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Part I.
Uglich is not an error message; Kostroma is not the scent of coffee on a cool Volga morning, nor is Rybinsk Russian for rye bread. These are actually towns along the Volga which date back to the 11^th and 12^th centuries. The great unifying factor of all peoples, tourism, has begun to retouch these remote aging regions of societies gone by, gone bad, and now regenerating hopefully in the fertile elements of decayed communism.

We, some 200 women, residents of the Former Soviet Union and of North America, have just invested a week together on a very modest ship, traveling down the Volga River. Eighteen hours of daylight yield lush green vistas above which flicker alternately ramshackle and palatial domed/turreted Russian orthodox churches and wooden or red brick “dachas”, summer houses of the Russian poor and Mafioso.

If mosquitoes tell tales, then the townspeople quickly realize we are far more than an overblown raft of tourists; this is a Project Kesher trip and societal evolution is the subject of our daily workshops, studies and ceaseless networking. Women’s chatting is like a form of sonar - we bounce ideas, experiences, feelings, hopes, vital information and dreams off of and to each other quickly, subtly and effectively. Faster than the internet, this women’s gathering has access to body language, a fleet of on-board translators, the ability to add an adjacent woman rich in talents, experience and range of influence into a discussion, and a week of steady access to each other.

I am writing this reflection from Amsterdam, Netherlands, where a friend passes me an email about how Jewish women are meant by G*d to reign over the home, not society. Hmph. As Enron and Russia’s Yukos scandal leaders prevail in the headlines, most newspaper pages address multi-national bottom lines. Meanwhile, Project Kesher women muse 600,000 orphans to be found in a single region of the FSU, 1.2 million teens with AIDS, pandemic trafficking in women, and villages with over 50% of inhabitants being widows due to early male deaths from alcoholism. Why must real men must be Talmud scholars, economic work horses (and cannon fodder), what comes of those denied intimacy, inner journeys and time at home?

On this voyage respectful pluralism prevails, almost all of us are Jews – from secular to observant, most everyone an experienced change agent and cultural creative – we are funders and founders, authors, artists and musicians, investors, healers and social workers, clergy and academics; all of us passionately intent on helping to forge a healthier human future. Most significant to me is Nellie Shulman, the first woman rabbi born in the FSU, who now serves in Belarus. She also has major administrative responsibilities for the Reform movement which is about to bring rabbinical students in as two-year community interns. Very friendly, honey-tone voiced and politically astute, she unabashedly wears short black belly button-revealing this-is-not-your-grandfather’s Judaism hip hugger pants and t-top.

A question for the reader. If you attended, what did you learn about navigating the journey called life in Hebrew school? Part of what is most radical about our work is that the liberation theology within Torah is a thirsted for and acclaimed nutrient in the lives of our FSU travel partners. We study Torah daily on the boat, not initially to find out what Rashi thought and how our mancesters built rabbinic Judaism on the text, but rather as a prism to share the Torah of our lives and find new revelations through the power of study in community.

For me the greatest surprise of the voyage is a turn-about, our FSU counterparts lead the Torah study, asking questions uncommon to classical methods. While they now study at the Steinsaltz Institute that won’t allow women rabbis to teach, they also have studied for almost a decade with other women on this voyage – the poet Merle Feld, Rabbi Eleanor Smith, Tamara Cohen, Debbie Friedman, myself and many more. I like to believe that we inoculated them against the tyranny of pure patriarchy. And oh how this shows in their sessions – while too often I see what is missing in a teaching – in the FSU women’s teaching I so kvelled at what was present. They asked:

What do you feel when you read this text? What are the qualities being demonstrated by the characters? What dialogue appears missing? What questions do you have for those in the text? Which items might be symbols – when a rock is a pillow, is it then also a seed of higher consciousness? At one point Hagar and Abraham texts are presented with what the declaration told to us is a core Project Kesher mantra – “no woman of means is ever struck twice by a domestic partner.” She won’t be sent out – she knows how to walk away.

Project Kesher’s micro-lending program allows women to attain some means by establishing small businesses – one example: a $2000 loan gave one woman the leverage to hire less fortunate women to plant the seeds of a nursery that feeds her plant shop, which she sees as soon having a café, and perhaps a second shop…..she has even made up souvenir ceramic bells for us, “loss leaders” – a marketing idea she found at the ORT Keshernet computer training centers, a project initiated on the principle of giving women access to computer skills could open up a world of possibilities, and it sure has!

Headlines on our return to Moscow are about an icon from the Russian Orthodox church that has resided since the war in Chicago and now it has been returned; thousands line up to cry and worship in its space. This is the chill that runs through these changing times. Russians will tell you the government hasn’t really changed those who sought power before and survived are back in office. Democracy shmemocracy, communism, bommunism, it’s all the same – the rich get richer and the poor, poorer. Rabbi Nellie Shulman is also concerned by the rapid re-growth of the Russian Orthodox Church, she finds almost none of the priests are open to inter-faith dialogue – they believe themselves to possess the keys to the kingdom of heaven.

Our key is not one of blind faith; one thing a Jew knows for sure is that the world to come is the one we leave to our children. We teach not doctrine, but method, offering a lens called Torah, Shabbat, and hope born of inviting the commitment of every generation to find new meaning through this common lens for the sake of the human future. Some 1.2 million Jews live in the FSU, there are now hundreds of day schools, synagogues are being reclaimed and refurbished daily and all of G*d’s eggs are neither in the basket of the forces of assimilation, conflict and disenchantment in America or the Middle East – a Process beyond our ability to grasp can be felt here. Many on the trip, like myself, looked around us in awe at the re-awakening of our people in the land of our grandparents and marveled as they declared: “Anti-Semitism? No. Here it is a good time to be Jewish.”

Part II.

Early on.

Square jaw. Defiant eyes. Short dark hair. Tall. He seemed disappointed as we met, as though due accolades from us. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked.

“Yes, you are "x"; sent by friends of ours who know you from when you lived in the states. They said you are a fascinating person whom we’d enjoy meeting as part researching the Reclaiming Peoplehood chapter for my next book. Thank you for greeting us here in Prague.”

His shoulders seemed to suddenly sag and a lost, almost sad look crossed his aging features. We walk a ways until he explains with renewed posture, “I am the spy who was exchanged for Scharansky.”

Fortunately, we’re not college students, or he’d have been even more disappointed. Most of them have no idea of the ardent substance of many readers' college years, working to free Soviet Jews. Most of the Jewish students I addressed last week on several college campuses had not even heard of Golda Meir.

Do you remember when the Soviet Jewish civil rights activist Anatoly Scharansky was exchanged for a “Russian” spy? It was on the Glienicker Bridge, linking East and West – Berlin and Potsdam. In 1978 Scharansky was tried and convicted on charges of treason, espionage, and anti-Soviet agitation--charges he always denied despite nearly eight years of harsh treatment, including torture by hunger, cold, and solitary confinement. He served nine years of a 13-year sentence, with a book of psalms as his companion. There were front page newspaper photos of his exchange. It was the stuff of cloak and dagger movies; each man slowly walking from his opposite end of the bridge. He came to symbolize Soviet oppression of religion and minorities.

I was incredulous and felt surprised to note anger rising within. “You were a spy? Against my country? For Russia? Why would you want to hurt America?”

“I don’t believe any power should get too big in the world.” “The exchange with Scharansky was my idea,” he continued. Someone was trying to have me murdered in prison and I asked my lawyer to see if the Russians would trade me for him. You see, I am a Czech national though I worked for the Russians. I wasn’t sure if they would help me get out, though they can be honorable about their spies; but would they help free a Czech? I’m not sure why, but they did.”

His wife "y" comes in. Also a Czech national she was a US citizen working in the New York City diamond district for 20 years. Today she heads a PR firm in Prague. They live well, out in the suburbs, in view of huge dachas (summer homes) of rich Russian black-marketeers.

I ask if she misses America. She tosses bobbed blond locks and her blue eyes flash like steel. “Oh yes. They held me, but could never prove anything. Still, part of the negotiations to free my husband required giving up my US citizenship.”

“Your life, Goldie,” a therapist once told me, “would be turned down as the plot for a soap opera on the grounds of implausibility.”

Today "x" says he is awaiting final details on two opportunities, a visiting professorship to teach world politics at a British University and a TV special in Israel where he and “Natan” Scharansky could meet in person and reflect on that era.

They proved kind, creative and thoughtful hosts.

Later on in the trip a curious, related event would emerge.

Part of the summer-long teaching/touring included a rabbi gig on a cruise ship around the Baltic. This brought me back to Russia a few weeks after working in Moscow with Project Kesher; only this time to St. Petersburg. It is my first not-specifically-Jewish trip to Russia, this stop is simply to view fine art at the astonishingly ornate Rococo-style Hermitage Museum where Dalis, Picassos, Renoirs, Rembrants and much more art “liberated for the people during the war” still reside.

The immigration officials that meet cruise ships are usually pretty casual characters. But my passport raised eyebrows and I was asked to follow the agent to a special room. There, he turned on the classic bright light and barked his question: “Do you know a Russian in Prague?” Happily, I’m someone who wouldn’t startle even if you dropped a glass window behind me. So I answer truthfully: “The only people I know in Prague are Czechs and American ex-pats.” He persists, louder with the same question. On round, let’s say, seven, he bellows: “Why were you in Russia several weeks ago? Then in Prague and now you are back. Why?”

“I’m a rabbi on the cruise ship this time; last time I was working for a women’s non-profit group, Project Kesher.”

He jumps up and I do startle. He pumps my hand warmly, “Project Kesher, why didn’t you say so right away – my wife is active with Project Kesher!”

Barukh HaShem. Thank G*d. But go figure some cold war spy is still being watched by the Russians.

I head out onto the docks where the tour buses are long gone. Woe. Wander over to some crates to sit down for reflection on next steps and happen to read the label on the crate, which I wrote down and word for word read as folows:

From: "q", [name deleted cause I don't won't key word search grief], Ukraine

To: Atomic Energy Commission of Iran, Tehran, Iran

My therapist, lo those many years ago, she was right. Am I being watched? Will this accidental seeing of these boxes get me in trouble again some authorities? Is the Prague spy being watched any any who meet him/them even by chance? Will it be clear that I'm just a curious rebbe on the road?

So today.

I’m was about to send off this posting and realized I didn’t know how to spell the name of the bridge they crossed. Do a Google search and several references came up that refer to "x" and/or "y". Things like his being sought in connection with the case regarding falsified documents regarding the death of Princess Diana.

"Mohamed Al Fayed has launched a $6m legal action in a US court against three men claiming CIA connections who tried to sell him forged documents purporting to prove that Diana, Princess of Wales, and his son, Dodi, were murdered in a Buckingham Palace-approved MI6 assassination plot. Named in the legal action are …….[and] "x", a notorious Czech agent during the cold war, [is] being pursued by the Austrian authorities. "

Nor did I realize "x" became so famous that he appears under the definition of Espionage on the web as one of the only known moles to penetrate the CIA and about whom, the internet trail reveals a whole book has been written by Washington Post and Wall Street Journal correspondent Ronald Kessler. Spy vs. Spy: Stalking Soviet Spies in America. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1988. The book review “recounts the story of "x" and his wife "y", whom Kessler interviewed in 1987. In 1965 they orchestrated a phony defection from the Czechoslovak Intelligence Service, after which Karl became a naturalized U.S. citizen, worked full-time for the CIA beginning in 1973, and continued as a contract agent after 1977. He spoke four languages, earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Colombia, and spent many of his weekends as a "swinger" at spouse-swapping parties with "y". By 1982 the FBI's counterintelligence squad was getting suspicious. In 1984 "x" admitted that he had been spying for the East all along, and in 1986 "x" and "y" were traded for Natan Sharansky.

Oh dear. AOL is just now reporting the death of Christopher Reeves. I can imagine what he might have said about our experience with Karl and Hana, because only a few months before his accident I got stuck on a ski lift at Copper Mountain on a bright sunny end of ski-season day for an hour and a half. My random seatmate got the same terrible sunburn as I; we were burnt like chickens in a broiler. But we engaged in conversation non-stop about snowflake crystals and other miracles of creation. At one point I introduced myself by name and the fellow answered: “How refreshing to have this conversation. My name is Christopher Reeves.”

Nu? Do I engage in much popular culture? So I asked what Christopher does for a living. “Act in movies, I play Superman for example. What do you do?”

“Rabbi.”

“A rabbi?! Fascinating. These days it's so hard to tell who you really are with.”

Blesed be the memory of Christopher Reeves - mensch, artist and activist.

Will try to get to Part III, which takes place in Freud's house.

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Rabbi Goldie Milgram is author of Reclaiming Judaism as a Spiritual Practice: Holy Days and Shabbat (Jewish Lights) and Make Your Own Bar/Bat Mitzvah: A Personal Guide to a Meaningful Rite of Passage (Jossey-Bass) and directs the resource and teaching site: ReclaimingJudaism.org.