Soviet
Jewry faced systematic discrimination and religious persecution. Yet, policies of segregation inadvertently
facilitated an organized form of Jewish celebration and resistance. Naturally, none of the large state
universities would admit Jewish students, but Meit College would. It was there a core group of students met and
began staging underground productions of the traditional Purim Spiel pageant. Anat Vovnoboy captures the oral history of
the Purim Spiel veterans as they watch surviving footage of their Purim Spiel
performances in her short documentary Pur,
which screens
during
the 2014 New York Jewish Film Festival.
Frankly,
recording the Purim Spiel shows on amateur home video was a potentially
dangerous practice, but history is much richer as a result. As one of the participants notes, many of the
early Communist leaders were Jewish, yet the revolution was followed by a
pogrom that never really abated. Few of
Vovnoboy’s interview subjects were raised with any sense of what their Judaic
heritage meant. They more or less
learned together as a loose group of constructively rebellious college
students.
While
they were not all necessarily Refuseniks per se, the Purim Spiel celebrants’
rediscovery of Judaic tradition largely coincided with the Refusenik movement
addressed in NYJFF’s excellent opening night film, Friends from France. Indeed,
there were real risks involved for the Purim celebrants, several of whom would
see the insides of Soviet prisons and interrogation rooms. As a result, many of the lyrics of the
program, such as “How did they let such a blood thirsty tyrant put a crown on
his head” take on perilous political dimensions. In fact, the Purim Spiel rather forthrightly
addressed topical issues, even lampooning Saddam Hussein its final installment.
