Epilogue

Abstract

The Epilogue explores why the history of Ashkenazi Jewish religious diversity has been virtually erased from the memory of East European Jewry in the Soviet years and in America following mass migrations at the turn of the twentieth century. This erasure persists despite surviving choral synagogues in the former Soviet Union and the political strength of Orthodoxy born in opposition to religious reforms in the late Russian Empire. Jewish ritual played a central role in the rise of Jewish ethnography and museum building in the last decade of the Russian Empire. The ethnographic turn of S. An-sky (Shloyme Rapoport) from collecting ritual objects to salvaging them highlights the impact of World War I on Jewish life and culture in the western borderlands. Soviet secularization witnessed the ethnicization of Jewishness followed by a religious revival in the post-Soviet period. The Epilogue ends with a survey of the growth of Reform Judaism in the contemporary post-Soviet sphere.