Russia’s Jews fear resurgent anti-Semitism amid
Ukraine war
Jews have fled Russia in droves, but those who remain
are scared of a return to the darkest days of discrimination.
BY VICTOR
JACK
July 4,
2022 4:02 am
As Vladimir
Putin’s war rages on for the fifth month in Ukraine and repression suffocates
civil liberties back home, Russian Jews are worried they’ll soon become the
Kremlin’s targets.
Jews have
been fleeing Russia in droves; those who’ve stayed behind are terrified of
directly criticizing the war, which Putin has cynically claimed he launched to
“de-Nazify” Ukraine.
“In our
congregation, we don’t talk about any political issues,” said a Moscow rabbi
who asked not to be named. He added that after a 2011 crackdown on protests
linked to Putin’s reelection, he ordered that politics must stay out of his
synagogue, which has roughly 300 members.
“Any words
which we say publicly [about the war] can be used against us as a Jewish
community,” the rabbi said.
Vladimir
Khanin, an associate professor at Israel’s Ariel University and an expert on
the Russian Jewish diaspora, said he estimates around a third of Jews living in
Russia are currently “actively” expressing their opposition to the war; most
“aren’t happy” with the situation, but are too scared to speak out. He
estimates that only 10 to 15 percent of Jewish people in Russia support the war
— partly because 70 percent of Russian Jews live in Moscow and St. Petersburg,
and most are “more liberal, more modernized” and better educated than the
average Russian, he said.
Unlike
Russian Orthodox leader Patriarch Kirill, whom the EU mulled sanctioning over
his support of Putin’s war, Jewish religious figures have been more critical.
Berel Lazar, the chief rabbi of Russia who was previously known to be friendly
with Putin, called for “peace” and offered to be a mediator in the conflict.
Other leading Jewish figures have made similar appeals, including the President
of the Federation of Jewish Communities Alexander Boroda.
Meanwhile,
Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, under pressure from the authorities
to back the war, fled the country two weeks after the conflict began. He now
lives in exile in Israel, and has said he has no plans to return to Russia,
though he will remain in his position.
The longer
Putin’s war drags on, the more likely he is to look for scapegoats, and Russian
Jews are all too aware that the lesson from their country’s bloody history of
pogroms is these scapegoats can often end up being them. In the most notorious
case, the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881 unleashed a wave of
anti-Semitic mob violence.
Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov gave a taste of what could be to come, comparing
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to Adolf Hitler, who he said “also had
Jewish blood.” Putin subsequently walked back on those comments, issuing a rare
personal apology to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, but Russia’s Jews
were on notice.
“Due to the
constant negative attitude toward us, hatred … we are used to being silent,
adjusting to the current government, and [we] always keep a foreign passport at
the ready,” said one 23-year-old Jewish woman from Derbent, in southern Russia,
who works in retail (she asked for her name not to be used). “You never know
when you’ll have to run again,” she added. “We understand that none of us are
truly protected.”
While
according to academics and pollsters, life for Russia’s Jews has improved since
the fall of the USSR in 1991, it’s coming off a low base. In a Levada Center
poll, for instance, 45 percent of Russians said they had a positive attitude
toward Jews in 2021, up from 22 percent in 2010. Russians said Jews were the
minority group they were most comfortable having close to them — but only 11
percent said they’re ready to have a Jewish friend, up from 3 percent in 2010.
Ilya
Yablokov, a digital media lecturer at the U.K.’s Sheffield University who has
written about anti-Semitism in Russia, said anti-Jewish xenophobia could flare
up at any moment if the Kremlin wants it to.
“In the
1980s and 1990s, the brutal anti-Semitism of politicians was a reaction to the
social polarization of Russia,” Yablokov said. “In the 2000s, things got better
economically so the level of anti-Semitism went down,” he continued, with the
Kremlin targeting other minority groups and making the West its No. 1
boogeyman.
But Putin’s
invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s retaliating sanctions, has Russian Jews
fearing they’ll once again be targeted by the Kremlin.
“It’s back
to the 1990s,” said Khanin, referring to a period when anti-Semitic conspiracy
theories proliferated and far-right firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky spouted
vitriol against Jews.
Starting
from scratch
Fearing
that the writing is on the wall and horrified by the war, many Russian Jews are
seeking to flee the country.
In
response, Israel has stepped up its specialized diaspora immigration program,
sometimes known as Aliyah, which grants citizenship to those who can prove
their relatives are Jewish up to the third generation. Waiting times at local
consulates were shortened from up to nine months to a few weeks, according to
an Israeli government official involved in the immigration process, who asked
not to be named as they were not authorized to speak to the media. Tel Aviv
also allowed refugees to apply for citizenship after arriving in Israel, which
the official said “a large majority” have opted for.
According
to estimates, around 165,000 Jews lived in Russia in 2019, at that time making
them the sixth-largest Jewish community outside of Israel. In the first three
months after Putin launched his invasion on February 24, approximately 10,000
of them were granted Israeli citizenship, the official said, compared with just
800 in as many months prior.
But
adapting to life in Israel comes with its fresh set of challenges.
Olga
Bakushinskaya, a 56-year-old Russian journalist who moved to Israel in 2014
after Russia annexed Crimea, started a Facebook group to help new Russian
arrivals integrate into the country in 2016. She said requests for help have
exploded over the past few months, with over 3,000 Russians (and Ukrainians)
joining the group since February — mainly middle-class and middle-aged parents
with children, who worked in academia or computer programming.
“Many made
no plans and just came,” Bakushinskaya said, adding that Russians have little
idea about the practicalities of living in Israel. “We’ve helped many hundreds
who come to us every week.”
Bakushinskaya
said she now spends up to three hours a day helping new arrivals with
everything from making friends, to sorting rent, to registering their children
for school. The group has also run webinars on topics including how to open
bank accounts.
While many
Israelis have welcomed the new arrivals, not everyone is so friendly.
Bakushinskaya said she has been helping Russians who’ve been greeted with
suspicion by some older Israelis who emigrated from Russia in the 1990s, who
brand them as “non-Jews” since most are secular, and clash with those who
criticize Israel.
Artem
Budikov, a 29-year-old actor who was born and raised in Moscow and has a Jewish
mother, left Russia for Israel on May 9. With no close connections in his new
homeland, Budikov, who said he would not consider himself deeply religious, has
been staying with a distant childhood friend since he arrived. He said he is
receiving a monthly stipend of around €700 from the Israeli government, as well
as subsidized Hebrew lessons, and is now looking for work.
Budikov
said he made the decision to leave Russia the day after Putin declared his
“special operation” in Ukraine. “It didn’t make sense in my head how this was
possible and I didn’t understand how I could continue working with my mouth shut,”
said Budikov. It took him a few weeks to save up the €900 he needed to buy his
plane ticket out.
He gave
what would be his final performance of his favorite play, Molière’s “Le
Tartuffe,” in a Moscow theater, then went straight to the airport, where he
flew to Sri Lanka, then on to Israel.
“No one
knew that I was [acting in] my last play,” Budikov said. “It was very hard
psychologically … when we took off, I was alone in my row [on the plane] and I
just started crying — and I cried until I fell asleep.”
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