By John Ferrannini

One of many remnants of the Russian enclave on San Francisco’s west side serves sit-down meals every weekday.

Olga Medvedko, the executive director of Russian American Community Services (RACS) at 300 Anza St., said her organization has been serving meals to seniors and people with disabilities in San Francisco since 1977.

“We open our doors for nutritional services at 10:15 a.m. and start giving lunches to go about 10:45 a.m.,” Medvedco said. “People start coming and sit down for a lunch program, dine in, and at about noon we’re mostly done.”

Clients don’t have to be Russian-American to take part.

“The Russian speaking community is our target clientele, but we have people who enjoy Russian-style cuisine, and we try to be very friendly and hospitable,” she said. “We have staff coming from different places – the majority are bilingual. Some of them Ukrainian, some from Uzbekistan, Belarus, Serbia. We have Spanish-speaking staff too. It’s like a San Francisco mixture.”

But RACS provides more than just a bite to eat. It also uses the lunchtime to preserve ethnic traditions from the old country.

On Fridays, for example, the menu features fish due to the custom of the Orthodox Church to abjure meat that day.

“We include activities; we have musicians perform for our clients,” Medvedko said. “We celebrate all major holidays.”

The menu often features borscht and stroganoff; it was approved by a city nutritionist.

“The menu is online,” she said. “There are some requirements we need to follow – a specific amount of proteins, carbohydrates, vegetables; a certain number of servings per day, but we keep our ethnic cuisines.”

The reason for the restrictions is that RACS gets $950,000 per year from the San Francisco Department of Disability. According to its website, RACS serves an average of 103,700 meals per year. It kept running during COVID-19 through modified to-go meals and now that it has returned in-person, it serves about 300 people daily.

“The nutrition programs account for approximately 85% of this annual funding,” a spokesperson from the San Francisco Human Services Agency wrote in a statement.

“The Russian American Community Services is a community-based organization that provides food and services to the Richmond District community,” the spokesperson continued. “The organization has cultural ties back to Russia and Eastern Europe, and it is most visible via language capacity of the staff, cuisine choices and program offerings to clients participating in their services. RACS also is a cherished resource to the Inner Richmond community where they are located.

“Beyond its ties to the Russian community, they are open to all and provide services to many non-Russian clients who highly regard their experience with RACS,” the statement concludes.

Russian American Community Services is one of several community institutions with their origin in the countries that once comprised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) that stand out of the Richmond neighborhood like the onion domes of Orthodox churches. It all started more than a hundred years ago, according to Lydia Zaverukha, co-author of Russian San Francisco.

“There were actually four waves of immigration from Russia,” Zaverukha said. “After the (Bolshevik) revolution, after World War II, later in the 1970s – including the Russian Jewish refuseniks – then recent, contemporary emigres.”

Jewish refuseniks were Soviet Jews who were not allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. to emigrate to Israel, which allows Jews worldwide the ability to become citizens of the world’s only sovereign Jewish state. The ban on Jewish refusenik emigration ended in 1971.

When Zaverukha grew up in San Francisco, she said that most of the stores and people who were in the neighborhood were from the first two waves. Her father was originally from Russia but was imprisoned by the Nazis during the war. Her mother grew up in China.

“That was common when communism came to Russia,” Zaverukha said.

Many Russian emigres who came to San Francisco first settled in the Fillmore neighborhood, but later the Richmond emerged as the center of the community, because it was more affordable. Today, the enclave is generally concentrated around the Holy Virgin Cathedral on Geary Boulevard, between 26th and 27th avenues.

“It’s still hard to be an immigrant and get to the states,” Zaverukha said. “They were more rigid at the time with sponsors. Even my dad, when he was in Germany, he had to live there a couple of years before he found a sponsor so he could come here.”

Zaverukha’s family moved to the Sunset District when she was 5 years old.

“At the time, San Francisco had the biggest Russian community outside the Soviet Union in the world,” Olga Mandrussow said. Her family once had a house on 17th Avenue between Geary Boulevard and Anza Street. As time went on, however, many of the original inhabitants moved away.

“It was gradual,” she said. “Families accumulated wealth and decided to move to San Mateo or Marin County. It probably started happening in the mid-to-late ’50s.”

The most recent wave of immigration from the former U.S.S.R. helped birth the Tikvah School at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco at 3200 California St. Yanina Nemirovskaya, manager of the school, is from Moldova. She said its mission is “to strengthen Jewish identity for children and their families.”

“We take students from 2 years old, and they stay with us 16 years until they graduate high school,” Nemirovskaya said.

The Tikvah School had Zoom classes during the COVID-19 pandemic but has returned to in-person.

“We have 63 kids,” she said. “Our program consists of music classes, dance classes, arts classes. We try to teach students Jewish tradition. I am absolutely happy when I see them singing Jewish prayers during Shabbat.”

There are two big performances each year for the students. The most recent was held in December and the next will be in June.

Like RACS, the school maintains San Francisco’s environment of openness, particularly as it opens its doors to the newest group of immigrants.

“We have children of all races, religions, languages; we have a lot of mixed families,” she said. “Some of the families are not Jewish. We have Ukrainian refugee families. For those families who lost everything because they ran away from their native country it’s a huge support.”