Dancing with the Scrolls Under Soviet Rule

The circling of the Torah scrolls on Simchat Torah took on a specific political charge in the twentieth century that its medieval origin in Safed gives no hint of. In the Soviet Union, where organised Jewish religious life was suppressed for decades and synagogues were kept under close state surveillance, public dancing with the Torah scrolls on Simchat Torah became one of the few occasions on which large numbers of Jews gathered openly and visibly in the streets outside synagogues, particularly in Moscow, where the annual crowd outside the Moscow Choral Synagogue grew through the 1960s and 1970s into a large, semi-tolerated gathering that foreign correspondents and Jewish activists abroad reported on as a rare public expression of Jewish identity under a government hostile to it. The gathering became closely associated with the wider Soviet Jewry movement advocating for the right to emigrate and practise religion freely, so that a purely liturgical custom functioned simultaneously as a form of peaceful public assembly under a regime that made almost every other form of organised Jewish expression difficult or dangerous.

In Israel, the custom has a distinct and more recent addition of its own: since the state's founding in 1948, many communities hold a second round of hakafot the following evening, begun specifically to let soldiers, immigrants and others who had already marked the festival elsewhere take part in a public, outdoor street celebration, so the same circling has generated two quite different modern practices, one born of restriction and one of newly available freedom.