How a Small Holiday Became a Symbol of Jewish Resistance

The new year festival season that began with Rosh Hashanah ends this Friday. Simchat Torah, the rejoicing in the Torah, is the last of Judaism’s fall holidays marking endings and new beginnings. Worshippers finish Deuteronomy and circle back to Genesis, restarting the annual cycle of Bible reading. To celebrate, they parade Torah scrolls around the synagogue. Seven circuits. Each time singing and dancing the horah — a circle dance.

Today these are small synagogue observances, but they were not always so. During the Cold War Simchat Torah was, alongside Passover, the main holiday for rallying in defense of Jewish rights. Tens of thousands took the festival out to the streets, transforming their horahs into huge dance rallies protesting the oppression of Jews in the USSR.

Jews in Moscow lit the spark themselves. Soviet discrimination against Jews included university quotas, workplace glass ceilings, vilification in state media, show trials, arrests for teaching Hebrew, religious suppression and more. Human rights activists named it antisemitism. The Kremlin said it was fighting “Zionism.” Call it what you will. The policies forced Jews into the closet.

Except on Simchat Torah. On that evening, tens of thousands gathered each year in front of the USSR’s few remaining synagogues to sing, dance, and celebrate their Jewishness in front of the KGB.

Elie Wiesel, the voice of Holocaust memory, helped break the story. He traveled to Russia in 1965 to bear witness to the plight of Soviet Jews. He joined the Simchat Torah crowds a few blocks from Red Square. “They come in defiance,” he reported back in his travelogue, The Jews of Silence. The Kremlin pressured Jews to abandon their heritage and their people.  Jews danced to Israeli folk songs in the streets of Moscow in response.

Their chutzpah inspired people everywhere. New Yorkers responded by organizing the world’s first Simchat Torah solidarity demonstration. In 1967, 3,000 protestor-worshippers converged on the Soviet UN Mission. Breaking with tradition, they sang and danced not only with Torah scrolls but also with protest signs. “Justice for Jews!”

Simchat Torah solidarity rallies spread nationwide. 35 cities in 1968. 56 in 1969. More than 100 by 1975, and on every inhabited continent. Protestors sang “Am Yisrael Chai,” the Jewish people lives, and dedicated each of the dance circuits to particular Soviet Jewish activists and political prisoners. The rallies were part of a massive, successful human rights campaign that pried open the Iron Curtain and enabled 1.5 million Russian-speaking Jews to flee to Israel, the US and other countries in the West.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the annual Simchat Torah solidarity rallies faded into history. But before then, they redefined what it meant to rejoice in the Torah. In the face of Soviet oppression, in the shadow of the Holocaust, and amidst wars to destroy Israel, Jews danced defiantly in the streets to affirm that they were determined to survive and thrive.

Last year, in the Jewish calendar, Hamas attacked on Simchat Torah. Or perhaps more accurately, Hamas attacked Simchat Torah—the very festival that Jews had transformed into a symbol of their solidarity, defiance and pride.

This year, Jewish communities around the world face the challenge of rescuing their desecrated holiday. The stakes are high. The circle dance could easily draw them back into the trauma of October 7th, and do so again year after year, turning Simchat Torah into one more victim of Hamas’s atrocities.

But Jews are loathe to grant their enemies power over them. Simchat Torah’s own history testifies to this. “They come in defiance,” Elie Wiesel wrote of the Cold War Jews who faced down the relentless force of Soviet antizionism. Post-October 7th Jews today certainly won’t grant Hamas power over Judaism’s insistence on celebrating life.

Simchat Torah preserves this stubborn spark of defiance — the insistence on treating what seems like an ending as a new beginning. The insistence on joy in the face of every attempt to cause pain. The insistence on retelling the Jewish story in the face of efforts to silence it. The insistence on dancing in the face of those who would see Jews gone.

The film memorializing the souls massacred last Simchat Torah at the Nova Music Festival is named, We Will Dance Again. The words apply equally well to the holiday itself.

How will Jews dance again this Simchat Torah? The holiday is wounded. It will take work to heal. Each synagogue will start the work of repair in its own way, with Jewish history and tradition to guide them.

At my congregation in Nashville, Tennessee, we will draw from the Cold War era holiday rallies, dedicating the dance circuits. We will also adapt a tradition from Hanukkah — whose name means “resanctifying that which was desecrated.” Just as we add one more candle to the menorah each night to symbolize the passage from darkness to light, we will resanctify our desecrated Simchat Torah by moving from silence to song.

One silent circuit, in memory of those slain. Then a doleful one, to pray for our hostages. But after that, each circling with the Torah will grow louder and more joyous, honoring all in Israel and around the world who are standing up against hate to safeguard the Jewish people. Our final round will end jubilant, with songs of peace, pride, redemption and hope.

So that the circle will continue, strong, defiant and unbroken.