Simcha and Yiddish noun meaning festive occasion. The term is used for any happy occasion, such as a wedding, Bar Mitzvah or engagement. The day of Simchat Torah, "Rejoice in the Law", which marks the completion and beginning of the annual cycle of reading the Torah. Simcha is also the name of a kosher beer from Saxony, Germany. It was also a slang term used in Jewish-American organized crime circles to refer to a pimp. Simcha is also used as a given name, for men or women. In the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, the name Simcha is most likely to be used
Religion in the Soviet Union sum, Muslims were not a homogeneous group with a common national identity and heritage, although they shared the same religion and the same country. In the late 1980s, unofficial Muslim congregations, meeting in tea houses and private homes with their own mullahs, greatly outnumbered those in the officially sanctioned mosques. The unofficial mullahs were either self-taught or informally trained by other mullahs. In the late 1980s, unofficial Islam appeared to split into fundamentalist congregations and groups that emphasized Sufism. Soviet policy toward religion was based on the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, which made atheism the official doctrine of the Communist Party.