Jewish Russian Community in Chicago, and how Russian Moishe House fits into it.

One of the many reasons I love living in Chicago is that the city has a large and outstanding Russian-Jewish community. This is important to me. In fact, it's important to most Russian-Jews my age, especially those who were born back there, and immigrated here around 8 to 10 years of age. For whatever reason, we prefer sticking with our own, these reasons being long enough to write an academic paper on.

Regardless, Chicago has a huge advantage for these looking to build a Russian-speaking Jewish community, due to an abundance of the 20-something demographic. Chicago also has a huge geographical problem which complicates communications and interactions. Most Russian families live in Chicago's various suburbs. And because most Russian high school students end up going to colleges around Chicago, and living at home, they may not leave the suburbs until they graduate college.

This naturally leads to formation of cliques that are based on which suburb you grew up in and who you knew in high school, or who did you meet in college. For this reason, the Russian Jewish community is not particularly unified, and until recently has lacked a central organization or a common place to hang out and meet each other. And at the same time, expressing their famous cynicism towards anything different, the Jewish-Russian youth resisted efforts to get engaged in their Jewish identity by various religious organizations they came across.

The goal of Russian Moishe House of Chicago is to alleviate both these problems. We give our guests a promise of interesting, fun programming they'll enjoy and a great company in which they'll have an opportunity to meet like-minded people they may not have had the circumstances to meet before. At the same time, we want to give them a small taste of Judaism they may not have had before - not too much, so that it feels oppressive, but enough to get them curious about it and want to learn more. Our 1-year goal was to get our name out there and to make the community aware of our existence, and I feel that we've already met this goal sufficiently well. Going forward, our goal is to become the most recognized and most attended social organization among Russian Jews of Chicago. In the process, we will shape the community towards learning more about their heritage and culture, and increase awareness of their identity.