She grew up under KGB surveillance. Today, she’s teaching Torah in Moscow

Ella Varazov sits opposite me at Aleph, a mehadrin dairy café in Moscow under the hashgachah of her husband, Rabbi Yosef Varazov. Young, beautiful, and put-together, Ella’s face doesn’t show any signs of the challenges she endured as a child behind the Iron Curtain in the final years of the Communist era.

Together we flip through an album of photos of Ella’s nine children, all of whom are growing up in the former Soviet Union, their parents on shlichus to spread the flames of Yiddishkeit  for which Russian Jewry sacrificed so much to keep alight.

Blacklisted

Ella’s parents, Rabbi Shimon and Nechama Asch, were born in Russia after World War II. They knew nothing about Torah or mitzvos, but when they married in 1969, they vowed that they would raise their children as proud Jews in the Land of Israel.

But for ten long years, it seemed that the young couple’s rosy dreams would never materialize. Despite their fervent prayers, the couple remained childless.

Ella's grandmother, a senior surgeon at a prestigious hospital, sent the worried couple to doctors all over Russia, but at each appointment, the young couple met with disappointment. “You won’t ever have children,” they were told.

They refused to accept the doctors’ bleak prognosis. “Although my parents barely knew their Creator, they had emunah peshutah,” Ella recalls. “They had no doubt that one day they would hold a child of their own. They didn’t give up and continued praying for a miracle.”

And then the miracle happened: After ten long years, the couple was finally blessed with a baby girl. Ella.

During this period, the Iron Curtain had been lifted slightly. The government was less rigid, and some Jewish families who applied for aliyah had received visas.

The Asches applied for visas and started packing, confident that they would soon receive their exit permits. “We had one open miracle when our daughter was born,” they told themselves. “Our second miracle will be when we get an exit visa.”

But nothing happened. There was no exit permit.

The Asches became refuseniks — Jews who for seemingly arbitrary reasons were blacklisted and denied permission to emigrate.

“Maybe they were afraid that my grandfather knew too much,” Ella suggests. "He was a former commander in the Red Army and he applied to leave with us. They might have been afraid that he’d disclose information to hostile countries.”

Many of the refuseniks banded together and formed an underground Torah-learning network. This was a turning point in their lives; while they had previously felt alone, they were now surrounded by others in the same circumstances. This was also their first introduction to Torah Yiddishkeit — and they embraced it, overjoyed, eagerly adopting each new mitzvah they learned. Finally, they understood what it meant to be Jewish.