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They are too consumed by internal bickering, he argued in a recent interview. "They are boiling in their own bullion," he said. "They live in ghettos." With the Russian-language press as their only source of information, he explained, real news is often eclipsed by rumors and gossip.
At a more practical level, nine out of 10 speak English so badly that they can't even look for the simplest job when they first arrive. And they're not certain how they fit into American culture. "In Russia, I was a Jew, but in the United States, I'm a Russian," said Ed Markoff, a photojournalist who emigrated here six years ago from Odessa. He took part in the interview with his friend Levchenko.
Demographically, they are also more elderly than many immigrant groups. Seventy percent of them are over 30, 40 percent older than 50. Twenty percent are over 65. Many are educated professionals with mismatched skills, like the 59-year-old Moscow coronary surgeon who now works as a $6.50-an-hour home care aide, or the physics professor who sweeps floors.
When they do organize, it's to perpetuate old feuds. Jewish veterans of the Soviet army in World War II, for example, count two groups. Why two? "They hate each other," Levchenko said, claiming that leaders foster personal animosities to discipline or motivate their groups.
Levchenko said that Pil plays to the same taste for divisiveness -- with flair. "Pil is the most famous Russian Jew," he added with a laugh. "He does a lot of Russian media advertising."
This past Hanukkah, Pil took out ads boasting he had erected the largest menorah in the city, Levchenko noted. Who cares? Well, it was a flagrant challenge to Langer and his Bill Graham Menorah (named after the late rock promoter) in Union Square. Langer's been lighting it, with a great deal of hype, for the past 21 years.
Langer, remember, was once Pil's reluctant mentor. So Pil's menorah challenge shows how enigmatic his relationship with the Lubavitcher hierarchy has become.
Pil's chabad was never officially sanctioned by either world headquarters or the Lubavitchers' California director, Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin, who's based in L.A. Cunin couldn't be reached for comment, but he said last year that Pil had "broke[n] the camel's back" when Pil unilaterally claimed Schneerson's name for his day school.
Caught in the middle is Langer, a charismatic and publicity-savvy East Bay native. Langer, age 50, came to his Judaism relatively late. He spent his youth in the '60s in hippieish pursuits, including immersion in the drug culture ("I inhaled, unfortunately," he says now). A series of encounters and studies brought him to the Lubavitcher sect, and he now shares its outlook, which blends the mystical and the mundane. He exudes a cheerful openness, in contrast to Pil's formality. He spoke recently in his downtown offices in a dingy building on the southern edge of Chinatown.
Langer had just returned from a meeting of a funding agency that he hopes will give him $100,000. "I'm always behind the eight ball," he said. Like Pil, Langer also works to make Judaism more visible; hence his "mitzvah bike," a Star-of-David-bedecked Harley, and the Union Square menorah-lighting ceremony, attended this year by Mayor Willie Brown. (Langer and Brown exchanged jokes about their mutual taste in Borsalino hats.)
For all his careful inclusionary talk, Langer still dresses the part of a Conservative Orthodox Hasidim. He, too, won't touch any woman except his wife, daughter, or sister. But he explained the rule with a chuckle, hastening to add that Hasidic men and women "enjoy each other" and to debunk a prevailing myth of their prudery. "We don't do it through the sheets."
Even for the worldly Langer, though, it all comes back to God, who is everywhere. The need to connect with God is tantamount. As a doctrinaire Lubavitcher, the connection can only be made through the unbroken lineage of chosen Lubavitch rebbes who have come before. That explains Schneerson's power and that of his six predecessors over the centuries. For a Lubavitcher, defying the rebbe, or taking an independent path, as Pil is considered to have done by some of his elders in the sect, is the same as leaving the sect altogether.
"The rebbe has been the inspirational point of Hasidism, a tangible human being who is practicing what he's preaching," said Langer. "If you're your own bottom line, you're out there."
Langer and Pil have known each other since Pil first came here, three years after Langer established his chabad in S.F. Now, Langer would just as soon not discuss Pil. His smile fades, his gray-streaked red beard seems to sag. Suffice it to say that they once celebrated the Sabbath side by side in shul. Now Pil no longer comes, and they don't really talk much.
Pil has chosen a grand backdrop against which to operate. "This is a very historic resettlement of major proportions," said Jewish Community Federation executive Richard Sipser in a recent interview in his offices in SOMA. As director of planning, allocations, and agency relations, he parcels out the JCF's yearly collections, which amounted to more than $19 million in California last year.
"Desert" or no, the Bay Area Jewish community is an acknowledged leader in the global drive to rescue Jews from the Soviet Union. At the same time, it is unique among urban U.S. Jewish populations for its high degree of assimilation, intermarriage with non-Jews (over 60 percent), and low profile. The strongly secular flavor of Bay Area Jewry may explain why Pil, with his heavy emphasis on the Orthodox religious practice of the Hasidim, holds it in such disdain.
Nevertheless, without any help from Pil's donated cars, Bay Area Jewish groups have raised tens of millions of dollars, which have been matched by a very small proportion of federal funds, to create a nationally respected resettlement network over the past two decades. It operates under close federal scrutiny. Money is strictly accounted for, and extended follow-ups with the newly arrived emigres are required to be documented. As a result, it is astonishingly effective. About 85 percent of the emigre families who pass through the system are self-sufficient after two years.
