reading Torah - that is a gift!"