Jewish Quarterly Review

The rebirth of Eastern European Jewish studies in the postcommunist era, especially from the discipline of history, often leans on a narrative of archival access. Prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, local archives were closed to western researchers; the fall of the Soviet Union unlocked the archives and overnight the field was resuscitated from its Soviet and Holocaust extinction. It was a narrative that fueled my own passion for the subject and excitement over archival discovery. Some of my greatest joy in mining state records on Jews in Russia and Ukraine came with document delivery, when I signed my name on the paper slip attached to each file—like the library check-out cards of old rendered obsolete by computing. I felt I’d hit the jackpot if I was the first name entered on the archival slip, and often I was only second or third.

This western narrative, however, obscures the grassroots efforts made by Soviet Jewish activists of the 1980s who had already then begun to revitalize scholarship on Eastern European Jewry, mining Soviet archives for unpublished sources on the Jewish experience. Many Jewish archival collections that were in secret storage were declassified in the late 1980s and early 1990s due to such interest. A critical personality in this effort and in making former-Soviet archival material accessible to all researchers— including Russian scholars—is Benyamin Lukin. He has worked as head of the Eastern European section of the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People in Israel since the early 1990s. He was trained and worked as an engineer in the Soviet Union, and fell into historical research and Jewish activism through disparate forays into Jewish cemetery [End Page 224] documentation and literary lexicography work. Lukin moved to Israel in 1990, where he became a professional archivist. He has spent the past three decades identifying and collecting historical materials on Russian-Polish Jewry from state archives throughout the former Soviet Union, publishing his own research, and helping several generations of scholars advance the field of Eastern European Jewish studies. His work is central to the spectacular growth of the field in the past thirty years.

In the 1980s, Lukin joined a commission documenting local cemeteries in Leningrad. He was responsible for surveying the Preobrazhenskoe, or Jewish cemetery. A local academic, Professor Natal’ia Vasil’evna Yukhniova, asked Lukin to report his findings at an upcoming conference on the ethnography of Leningrad at the Institute for Ethnography. This foray into Jewish studies led to his subsequent participation in expeditions to Jewish towns in Eastern Europe. These expeditions were the brainchild of Ilya Dvorkin, who together with Lukin revived the Jewish Historical Seminar in 1987 and began leading expeditions to Jewish small towns in 1988. There were underground Jewish studies seminars in Leningrad from the 1970s, but Dvorkin and Lukin expanded the theme beyond the Holocaust and Jewish partisans to focus on communal histories. This seminar eventually became the Jewish University in St. Petersburg. In 1988, Lukin and his family joined Dvorkin on an expedition to Medzhibozh, famed town of the Ba’al Shem Tov. For the next two and half decades, Lukin participated in various expeditionary groups, often with art scholar Boris Khaimovich, traveling to hundreds of small towns in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria to explore cemetery and synagogue remains and conduct oral interviews. Alongside this research, Lukin joined a team working on a biographical dictionary of Russian writers organized by the publishers of the Soviet Encyclopedia. Through this research project, Lukin furtively followed his interest in Jewish history via biographies of Jewish writers and Judeophobes and began collecting material in Soviet archives, paying attention to the vast and unknown corpus of archival documents on Jews. By researching Russian writers, he avoided labeling his archival requests as pertaining to “Jews.” As the only Jewish Historical Seminar participant with archival experience, Lukin prepared an overview of Jewish sources in the Leningrad archives, which he published through samizdat in the Leningrad Jewish Almanac. Lukin gained a reputation as a local Jewish history expert and was sought...