The Last of the Saturday People

The Subbotniks are the most prominent survivors of the "Judaizers," a collective term applied to Russians who, from the 15th century on, left the Russian Orthodox Church for Judaism, were persecuted and finally exiled to the far reaches of the Russian Empire. Because of their Slavic roots and rejection of the Talmud, the Subbotniks always remained outside mainstream, rabbinical Judaism with its intellectual traditions and institutions.

The Subbotniks' precise origins are obscure — even to members of the community themselves — partly because they never created their own yeshivahs or seminaries, and partly because the czarist authorities were eager to squelch and isolate a religious movement viewed as a threat to the state faith, Russian Orthodoxy. As for the Communist authorities, they were equally hostile to the very existence of independent religious movements of any kind, as to their study by ethnographers or historians.

ON A recent weekday in an apartment here, about 10 of Sevan's remaining Subbotniks gather to reminisce, polish off three bottles of vodka and sing long mournful hymns based on a narrative from Genesis. Asked about their faith and history, they have little to offer. "We are Subbotniks. We celebrate all the Jewish holidays in full," is the best that Alexander Andreyev, 70, a retired electrician and acting leader of the community, can muster.

The 20th-century narrative is somewhat fuller, though. They do know that the Communist authorities seized the synagogue in the 1920s and turned it into a grocery store, that circumcisions were banned a few years later, that the last man who could read Hebrew died in the 1960s and that the last ritual slaughterer died in the 1970s.

Unable to muster a minyan of 10 men, they gave away their Torah scroll in 1993 to the 1,000-strong Jewish community in Yerevan. Nowadays, the 18 women and five men, all elderly, take turns hosting weekly informal prayer services. Everyone pays dues of 100 drams (18 cents) a month. Anna Andreyeva, 71, a retired accountant, usually leads the singing from a child's exercise book in which the dirge-like Subbotnik hymns are recorded, written in Russian with a blue ballpoint pen.

Russia's leading Subbotnik expert cannot add much more. Valery Dymshits, an ethnographer and folklorist who teaches at the European University in St. Petersburg, has been traveling since 1997 to Azerbaijan and southern Russia conducting interviews and filming Subbotniks in farming communities. "We are trying to find their communities and contact them," he says. "It is difficult because they were — and are — everywhere: Siberia, the Caucasus, on the Volga, in Ukraine."