NCSEJ WEEKLY NEWS BRIEF Washington, D.C. March 24, 2017

Ukraine is governed by "people with non-Ukrainian blood", says Savchenko LB.ua, March 21, 2017 https://en.lb.ua/news/2017/03/21/3385_ukraine_governed_people.html

People's deputy Nadiya Savchenko says Ukraine is governed people with "non-Ukrainian blood."

During an appearance on NewsOne TV channel on Tuesday, 21 March, Savchenko answered a telephone question from a woman from Krivyy Rih.

"Nadya, why does not anyone say what people say? I stood at a bus stop and heard an old woman saying what has been written in the Bible: there was a Tatar-Mongol yoke, there was a Polish yoke for Ukraine, and now its Jewish yoke. Why do you keep mum about it?" the viewer asked.

Savchenko replied: "Yes, thank you, a good question. If the people are talking about this, it must be the truth. And yes, we have the people at the power with, let's say, non-Ukrainian blood. We can talk about that, we should think and act!"

Boryslav Bereza reaction on Savchenko’s interview

MP of Jewish origin Borislav Bereza commented on the statement by his colleague on the parliament Nadezhda Savchenko that Ukrainian authorities have "non-Ukrainian blood".

He wrote about this on his Facebook page.

"I found the information about the anti-Semitic statement of Savchenko in Paris at a meeting with French parliamentarians. A journalist from Ukraine called me and asked to comment on the situation. After my comments french politics asked me what I was talking about, they were interested in my facial expressions and intonations. I showed them a video and told what the MP of Ukraine, a former member of the PACE delegation, Nadezhda Savchenko said. "Then the only their phrase was:" For such a statement the French MP would be discarded in the shortest time, regardless of his merits before the Republic."

"It's all you need to know about an adequate reaction to such demarches." After all her antics, from statements to joint pastime with the pro-Russian separatists and the lack of reaction from the state, I doubt that something will happen. "Savchenko provocateur. Or did it by stupidity, but it works against Ukraine. This topic is closed, the page is turned in. Now we can wait for the reaction from the regulatory committee or the GPU, but the time will show everything. But I want to recall the name of the famous etching by Francisco Goya "The dream of the mind generates Monsters. "If you do not react, then the monster will devour those who try not to notice it," - said Bereza.

Rabbi Lazar urges to legalize circumcision in Russia Interfax-Religion, March 23, 2017 http://interfax-religion.com/?act=news&div=13656

Chief rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar speaks for legalizing the procedure of circumcision in the country.

"I believe it is extremely important to consolidate efforts on legalizing this procedure. Any bans in this field will lead to appearance of underground doctors that will not bear any responsibility for their actions," Lazar said at his meeting with the head of the State Duma Committee on developing civil society, questions of public and religious associations Sergey Gavrilov in the Jewish Museum and Center of Tolerance in Moscow.

According to the rabbi, if there is a clear and comprehensive mechanism of control in this sphere from the side of religious organizations and authorities, "it will settle many questions."

Lazar reported that the Jewish community had worked out a draft document on legalizing circumcision.

Russian Jewish Congress, Footballers' Union Unveil Anti-Racism Project Sputnik, March 21, 2017 https://sputniknews.com/politics/201703211051816968-anti-racism-project/

Russian footballer's trade union head Roman Shirokov and Russian Jewish Congress President Yury Kanner signed a cooperation memorandum to implement the project in the presence of the Russian Football Union's anti-racism and anti-discrimination inspector, Alexei Smertin, according to the statement.

"Today, on March 21, on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination established by the UN General Assembly, the #WeareRussia#Against Discrimination national project was launched to tackle racism, xenophobia, antisemitism and other forms of discrimination in Russian football," Russian Jewish organization said in a statement.

The project involves conducting sociological research, training experts to deal with ethnic tensions in sports, producing guides and education programs for schools and universities, monitoring xenophobia in sports, working with fans, holding educational events and making documentaries, the statement added.

The project will run at least until next year, when Russia is due to host the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Russia is also hosting the 2017 FIFA Confederations Cup this summer.

Russia's Federation of Jewish Communities Calls for Return of Synagogues Soviets Seized By Paul Goble Window on Eurasia, March 21, 2017 http://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/03/russias-federation-of-jewish.html

Following the path the Russian Orthodox Church and Russia’s Muslim groups have already entered, Russia’s Jewish community is demanding that the Russian authorities restore to them synagogues that the Soviet state seized from them, a call that is already provoking a negative reaction by some Russians.

Citing the Russian law on the restoration of religious property to its rightful owners, Aleksandr Boroda, the president of FEOR, says that his community “unqualifiedly supports” the provisions of that legislation and wants to see Russian officials, especially at the regional level, respond to its call “more actively” (apn- spb.ru/opinions/article25633.htm).

At present, he continues, “historic synagogue buildings in Kaluga and Rybninsk” have been returned and “negotiations are taking place in a number of other cities.” Unfortunately, he suggests, this is “a quite complicated and slow process,” despite the clear intention of the Russian law on this point.

The return of synagogues to the Jewish community may be even more important than the return of churches to the Russian Orthodox or mosques to the Muslims, he suggests, because “before 1917, Jewish communities were subjected to various limitations and simply couldn’t physically ‘acquire’ significant property.”

That has provoked an angry response by the Russian nationalist APN-St. Petersburg portal which declares that “Boroda doesn’t know the history of his own people. In 1917,” it says, in just the five largest cities of the Russian Empire on the territory of present-day Belarus, there were 231 synagogues. In Minsk alone, the 67,000 Jews could pray in 83 synagogues.”

“The Jewish diaspora of present-day Russia,” the portal continues, “numbers fewer than 200,000, of whom more than 50,000 live in Moscow where there are five synagogues” open. “But in contrast to 1917,” APN-St. Petersburg says, “the overwhelming majority of them are non-believers, Christians or agnostics.”

“For the rest,” the site says, “there are quite enough” to satisfy demand. Clearly, the Jews of Russia are simply following the “infectious” demands of the Russian Orthodox Church for restitution even though the ROC has far more justified claims given how many more Orthodox Christians there are in the country.

The APN-St. Petersburg report is likely to be the openly salvo of a new attack on any religious group other than the ROC which seeks restitution, but the fact that FEOR is seeking the return of Jewish property means that this segment of the war of monuments is likely to heat up still further in the coming months.

Russia summons Israeli envoy following IDF strikes in Syria JTA, March 17, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/03/17/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/russia-summons-israeli-envoy-following- idf-strikes-in-syria

Russia summoned its ambassador to Israel for clarifications following Israeli airstrikes in Syria.

Russia, which backs Syria’s embattled president, Bashar Assad, summoned its envoy, Gary Koren, on Friday less than 24 hours after the Israeli military action on Thursday night, according to The Times of Israel.

In a rare statement, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed to having carried out aerial strikes in Syria and intercepted missiles launched at its aircraft from the ground.

No Israelis were hurt during the strikes Thursday night or from the anti-aircraft fire, according to a statement by the IDF spokesman.

Israel is believed to have carried out several attacks on Syrian soil in recent years, but usually refrains from confirming or denying reports on its alleged actions there.

According to the nrg news site, the strikes were against targets affiliated with Hezbollah, possibly on a weapons shipment to the Shiite terrorist group, which is based in Lebanon but is fighting in Syria alongside Assad’s forces against rebels and Sunni militants.

Israeli “aircrafts targeted several targets in Syria. Several anti-aircraft missiles were launched from Syria following the mission and IDF Aerial Defense Systems intercepted one of the missiles. At no point was the safety of Israeli civilians or the IAF aircraft compromised,” the IDF spokesman wrote.

The missiles were launched at the airplanes minutes after they had left Syrian airspace, according to nrg. Debris from the missiles, which were intercepted by the Arrow defense system over Jordan, landed on residential homes in the west of that country near Inba and Irbid.

The Syrian media reported that the country’s Defense Ministry claimed that one Israeli plane was downed and another was damaged from anti-aircraft fire. A ministry statement also vowed “a harsh response against the Zionist regime by all means available.”

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Russia’s contribution to the fight against the Islamic State and al-Qaida during a one-day visit to Moscow.

Russia must limit Iranian power in Syria: Israeli intelligence director By Luke Baker Reuters, March 21, 2017 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-syria-iran-idUSKBN16S1IA

Russia and other world powers must move to limit Iran's growing military strength in Syria because it poses a regional threat, the director-general of Israel's Intelligence Ministry told Reuters in an interview.

Israeli officials estimate Iran commands at least 25,000 fighters in Syria, including members of its own Revolutionary Guard, Shi'ite militants from Iraq and recruits from Afghanistan and Pakistan. It also coordinates the activities of the powerful Lebanese militia Hezbollah.

"As we speak, relations between Iran and Syria are getting tighter," said Chagai Tzuriel, the top civil servant in Israel's Intelligence Ministry, who spent 27 years in Mossad, including as station chief in Washington.

"Iran is in the process of putting together agreements, including economic agreements, with Syria to strengthen its hold, its ports and naval bases there," he said in a rare interview. "There is a need for Russia and other powers to work to avoid the threat that Iran ends up with military, air and naval bases in Syria."

Israel has long warned about the threat from Iran, especially its perceived desire to acquire nuclear weapons, but now sees a rising territorial squeeze, with Tehran's influence reaching in an arc from Lebanon in the north to Gaza in the south, where it has links to Islamist groups.

Iran maintains it wants a nuclear capability only for domestic energy and scientific research purposes, and has so far largely stuck to the terms of the nuclear deal agreed with the United States and other world powers in 2015.

Tzuriel said the conflict in Syria, now in its seventh year, had created a number of imbalances in the region - whether between Sunni and Shi'ite Muslims, Iran and Turkey, Kurds and Arabs, Turkey and Syria, Russia and the United States - that needed to be kept contained and shifted back into equilibrium.

A lot of the responsibility for that rests with Russia, which has become the biggest player in the region and is capable of exerting the most influence, he said.

"When it comes to Iran, the United States, Russia and other powers need to understand that (growing Iranian influence in Syria) is going to be a constant source of friction," said Tzuriel, adding that it could reduce Moscow's own influence in the region and set back the gains it has made in Syria.

"Russia has a vested interest in keeping that threat contained."

'WHAT DO WE WANT?'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has met President Vladimir Putin five times since Sept. 2015, largely in an effort to ensure communications are open and there are no misunderstandings over Syria, where Israeli fighter planes have occasionally bombed targets, including last week. Syria fired a missile in response and Moscow called in Israel's ambassador to discuss the Israeli raid.

"We don't view Russia as the enemy and I don't think they view us as the enemy either," said Tzuriel, but he suggested Russia would need to work with others, including the United States, to keep a lid on the forces at play in Syria.

"We have to assume that the Russians want stability, they want a Pax Russiana in the region," he said.

"If they want a stabilization, they can't do it alone. They need the United States, they need regional powers, they need opposition parties and militias, even those that are not exactly Russia's cup of tea."

After a career in intelligence gathering, Tzuriel drew a distinction between intelligence and strategy. After years of conflict and more than 500,000 dead, it was still incumbent on the parties tied to Syria to fix a strategic outcome.

"We have to decide what we want (in Syria) or what we don't want," he said. "The main strategic threat right now is what happens in Syria, it is the key arena. There's no place in the world that has so many elements wrapped up in it."

How Our Jewish Organizations Combat Anti-Semitism By Ira Forman Times of Israel, March 21, 2017 http://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/how-our-jewish-organizations-combat-anti-semitism/

It’s been two months since I left my position at the U.S. State Department as the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism (SEAS). I didn’t come away, after 44 months, with any grand theory on anti-Semitism, nor do I have any silver bullet answers to the problem. I do, however, have a number of strongly held conclusions on the tools we must utilize to combat this evil.

Foremost is to recognize the role of the major American Jewish organizations in this fight. Those of us who devote a great deal of time to the Jewish world can be cynical at times about some of our Jewish organizations. There seem to be so many of them; are they all necessary? But in my SEAS job I came to understand and appreciate the resources the Jewish communal world devotes to fighting anti-Semitism and the expertise these groups have developed, which are truly impressive. I shudder to think how much worse things would be for world Jewry without their efforts.

The growing threat of anti-Semitism today can only be confronted effectively by a broad coalition of state and civil society actors who in many ways are dependent on each other. The small SEAS office in the State Department has a limited ability to confront today’s anti-Semitism without the active cooperation of other State Department bureaus and our embassies overseas. The State Department has limited effectiveness without the support of the White House and the Congress. And the united efforts of the U.S. government are often not adequate to push back against threats to worldwide Jewry without the support of democratic allies in Europe and Israel. Perhaps most importantly, governments can’t control this problem without the active help of civil society.

From my experience the single most committed and active civil society actor fighting anti-Semitism today is the Jewish communal world.

I came to rely not only on my State Department colleagues to educate me regarding the facts on the ground and effective strategies, but also on our Jewish organizations, sharing information, seeking advice and engaging in joint action.

Here is only some of what they have done:

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) has developed a talented team of senior professionals dealing with worldwide anti-Semitism. The efforts of these professionals who focus on European anti-Semitism is not only impressive but our office depended on their strategic vision, knowledge, contacts and organizational work. AJC’s work with multilateral organizations is also very important. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has developed critical programs to aid Jewish communities overseas. Moreover, in the increasingly important field of countering cyberhate the ADL is our first source of information, unsurpassed among American Jewish groups.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC) collects information, lobbies against and reports on anti-Semitism worldwide. It was essential to the efforts to get the Working Definition of Anti-Semitism accepted by state actors in Europe. Particularly in hot spots like Hungary, SWC often helped us recognize problems before we began reading about them. The National Committee Supporting Eurasian Jewry (NCSEJ, formerly the National Council on Soviet Jewry) was our first and primary source of information in the countries of the former Soviet Union — places like Russia, the Baltic States, Ukraine and Central Asia. No one knows the Jewish communal players and government attitudes toward anti-Semitism in this part of the world like NCSEJ.

The World Jewish Congress (WJC) has knowledgeable staff and influential lay leadership around the world dealing with anti-Semitism issues. No other Jewish organization can generate more headlines and focuses more media attention on problems when diaspora Jewish communities are at risk.

When there was an international effort to push back against Hungarian government efforts to honor historical anti-Semites, Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) spoke out and sent a representative to Budapest. The Jewish Council on Public Affairs (JCPA) has worked with local Jewish community relations councils to disseminate information to the grass roots on problems to focus on. Individual Jewish federations have reached out to partner and aid some of the most vulnerable Jewish communities in the diaspora. The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organization along with JFNA has supported the development of security measures that protect American Jewish institutions through their sole support of the Secure Community Network (SCN). The SCN’s experience in working with law enforcement has benefited smaller Jewish communities in Europe. The Conference of Presidents continues to serve as a focal point of sharing information and urging united action when anti-Semitic activity peaks.

B’nai B’rith’s Washington staff provided us critical resources for dealing with the problems facing South American Jewry. HIAS and the Jewish Agency in Israel (JAFI) quietly and effectively save Jewish lives threatened by anti- Semitism and provide for Jewish families in their new homes.

There are so many other Jewish organizations that our office worked with over these last four years. I apologize for not mentioning their individual contributions in this limited space.

Recent events have taught us that anti-Semitism is not just the problem of smaller diaspora communities in Europe — or South America, Asia or Africa. The problem is complex and increasingly pervasive. We can be proud of the work that many different parts of our government have undertaken, particularly over the last decade, to help Jewish communities overseas. However, if there is one takeaway from my experience, it is that coalitions of governments and private sector actors are the only way to effectively fight back. Our American Jewish communal organizations have stepped up to do their part. We should recognize and thank them for it.

Ira Forman most recently served as the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism at the State Department.

Jewish groups urge Congress to preserve anti-Semitism monitor JTA, March 22, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/03/22/news-opinion/politics/jewish-groups-urge-congress-to-preserve-anti- semitism-monitor

Jewish defense groups urged Congress to preserve the State Department’s anti-Semitism monitor.

Representatives of the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Secure Community Network testified Wednesday before the human rights subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee.

Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., the subcommittee chairman, convened the hearing to examine connections between increases in anti-Semitism in Europe and in the United States.

The witnesses spoke to the topic, but also made the case for preserving the special envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. A report last month said that President Donald Trump’s administration was planning to scrap the position. No successor has been named for the the most recent anti-Semitism monitor, Ira Forman, who was on hand for the hearing.

The position is mandated by a 2004 law that Smith helped author, and the New Jersey lawmaker has joined Democrats in opposing any bid to scrap it. An array of Jewish groups and lawmakers have also urged the Trump administration to keep the post in place.

Naming a replacement for Forman “will ensure that the U.S. maintains a specialized focus on anti-Semitism,” said Stacy Burdett, the director of ADL’s Washington office.

Mark Weitzman, the director of government affairs for the Wiesenthal Center, said the position should be elevated to the ambassador level.

Speakers suggested — sometimes gently, sometimes less so — that Trump’s team needed to exhibit more sensitivity to the issue of anti-Semitism.

Weitzman cited the White House’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement, which omitted any mention of Jews. He noted that anti-Semites seized on the statement as a means of denying Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

“Even a mistake in the context of this background can be used by people with bad intentions,” he said.

Burdett said that “political leaders have the most immediate and significant opportunity to set the tone of a national response to an anti-Semitic incident, an anti-Semitic party or an anti-Semitic parliamentarian.”

Rabbi Andrew Baker, the director of international Jewish affairs for the AJC, focused on manifestations of anti- Semitism on the left and right in Europe.

Paul Goldenberg, the director of SCN, the security arm of the Jewish Federations of North America, said that extremist groups in the United States and Europe are “increasingly the context for each other” by echoing one another in the themes they embrace.

Belarus leader accuses Western spies of fomenting protests AP, March 20, 2017 https://www.yahoo.com/news/belarus-leader-accuses-western-spies-fomenting-protests-122026346-- finance.html

The president of Belarus says Western intelligence agencies are using a "fifth column" to cause unrest and threaten the stability of his regime.

Thousands of people have taken to the streets in the former Soviet republic in recent weeks to protest an unpopular labor law, the largest anti-government demonstrations in Belarus for years.

President Alexander Lukashenko says Monday that "Western funds under the direction of Western security services" are trying to "inflame the situation in Belarus," the state news agency Belta reported.

People in Belarus are unhappy about government plans to tax those without official employment. Despite a rare decision by Lukashenko to postpone the measure, protests have continued. Dozens of demonstrators have been arrested by the authorities.

Lukashenko has suppressed opposition and independent media since coming to office in 1994.

CHAIRMAN WICKER HIGHLIGHTS IMPORTANCE OF OSCE MISSION IN STABILIZING EUROPE CSCE, March 21, 2017 https://www.csce.gov/international-impact/chairman-wicker-highlights-importance-osce-mission- stabilizing-europe

At a March 21 U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearing on “U.S. Policy and Strategy in Europe,” Helsinki Commission Chairman Senator Roger Wicker underlined his commitment to Ukraine’s future and highlighted the importance of the mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

“The more Ukraine succeeds, the better off it is for us in the United States and the West, and I think it is one of the most profoundly important issues that we face in the next year or two,” stated Senator Wicker, who also serves as a senior member of SASC.

Praising the OSCE’s monitoring mission in Ukraine as providing the “international community’s eyes and ears in the conflict zone,” Chairman Wicker underlined the challenges facing the consensus-based OSCE in addressing the increased aggression in Europe by Russia, one of its participating States.

Citing the fundamental “Helsinki principles” on which the OSCE is based, Senator Wicker pressed a panel of experts for their views on the continued value of the OSCE.

Ambassador William J. Burns, former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State who also served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, stated that despite the OSCE’s limitations, the organization has continuing value.

“It embodies some of the core values that we share with our European allies and partners in terms of sovereignty of states and the inviolability of borders—so that the big states don’t just get to grab parts of smaller states, just because they can,” he said. Burns further called for continued U.S. investment in the OSCE.

Former NATO SACEUR General Philip M. Breedlove, USAF (Ret.), suggested that the Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine was a particularly valuable expression of the OSCE’s work, underlining that “…with some of the fake news that was created in the Donbass and other places as Russia invaded, even though OSCE was challenged … often, [the monitoring mission] was the source of the real news of what was actually going on on the ground.”

Ambassador Alexander R. Vershbow, former Deputy Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization who also served as U.S. Ambassador to Russia, stated that the OSCE remains valuable, despite the challenges inherent in Russian actions, “…because of the norms and values that it upholds – even though the Russians are violating a lot of those right now – it gives us a basis on which to challenge their misbehavior.” Praising the Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine as “very courageous,” Vershbow underlined that while the OSCE faces serious limitations, “I don’t see any alternative right now in trying to manage a conflict like in Eastern Ukraine.”

Denis Voronenkov: former Russian MP who fled to Ukraine shot dead in Kiev By Shaun Walker Guardian, March 23, 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/23/former-russian-mp-denis-voronenkov-shot-dead-in- kiev

A former Russian MP who had fled to Ukraine was shot dead on a busy street in central Kiev on Thursday.

Denis Voronenkov, who had spoken out against Vladimir Putin and Kremlin policies, was shot three times outside the upmarket Premier Palace hotel.

Ukraine’s president, Petro Poroshenko, quickly pointed the finger at Russian authorities, calling the killing an act of “state terrorism”.

Kiev’s head of police said Voronenkov, who had been granted Ukrainian citizenship after he fled in 2016, was shot three or four times in the head and neck and died at the scene.

A firefight broke out between Voronenkov’s bodyguard, believed to have been provided by the Ukrainian security services, and the assassin. Both were wounded and taken to hospital, where the assassin died a few hours later.

The former MP, 45, had been a member of Russia’s Communist party. His wife, the opera singer Maria Maksakova, was an MP with the pro-Kremlin United Russia party. She reportedly fled to Ukraine with her husband five months ago.

“He told me he was receiving threats from the FSB,” Ilya Ponomarev, another former MP who has also fled Russia, told the Guardian by telephone from Kiev. “To be honest, I had thought he was being a bit paranoid.”

He added that Voronenkov had asked Ukrainian security services for armed protection after receiving the threats. Ponomarev said he had been speaking to Voronenkov every day recently and had been due to meet him on Thursday morning.

After meeting Ponomarev, Voronenkov was apparently planning to give evidence in a case against Ukraine’s former president Viktor Yanukovych, who fled to Russia after the Maidan revolution in 2014.

In the aftermath of the uprising, Russia annexed Crimea and backed separatist forces in east Ukraine in a war that has killed 10,000 people. After fleeing to Kiev, Voronenkov claimed he had supported the annexation of Crimea as an MP because of political pressure.

Senior Ukrainian officials quickly painted the killing as a Kremlin plot, with the prosecutor general, Yuri Lutsenko, writing on Facebook that it was “typical public Kremlin punishment of a witness”.

Lutsenko said Voronenkov had already given testimony that implicated Yanukovych in providing cover for Russian military intervention in Ukraine.

Poroshenko released a statement saying Voronenkov was one of the “main witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine and, in particular, the role of Yanukovych regarding the deployment of Russian troops to Ukraine”.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said it was absurd to look for a link to Moscow in the killing. The foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the “killer regime” in Kiev “will do its best to make sure that no one will ever know the truth about what happened”.

Voronenkov had spoken about the possibility of retribution from Russia after he fled , but said he refused to go into hiding. He gave a number of interviews after his defection that were sharply critical of the Russian president and Kremlin policy in Ukraine. He compared modern Russia to Nazi Germany and called the annexation of Crimea illegal.

“I believe that whatever will happen will happen. I don’t intend to hide,” he said in a recent television interview. He said he believed the Ukrainian security services were able to keep him safe.

In an interview with the Washington Post this week, he said he and his wife were considered traitors in Russia. “It’s hard to imagine we will be forgiven,” he said.

Voronenkov had been put on a Russian wanted list in connection with an alleged $5m (£4m) property fraud. Earlier this month, a Moscow court sanctioned his arrest in absentia.

The anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny released a video after Voronenkov’s flight to Kiev last October calling the former MP a hypocrite who had engaged in corrupt dealings and enthusiastically backed Putin before fleeing. Tweets Voronenkov posted in 2014 gloated over the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin-backed uprising in east Ukraine.

Many Ukrainians were sharply critical of the decision to award citizenship to an MP from Russia who had voted to annex Crimea and suggested he may have changed his views to win citizenship and flee his troubles with the law in Russia.

Ponomarev, who was the only member of Russia’s Duma to vote against the annexation of Crimea, said this was unfair: “To be honest, I think he was never that interested in high politics and decisions like Crimea. Nobody is perfect, but I don’t think he was engaged in serious corruption. He was doing some investigations and was very dangerous for the FSB.”

Ukrainian security services said they would be offering protection to Ponomarev and Voronenkov’s wife Maksakova in the aftermath of the killing. Maksakova arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting and was escorted away. The couple were raising an infant son.

Separately, in the early hours of Thursday, an explosion at an ammunitions depot in east Ukraine caused a huge fire and prompted the evacuation of more than 20,000 people. Ukrainian authorities said the explosion was sabotage and Poroshenko said “it is no coincidence” that the explosion and Voronenkov’s killing came on the same day, although he offered no evidence linking the events.

Russia Wants Review Of Ukraine's 'Unfair' Decision Barring Eurovision Singer RFE/RL, March 23, 2017 http://www.rferl.org/a/russia-complains-ukraine-ban-eurovision-singer/28386618.html

The Kremlin has called for a review of what it said was Ukraine's "unfair" decision to bar Russia's contestant in the upcoming Eurovision Song Contest from entering the country.

"We consider this decision to be very wrong and...we expect that this decision will be reviewed and that the Russian participant will be able to take part in this contest," Russian President Vladimir Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters on March 23.

The Ukrainian Security Service on March 22 said it had prohibited Yulia Samoilova from entering Ukrainian territory for three years because she had violated Ukrainian law, an apparent reference to a visit by the singer to Crimea in 2015 -- the year after Russia seized control of the Black Sea peninsula from Ukraine.

Ukrainian law enables the government to ban people who have traveled to Crimea without obtaining prior permission from Kyiv. Ukraine last year blacklisted 140 Russian performing artists on those grounds.

Ukraine won the right to host this year's edition of Eurovision, a colorful annual song contest watched live on television by nearly 200 million people last year, when its contestant won in 2016. The final will be held on May 13 in Kyiv.

The Russian Foreign Ministry sharply criticized the ban on March 22, calling the Ukrainian government a "regime infected with Russophobic paranoia."

The move also drew criticism from the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), co-producer of the event with the host country each year, which said it was "deeply disappointed" over the decision.

The EBU has said it "will continue a dialogue with the Ukrainian authorities with the aim of ensuring that all artists can perform" in Kyiv.

Russian state television channel Rossia said that none of the country's national stations would broadcast the contest.

Samoilova, 27, was chosen as Russia's contestant on March 12. The singer, who suffers from a rare muscular disorder that leaves her bound to a wheelchair, performed in the Crimean city of Kerch in mid-2015.

Russia took control of Crimea in March 2014, after sending in troops and staging a referendum considered by most countries worldwide as illegitimate.

The takeover was decried in the West as an aggressive attempt to redraw European borders and upset the postwar security order, and led to the imposition of sanctions on Russia by the United States, the European Union, and other countries.

Vladimir Putin meets French far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in Moscow By Shaun Walker and Kim Willsher Guardian, March 24, 2017 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/mar/24/vladimir-putin-hosts-marine-le-pen-in-moscow

Vladimir Putin has received Marine Le Pen in the Kremlin in a surprise move likely to reignite fears in Europe about Russian support for the European far right.

Putin told Le Pen Russia had no intention of meddling in the French presidential elections, according to Russian news agencies, though the meeting is likely to send the opposite message.

“We do not want to influence events in any way, but we retain the right to meet with all the different political forces, just like our European and American partners do,” said Putin.

Le Pen travelled to Moscow at the invitation of an MP for meetings in the Russian parliament, and had not been expected to meet Putin. However, after the parliamentary meetings were over the Front National candidate soon appeared in televised pictures from inside the Kremlin.

“Of course, it would be very interesting to share our opinions about how our bilateral relations are doing, and about the situation that is developing in Europe,” Putin told Le Pen. “I know that you represent a European political force that is growing quickly.”

Speaking after their meeting, Le Pen said Putin represented “a sovereign nation” and “new vision”.

“A new world has emerged in the past years. This is Vladimir Putin’s world, Donald Trump’s world in the United States, Mr [Narendra] Modi’s world in India,” she added.

“I think I am probably the one who shares with all these great nations a vision of cooperation and not one of subservience - a hawkish vision that has too often been expressed by the European Union.”

Russian support for Le Pen appears to have similar roots to the well-publicised backing of Donald Trump. There is both the pro-Moscow rhetoric of the candidate, and the broader goal of supporting a “chaos” candidate who would be likely to erode European unity on issues such as sanctions against Russia.

Le Pen has publicly backed the Russian annexation of Crimea and frequently expressed admiration for Putin.

A Russian hackers’ collective released emails that appeared to show Le Pen had received a loan from a Russian bank in 2014 in return for taking pro-Moscow positions in public.

Le Pen has denied those allegations, but makes no secret of the fact that the Front National has taken loans from foreign banks because French financial institutions refuse to fund the presidential campaign.

On Friday Le Pen said the subject of Russian financial backing for her party had not come up in her meeting with Putin. She did, however, reaffirm her position that if elected she would seek a swift removal of EU sanctions on Russia.

Earlier in the day she had called on Russia and France to work together to save the world from “globalisation and Islamic fundamentalism”, two of her campaign issues. “I’m a totally free woman,” she said. “I don’t want to be under the yoke of the US … I don’t want to be under the yoke of Russia.

“We are in a period where conspiracy theories appear to be very much in fashion. As soon as something goes wrong, it’s Russia’s fault. This makes me smile.”

Last year, Le Canard Enchaîné, the French satirical newspaper, reported that Mike Turner, a Republican on the US House of Representatives’ permanent select committee on intelligence, had urged American intelligence agencies to look into Le Pen’s Russia connections.

James Clapper, the then director of national intelligence, wrote in a letter dated 28 November that the Front National “publicly acknowledged that it had received a $9.8m loan from a Russian bank with links to the Kremlin, allegedly brokered by a sanctioned Russian Duma deputy, according to French press reports”.

The Front National treasurer, Wallerand de Saint-Just, has insisted Le Pen’s visit is not a campaign fundraising exercise. His comments came as party members admitted they were still short of millions to run the campaign.

Opinion polls suggest Le Pen and the independent centrist Emmanuel Macron will go through from the first- round presidential vote on 23 April to the second round run-off on 7 May.

Preparing for Passover in Ukraine’s last shtetl By Cnaan Liphshiz JTA, March 22, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/03/21/news-opinion/world/preparing-for-passover-in-ukraines-last-shtetl

At first glance, this drab town 160 miles south of Kiev seems nearly identical to the settlements that dot the poverty-stricken district of Vinnitsa.

Shrouded in a seemingly permanent cloud of smoke from wood fires — still the standard means of heating here — Bershad, population 13,000, features two rickety bridges over the polluted (and presently frozen) Dokhna River, roads traversed by Soviet-era clunkers and an utter absence of street lights.

And like many far-flung Ukrainian towns, Bershad, too, has a small, aging Jewish population. The Jews persist here even though almost all of their relatives are living in the relative comfort of Israel or the United States. But there is more to Bershad than meets the eye.

But there is more to Bershad than meets the eye.

A closer look at its unique history and architecture reveals something incredible: Bershad is one of Europe’s last remaining shtetls. This town near the Moldavan border, with a Jewish population of 50, is a living testament to the Jewish community’s incredible survival story — one that has endured despite decades of communist repression, the Holocaust and the exodus of Russian-speaking Jews.

Nowhere is the uniqueness of this Jewish community more evident than the Bershad synagogue, which was built from clay 200 years ago.

Incredibly, Soviet authorities returned the white, two-story, tin-roofed building to the town’s Jewish community in 1946, shortly after the Red Army liberated present-day Ukraine from the grip of Nazi Germany and its allies. It was a highly unusual move in a secularist empire that under Joseph Stalin systematically nationalized property of faith communities and routinely persecuted Jews who insisted on practicing their religion.

Coming on the heels of the Nazi genocide, this Soviet policy was a death blow to Jewish life throughout Ukraine’s countryside — once the home of thousands of shtetls — and severely limited it in the large cities.

Yet “at a time where communist repression ended the existence of the few shtetls that by some miracle survived the Holocaust, the existence of a working synagogue in Bershad was the axis of communal life for this shtetl,” said Yefim Vygodner, 64. The town had a Jewish population of some 3,500 in the 1960s.

Vygodner is the leader of Bershad’s Jewish community — and its youngest member.

Over the decades, the relatively privileged status of Bershad Jews – Vygodner attributes it to a combination of luck, remoteness, resilience and friendly ties with non-Jewish neighbors — became most apparent on Passover and Yom Kippur, he said, because on those holidays Judaism came out of the home and into the synagogue.

In an interview this month, Vygodner told JTA how, when he was a boy, his mother would send him to a makeshift matzah bakery that opened each year in front of the synagogue. In the weeks before Passover, the smell of baking matzah wafted along the shtetl’s muddy streets, he recalled.

“The baker would scoop out of the oven wavy, handmade matzah and wrap [it] up in paper for each client individually,” Vygodner said. “I didn’t even know that matzah was also mass produced.”

Bronia Feldman, a jovial 79-year-old, recalled another scene from Jewish life in Bershad: Every Yom Kippur, her mother would take her to the square opposite the synagogue, where hundreds of Jews would gather to hear the shofar — the culmination of Judaism’s solemn Day of Atonement.

“Those with sensitive jobs, teachers and doctors, didn’t go into the synagogue because they didn’t want to get in trouble,” Vygodner said of the communist years. “They just hung around the synagogue.”

On Passover, though, “everyone ate matzah – doctors, teachers, engineers – everyone,” she said.

Vygodner and Feldman’s accounts are highly unusual for Jews their age who grew up in the former Soviet Union, where Judaism was practiced in secret, if at all.

The key to Bershad’s survival was its western location: In 1941, its region fell under the occupation of Romanian fascist troops, who were less methodical about murdering Jews than their German allies. They liquidated neighboring shtetls and turned Bershad, which in 1939 had a Jewish population of 5,000, into a central ghetto with 25,000 prisoners. Many perished, but 3,500 Bershad Jews survived.

One of them is Alxander Zornitskiy, 83, a retired veterinarian and an author, who hid with his mother and two sisters as German soldiers killed 2,800 people in their nearby shtetl of Ternovka. With help from non-Jewish locals, the family made it to Bershad, where they lived in crowded conditions and without enough food in one of the two-room wooden houses that made up the Jewish quarter.

“The Romanians were cruel, but they didn’t shoot us,” he summarized. “Every street here reminds me of the Holocaust. But it’s also where I survived.”

After the Holocaust, the consent — or at least silence — of Bershad’s non-Jews was crucial to maintaining the town’s Jewish spiritual life.

“This is where centuries of coexistence played a role,” Vygodner said.

Unlike their more intellectual coreligionists from big cities, he added, Bershad’s Jews were blue collar: metal workers, shoemakers, carpenters and fishermen, whose families for centuries had worked shoulder to shoulder with non-Jews.

The matzah bakery closed in the 1980s. By 1989, Bershad’s Jewish community comprised 1,000 members – half its size from a decade earlier.

Today, Bershad’s remaining Jews celebrate a communal seder at the synagogue organized by Chabad. They also come here year-round to receive food packages courtesy of the Christians for Israel charity group. Yakov Sklarsky, who owns the town’s only photo studio, functions as rabbi most of the year. His credentials are his ability to sing and read, if not understand, Hebrew.

The Torah scroll in the synagogue is not kosher. The shul itself, which Vygodner said functions more like a community center than a house of worship, rarely gets a minyan, the quorum of 10 men required for some prayer services in Orthodox Judaism. Its Star of David ceiling fresco remains, but its façade is peeling, revealing the clay and hay makeup of its walls. The women’s section has been transformed into a storage area.

Even so, it is one of the best-preserved buildings of the old shtetl, boasting a new tin roof and a fresh coat of white paint.

Most of the houses that surround the synagogue, which is at the heart of Bershad’s Jewish quarter, are uninhabitable, left to disintegrate by Jewish owners who immigrated to Israel, the United States or Kiev, but were unable to sell the land in one of Ukraine’s poorest areas. The yards are filled with junk and packs of stray dogs.

Many of the houses have a front porch that Vygodner says was an amenity favored by shtetl Jews. Some even have mezuzah markings on the peeling paint of their door frames.

But members of the Jewish community here, for their part, are not complaining. Feldman says she is happy to have a synagogue – an institution that few other towns of Bershad’s size can boast in Ukraine – and feels “lucky to have Yakov as our rabbi.”

Despite the local pride Feldman, the last remaining Bershad Jew whose mother tongue is Yiddish, is contemplating leaving.

“I have a sister in Ashdod, and I’m thinking of joining her,” she said of the Israeli city, adding that her main reason for staying is her daughter, Maya, who lives in Bershad.

As for Vygodner, his son left for Israel five years ago. But he and his wife, Tamara, won’t be joining him anytime soon.

“I don’t think Israel is holding its breath for me,” he said. “Besides, living here is an acquired taste and I’m set in my ways. I have my community here, my place.”

Ukraine Is Silently Leading A Digital Currency Revolution By Ben Carnes Forbes, March 20, 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2017/03/20/ukraine-is-silently-leading-a-digital-currency- revolution/

There’s a witticism sometimes used among Ukrainians: “may you be forced to survive only on your official salary.” The quip is both a tongue-in-cheek nod to the endemic corruption that is a daily, often necessary, reality of life in Ukraine and also emblematic of a certain self-effacing, survivalist mentality constituent to the national character. In recent years, the necessity of this “go-it-alone” approach to daily life has led to first-in-the-world technological strides.

Ukrainian frustration with the corrupt status quo boiled over in 2014, leading to the Euromaidan revolution and the ousting of Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych. But beyond the photo-ready scenes of violent confrontation, ensuing economic instability saw a digital revolution silently take hold in the form of an almost unparalleled adoption of digital “crypto-currencies,” such as bitcoin.

Bitcoin is based on so-called “blockchain” technology, a “centralized but decentralized” concept that helps the currency simultaneously balance security, anonymity and fiscal stability. The blockchain is “centralized” in that it serves as a ledger by which digital transactions—say, sending a single bitcoin to an online vendor—are tracked to ensure that, for example, the bitcoin is actually yours and not a digital copy. But the ledger is also “decentralized,” in that it’s distributed widely and open to the public, allowing no single party or group to game the system. The result is an ostensibly open, transparent system of currency.

Ukraine has been nothing short of passionate in its embrace of bitcoin, with many citizens using the currency as a hedge against extreme inflation and an unstable hryvnia that has lost 80% of its value amid ongoing turmoil. In 2014, nearly 5,000 BNK-24 ATM terminals nationwide began offering the option to buy bitcoins for cash as effortlessly as one would conduct any other automated banking transaction. Last year saw one Ukrainian bitcoin- selling service report a five-fold increase in demand, and the country also became the first regulated market in the world to begin offering futures on bitcoin contracts.

But perhaps most notably, the Ukrainian government has sought to apply the promising technology’s tell-tale transparency to its process of auctioning state property. In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Ukraine underwent a sort-of “revolution without a revolution." The same basic, established power structures remained in place, despite an ostensibly more democratic government that had, in reality, done little more than change the titles on its business cards.

As Ukrainian historian Dr. Serhy Yekelchyk writes in Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation: "The new elites were essentially the old Soviet bureaucrats in Ukraine who came to power as a result of imperial collapse rather than revolution and thus felt no need to develop either democratic institutions or a market economy."

With former party elites maintaining their positions of power under a different banner, the process of auctioning off state assets to the private sector became a lucrative target for the unethical. With a small group of elites controlling the auction process, access could be used to curry favor and to line the pockets of the country’s entrenched oligarchs. Both ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko—nicknamed the “gas princess” for the fortune she amassed in the natural gas industry—are among the high-ranking officials alleged by court documents to have benefited from such practices.

Last July, at a blockchain-related conference in Odessa—one of two Ukrainian bitcoin conferences held in 2016, both of which drew sellout crowds—Minister of Finance Oleksandr Danylyuk laid out plans to move the auction process from a paper-based system to the new blockchain-based “Auction 3.0” system, thereby ensuring transactions would be public and fully transparent. The efficiency of the system—which represents one component of a “Cashless Economy Project” undertaken by the National Bank of Ukraine slated to run through 2020—promises a number of additional benefits, including significant cost savings and a dramatic decrease in the bureaucracy needed to run the system.

The timing of this dramatic rush toward digital currencies is not without a certain sad irony. Ukraine is perhaps the nation most singularly affected by the foreign policy shifts following the election of President Donald Trump. Trump’s unabashed willingness to cozy up to Russia, whose ongoing military presence in Ukraine underlies many of the nation’s economic woes, represents a waning opportunity for Ukrainians who had hoped for a more hard-line stance from the United States. With a long history of Westward-reaching diplomacy, even under Soviet rule, the country became the third-largest recipient of American foreign aid by the end of the 1990s, despite only achieving independence in 1991.

Thus even as the idealized ally upon which Ukraine modeled its very constitution finds itself rushing headlong into that which Ukraine has long sought to flee, Ukraine’s commitment to blazing new trails in the name of transparency represents a commendable example for an American political sphere increasingly marked by intentional obfuscation and “alternative facts.”

Mr. Carnes previously served as communications director for Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and Rep. Darrell Issa (CA-49).

The Putin Anomaly: In modern European history, Vladimir Putin is the first classically reactionary and even revanchist leader who is not, or at least not yet, an anti-Semite. By Leon Aron Mosaic, March 20, 2017 https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/03/the-putin-anomaly/

In his edifying and heartfelt essay, “The Prospect for Russia’s Jews,” Maxim Shrayer raises a number of issues that invite further reflection. I’ll touch on a couple of them.

A few years back, at what I was told was a “very closed” meeting in the Kremlin, an unusually expansive Vladimir Putin regaled the gathering with an elaborate anekdot (a joke). The gist, as related to me by a reliable first-hand source, and shorn here of its colorful verbal trimmings, was this: another Great Flood is about to engulf the earth, extinguishing the human race. It will happen within a month, and cannot be forestalled or prevented. To soften the blow, the clergy of every religious denomination have allowed the faithful to break all taboos. Muslims are given leave to drink alcohol, Catholics to indulge every deadly sin from sloth and gluttony to wrath and lust. Rabbis, by contrast, are urging their congregants: “We have a whole month. Jews! We must learn to live under water!”

If it seems to you that this anekdot was meant not just to amuse but to express respect and even admiration for the last-named group, you’re quite correct. Several of the Russian Jewish interlocutors in Shrayer’s report stress the importance of this same element in Vladimir Putin’s personal makeup. The Russian president may be almost certain to pick a fight with NATO on the alliance’s eastern flank, but, rather miraculously, he is also the first classically reactionary and even revanchist leader in modern European history who is not an anti-Semite. Putin’s Russia is the best non-revolutionary Russia that Jews have known since the 1770s, when Catherine the Great acquired them in the first partition of Poland.

“Non-revolutionary” is an important qualifier. Jews, or at least some Jews, have done well in revolutions and their immediate aftermaths. In the 1650s, Oliver Cromwell re-admitted Jews to England, from which they had been expelled almost four centuries earlier. In 1791, the French National Assembly granted Jews equal rights. And Russia’s four revolutions fit this pattern as well.

In 1905, the twenty-six-year-old Lev Davidovich Trotsky (né Bronshteyn) became the chairman of the St. Petersburg soviet, or council of workers’ delegates. The February 1917 revolution abolished the Pale of Settlement, and the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, whose leaderships were overwhelmingly Jewish, had by far more deputies in local soviets and in the short-lived Constituent Assembly than did any other party. And, of course, the early Bolshevik Russia, like its contemporary Weimar Germany, saw an advancement of Jews to positions of political influence in numbers unprecedented in modern European history.

Then there was Russia’s fourth, most recent revolution (some would say counter-revolution), the one that began in 1987 and ran until 1999. In this period, which saw the undoing of Soviet Communism, Jews or half-Jews served as first deputy prime minister (Boris Nemtsov and Anatoly Chubais), president’s chief of staff (Chubais again), and minister of finance and personal economic adviser to the president (Alexander Livshits). Yegor Gaidar, economic reformer and acting prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, had Jewish grandmothers on both his father’s and his mother’s side.

Needless to add, these facts did not escape the Russian left. (European anti-Semitism began to migrate from right to left toward the end of the 1960s, and post-Soviet Russia followed suit.) Surfacing most prominently among supporters of Gennady Zyuganov, first secretary of the Communist party of the Russian Federation and Boris Yeltsin’s main rival in the 1996 presidential election, anti-Semitism has remained a staple of leftist propaganda ever since.

That Putin has refrained from tapping into this rich store of ammunition is all the more impressive given that condemnation of the “cursed” 1990s has otherwise been a key component in the stock narrative that undergirds the legitimacy of his own regime. A leading target in this litany has been the period’s splurge of so-called “bandit privatization,” among the most prominent beneficiaries of which were a number of Jews or half-Jews including the billionaires Roman Abramovich, Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, and Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

In the early 2000’s, as I entered Moscow’s Jewish Community Center on my way to breakfast with Rabbi Berel Lazar (who figures importantly in Shrayer’s essay), I came upon the plaques commemorating the philanthropic contributions of these men to Jewish causes. Abramovich’s, at least two-feet square in size, dwarfed them all. Given Rabbi Lazar’s well-earned reputation for political astuteness, I can’t help wondering whether the names of Gusinsky and Berezovsky, outspoken opponents and specific targets of Vladimir Putin, are still there today. Abramovich, who is still in Putin’s favor, has nothing to worry about.

What makes Putin so happy an anomaly? What has kept him from the well-trodden path of European anti- Semitism? Was it, as some say, the Orthodox Jewish neighbors who often sheltered and fed him in the crummy communal apartment building where he grew up? Was it his favorite Jewish high-school teacher of German? According to Moscow and Jerusalem lore, after a teary reunion with this teacher on his 2005 visit to Israel, the first such visit ever by a Soviet or Russian head of state, Putin instructed an aide: “Buy her an apartment in Jerusalem!” (And so it was done.) Or was it his judo coach, Anatoly Rakhlin, for whose funeral, Putin, already president, traveled to St. Petersburg and after the interment abandoned his bodyguards and limo for a lone meditative stroll? Or Boris and Arkady Rotenberg, fellow judo enthusiasts and sparring partners whom he made billionaires?

Even at critical moments like the lightning annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war on Ukraine, with the country submerged in a deafening din of patriotic mobilization (or “mobilized patriotism,” in the coinage of the leading Russian political sociologist Igor Kliamkin), the inevitable accompanying rise in populist anti-Semitic sentiment has effectively been nipped in the bud. In the absence of an “official directive” (goszakaz), as Yuri Kanner, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, noted last October, anti-Semitic propaganda has been withering on the vine.

The results can be traced in surveys of public opinion. In a 2015 survey by the Anti-Defamation League, Putin’s Russia was found not only to be the least anti-Semitic of all East European countries but also to register less anti-Semitism than Italy, Spain, and Argentina (not to mention Greece). Last October, a Levada Center poll, commissioned for the international conference in Moscow that Shrayer attended and reports on, found only between 8 and 16 percent of Russians harboring “hard” anti-Semitic feelings.

Could Judeophobia nevertheless be unleashed? If, following several more years of an anemic economy, or after an embarrassing military defeat, Putin should find his back against the wall, might he yet turn to the old, tried and true formula for rallying national support? Almost certainly. Nor would the fact that there are at most 200,000 “self-identified” Jews in a nation of 140 million present a problem. In 1968, the Communist regime in Poland, where there were at most 30,000 Jews in a population of 32 million, managed to whip up a frenzy against the “Zionist Fifth Column.”

This past January, Petr Tolstoy, deputy chair of the Duma, mused openly about the “descendants of those who in 1917 jumped with guns out of the Pale of Settlement and proceeded to destroy our [Russian Orthodox] churches.” A trial balloon? A preemptive move by a shrewd courtier seeking later recognition as the first to have nudged the ship of state in the “right” direction?

So, to rehearse Maxim Shrayer’s overarching question: why are Jews staying?

Adjacent funerary niches in a wall at Moscow’s New Donskoy crematorium, next to the 16th-century cemetery of the Donskoy monastery, hold the ashes of my grandfather Lazar Abramovich Berenshteyn and my grandmother Rozaliya Efimovna Atlas. Son of a “merchant of the first [highest] guild” and thus privileged to reside outside the Pale of Settlement, Grandpa was educated in Heidelberg and New York, where he earned a medical degree. He then returned to Russia, ostensibly because his mother and sisters refused to leave but largely, I suspect, because he himself was loath to abandon the motherland. He volunteered in World War I, and received a commission as a praporshchik (the equivalent of a warrant officer) in the Tsar’s army. (Jewish doctors, dentists, or pharmacists were not required to convert in order to qualify for a commission.) He was injured and decorated.

Grandma Roza, among the first women to be admitted to the department of medicine at Kharkov University, graduated in 1914 and worked as a physician for 40 years. A popular song as I was growing up went like this: “Love Russia, love Russia! For the Russian heart, there is no better land.” Whenever she heard it on the radio or later on TV, Grandma would add, loudly and emphatically, “And for the Jewish heart as well!”

What would my grandparents say about their grandson who left Moscow for New York at the age of twenty-three with a suitcase and $100? Would they understand, let alone approve, his reasons and intentions? Frankly, I’m not sure, although I have my doubts.

Would it have helped their grandson plead his defense to note that his head was full of samizdat like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which had disabused him of any hope that the motherland would ever become a normal state? Or that, in addition to the $100 and the suitcase, he was taking with him the complete works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Chekhov, and Gogol? Or that in subsequent years, outside his main vocation, he would write essays about Pushkin’s “Elegy” and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, translate passages from Osip Mandelstam and Fyodor Tyutchev to serve as epigraphs to his books and articles, and weave Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Platonov, Mandelstam and Yuri Dombrovsky, into his policy analyses?

Or that, on the other side of the ledger, and despite having graduated with a “red diploma” (the equivalent of a summa cum laude), their grandson had received orders to work above the Arctic Circle in Yakutia, today the Sakha Republic—Eurasia’s coldest region, where winter temperatures average negative-30 degrees Fahrenheit—while his ethnic-Russian classmates, including those with a C- average, won jobs in Moscow?

Again, I’m not sure. As Maxim Shrayer knows and well chronicles, we Russian Jews are an odd and complicated lot.

Leon Aron is the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of, among other works, Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life and Roads to the Temple: Memory, Truth, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution 1987–1991.

Nationalism the big winner in Bulgarian election By Angel Krasimirov Reuters, March 23, 2017 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-bulgaria-election-nationalism-idUSKBN16U1GP?il=0

Syrian refugee Fatema Batayhi says she has not left her home for five weeks, not since a hostile crowd confronted her on the main square of this sleepy town in a valley east of Bulgaria's capital, Sofia.

Batayhi, her husband and their youngest son fled the barrel bombs and street fighting of Syria's Aleppo four years ago, eventually joining their eldest son in setting up home eight months ago in the first European Union country they could reach – Bulgaria, via Turkey.

However, they had not reckoned with the town's mayor, who refused to issue them with residence papers, or on a growing mood of nationalist intolerance that has dragged Bulgarian politics toward the hard right and may help determine the make-up of the next government after an election on Sunday.

The crowd in Elin Pelin, a town of some 7,000 people named after an early 20th century Bulgarian writer, hurled insults and objects at Batayhi, a Muslim.

"I got scared, very scared," the 50-year-old said over strong Arabic coffee, Syrian cheese and fruits. "I haven't been out since then and I keep the door locked."

Her husband, Fahim Jaber, said nationalists had threatened to forcibly convert the family to Christianity.

"We're Muslims, but our home in Aleppo was close to the church and I have never seen such division and aggression between Muslims and Christians," he said.

The wave of mainly Muslim refugees and migrants reaching Europe's borders over the past two years has contributed to a rise in right-wing nationalism across the continent, particularly in the countries of ex-communist Eastern Europe, which mostly have little experience of large-scale immigration.

Bulgaria stands out in the region for its significant Muslim minority, some 12 percent among 7.2 million mainly Orthodox Christians - a legacy of almost 500 years of Ottoman Turkish rule that ended in the late 19th century.

The resistance to the Muslim Ottomans is a core element of Bulgarian national identity, and some nationalists have cast the mainly Muslim migrants arriving via Turkey as a fresh threat to the nation's security and Orthodox Christian faith, despite the fact that most want to move on to wealthier western Europe.

The growing climate of intolerance is now feeding support for the likes of the United Patriots, an alliance of anti- migrant nationalist parties polling third with more than 11 percent of the vote ahead of Sunday's poll.

A strong showing could turn United Patriots into kingmaker in post-election coalition talks, and has seen Bulgaria's two biggest parties – the center-right GERB and the Socialists – harden their own already tough rhetoric on migrants.

It remains uncertain which of the two main parties the United Patriots would favor joining in government given the alliance's own internal divisions.

"It’s fashionable to sound like a nationalist today," said political analyst Parvan Simeonov.

"WE'RE NOT FASCISTS"

According to a survey published in February, 77 percent of Bulgarians see migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa as a threat to national security.

Earlier this month, an Italian Catholic priest in northern Bulgaria announced he was leaving the country after his decision to provide shelter for a Syrian family triggered a backlash from local people.

Few of those traveling across the Balkan peninsula have any intention of actually staying in the largely poor region.

Fahim and Fatema, however, wanted to remain after their eldest son had managed to start a life for himself in Bulgaria in 2013. They joined him in June 2016 after three years in Turkey and were granted refugee status.

The refusal of the mayor, Ivaylo Simeonov, to issue the family with residence papers, which Fahim said had cost him several job opportunities, was condemned by rights groups, but drew no response from the government.

Simeonov is a member of the VMRO party, part of the United Patriots alliance.

Krassimir Kanev, the head of the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, said the mayor’s behavior and the inaction of the authorities were "extremely disturbing" and unlawful.

"It is the result of the continuing incitement of hatred, discrimination and violence against migrants legally residing on the territory of Bulgaria," he said.

Simeonov said he acted in accordance "with the will of the people".

"We're not fascists," he told Reuters. "We want peace for the town and its citizens."

"Europe did not allow us to distinguish between humanitarian refugees and economic migrants, and people are now afraid that many others, who are not as quiet as the Jaber family, will arrive."

Fahim said he had asked the United Nations Refugee Agency to return him and his family to Syria but that the agency had refused on security grounds.

Fatema said they should never have left Turkey. "I regret that we ever came here," she said.

Once in the Shadows, Europe’s Neo-Fascists Are Re-emerging By Rick Lyman New York Times, March 20, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/19/world/europe/europe-neo-fascist-revival-slovakia.html

Head bowed in reverence, Robert Svec gently placed a bouquet of blood-red flowers at the foot of the only known statue of Jozef Tiso, Slovakia’s wartime fascist leader, in a weedy monument park known as the Pantheon of Slovak Historical Figures.

For years, Mr. Svec’s neo-fascist cultural organization, the Slovak Revival Movement, was a tiny fringe group. But now his crowds are growing, as 200 people recently gathered with him to celebrate the country’s fascist past and call fascist-era greetings — “Na Straz!” or “On the guard!” Mr. Svec is so emboldened that he is transforming his movement into a political party, with plans to run for Parliament.

“You are ours, and we will forever be yours,” Mr. Svec said at the foot of the statue, having declared this as the Year of Jozef Tiso, dedicated to rehabilitating the image of the former priest and Nazi collaborator, who was hanged as a war criminal in 1947.

Once in the shadows, Europe’s neo-fascists are stepping back out, more than three-quarters of a century after Nazi boots stormed through Central Europe, and two decades since a neo-Nazi resurgence of skinheads and white supremacists unsettled the transition to democracy. In Slovakia, neo-fascists are winning regional offices and taking seats in the multiparty Parliament they hope to replace with strongman rule.

They are still on the edges of European politics, yet offer another reminder of how turbulent politics have become. Just as the rise of far-right parties is forcing many mainstream politicians to pivot rightward, so, too, has the populist mood energized the most extremist right-wing groups, those flirting with or even embracing fascist policies that trace back to World War II.

“Before, pro-fascist sentiments were kept hidden,” said Gabriel Sipos, director of Transparency International Slovakia. “Parents would tell their children, ‘You cannot say this at school.’ Now, you can say things in the public space that you couldn’t say before.”

Although nationalist parties have thrived across Europe in recent years, only a few — Golden Dawn in Greece and the National Democratic Party in Germany, to name two — embrace neo-fascist views. Some, like Jobbik in Hungary, are extremist in their right-wing views but stop short of outright fascism.

Instead, the broader impact of these groups has been measured in how they have pushed mainstream parties in a more firmly nationalist direction — especially on immigration — to slow the defection of supporters.

“Now, extremists and fascists are part of the system,” said Grigorij Meseznikov, president of the Institute for Public Affairs, a liberal research group.

In Slovakia, neo-fascism has established something of a beachhead. Mr. Svec is joining a political field where a party with an established neo-fascist leader, Marian Kotleba, demonstrated surprising strength in last year’s parliamentary elections, winning 14 seats in the 150-member chamber.

Pre-election polls showed his party getting less than 3 percent of the vote, but his result — 8 percent — was built on strong support from young people and other first-time voters. More recent polls show his support nearing 13 percent. He had already stunned Slovakia in 2013 by winning the governorship of Banska Bystrica, one of Slovakia’s eight regions.

Mr. Kotleba, 39, who recently renamed his party Kotleba — People’s Party Our Slovakia, used to appear in uniforms reminiscent of those worn during the wartime Slovak State. Once he and his party got into Parliament, the uniforms disappeared and he shifted his attacks from Jews to immigrants and the country’s Roma minority.

“They used to turn up at gay pride parades, show their muscle, turn up the heat,” said Michal Havran, a television talk-show host and political commentator. “Now, they don’t go; they are worried about their image.”

But the underlying message of groups like Mr. Kotleba’s and Mr. Svec’s has not shifted — Slovakia was better off under a fascist government.

“Something very dark and very troubling from the past is coming back,” Mr. Havran said. “They feel they are fighting for something very pure, something very old and sacred. A few years ago, they were ashamed to talk about it. Now, they are proud.”

In Banska Bystrica, Mr. Kotleba’s powers as governor include overseeing schools, cultural institutions and some infrastructure projects.

“If you are a white, heterosexual man, you probably don’t notice any difference living in a place where Kotleba is governor,” said Rado Sloboda, 26, one of a group of Banska Bystrica activists opposing Mr. Kotleba under the banner “Not in Our Town.” “If you are a minority, like a Roma, you feel it more keenly. There is a feeling that they are even less welcome in the center city.”

The muscular receptionist outside Mr. Kotleba’s office said this month that no entry was possible without an appointment, although the governor almost never grants interviews. When told that repeated calls had not been returned, he asked the name of the newspaper. “Oh,” he said. “That explains it.”

Mr. Kotleba’s party has been especially effective on social media, with more than 140 interconnected Facebook pages. When a local retiree, Jan Bencik, 68, began blogging to expose the country’s neo-fascists, his name appeared on a list of “opponents of the state.”

“They called me a Jew, said that I should die, die, die,” Mr. Bencik said. “They said that people like me would be dealt with in the future.”

One of the ironies of Mr. Kotleba’s coming to power in Banska Bystrica is that it was the center of the anti-fascist Slovak National Uprising during the war and is home to the national museum commemorating that event.

Stanislav Micev, the museum director, characterized Mr. Kotleba’s message as “fascism with elements of Nazism,” mixing Mussolini’s strongman rule with Hitler’s demonization of minorities.

“They are against Americans, Hungarians, Jews, black people and yellow people,” Mr. Micev said. “His current positions are right on the edge of what is legal.”

As a newcomer on the neo-fascist political scene, Mr. Svec regards Mr. Kotleba as a potential rival for the same angry vote. At the Jozef Tiso memorial ceremony, the top officials in Mr. Svec’s movement wore matching dark suits with white shirts and bright red ties. A table in the back of the room did a brisk business selling Slovak Revival Movement patches, stickers, key rings, calendars, cookies and bottles of wine (white only) labeled “Year of Jozef Tiso.”

“The people in power want Slovaks to be ashamed of their history,” said Martin Lacko, a historian and supporter of Mr. Svec. “They want them to keep apologizing. That’s why they keep talking about deportations of Jews during the war and other negative things.”

A group of gray-haired singers in folk costumes, accompanied by a clarinet and an accordion, performed a series of patriotic favorites. “Slovak moms, you have beautiful sons,” they sang.

A pair of university students with floppy hair and denim sat in the back corner, whispering during the speeches and snatching pastries from a nearby table during breaks. Both said they considered themselves devout and conservative, and did not believe Mr. Svec and Mr. Kotleba were extremist in any way. They also pointed to the election of President Trump as a good thing.

“I have to say, the U.S. election results made me extremely happy,” said Martin Bornik, 23.

In an interview after the ceremony, Mr. Svec rejected the notion that his group is neo-Nazi.

“When Americans bring their flags to parks or to public events, nobody says anything,” Mr. Svec said. “When we do it, they call us neo-Nazis. You know, labeling someone is the easiest thing to do.”

The Roots of Today's Revival of Russian Judaism Lie Deep in the Soviet Past By Dovid Margolin Mosaic, March 23 2017 https://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2017/03/the-roots-of-todays-revival-of-russian-judaism-lie-deep- in-the-soviet-past/

Seven decades of persevering, clandestine, hazardous activity devoted to the material and spiritual succor of Jews.

I read with great interest Maxim Shrayer’s elegantly composed “The Prospect for Russia’s Jews.” Striking an especially strong chord with me were his memories of growing up as the child of refuseniks in the Soviet Union, since my parents, too, were refuseniks. (Our family finally won permission to leave in 1985.) Elsewhere in his essay, however, Shrayer exhibits a dismaying lack of familiarity with important historical aspects of the Russian Jewish scene, a constraint that colors his analysis of the situation today.

In particular, Shrayer presents the salient success of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in today’s Russia as a relatively recent phenomenon, one whose origins are traceable to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—which is also when Rabbi Berel Lazar, the head Chabad emissary in the region, arrived on the scene. Shrayer is not alone in this; others who write on the subject adhere to a similar narrative, tending to attribute much of Chabad’s success to the purportedly close relationship that Lazar enjoys with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Taking this narrative at face value, Shrayer adduces in confirmation a speech that he heard Lazar give in Moscow late last year.

In what follows I’ll try to offer a brief corrective to this misimpression; but first let me disclose my interest. A New York-based writer and editor at Chabad.org, the movement’s online presence, I speak neither for the website nor for the Chabad movement as a whole; moreover, the website itself has no formal connection with Chabad of Russia or with the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union. I have, however, devoted much time to researching and writing about Jews in the area, both their history and their current challenges, with a special interest in the role of Chabad. It is in the history of that role, I believe, where the real secret of the movement’s recent success is to be found.

In the speech by Berel Lazar that Shrayer heard and quotes from, the rabbi adverted to the fall of the Communist regime in the early 1990s and specifically to a conversation he had at the time with an elderly Jewish woman. To his queries about the then-current status of Jewish life in the Soviet Union, she replied: “Rebbe, here there is nothing. U nas nichego net.” Shrayer then proceeds to unpack the significance of this anecdote for Lazar:

Nothing, nichego, gornisht: the word was meant to sum up 70 Soviet years that, in this reckoning, saw a total destruction of traditional Jewish life and Jewish learning. Lazar’s anecdote fashioned the mission of Chabad- Lubavitch not as a renewal but as a reinvention of Jewish life. Both the official remnants of Judaism (embodied in the Moscow Choral Synagogue and its “Soviet” rabbis) and the unsanctioned grassroots movement of Jewish learning in the 1960s-80s, made possible by refusenik zealots, vanished in this narrative. Not until the arrival of the [Lubavitcher] rebbe’s emissaries in the early 1990s was Jewish life rebuilt almost from ground zero until the point where, today, Chabad-Lubavitch stands as the guardian of Russia’s Jews.

This construction of Lazar’s purpose in recalling his encounter with the woman is highly implausible. In order to have said or implied that modern-day Chabad “reinvented” Jewish life virtually from scratch, Lazar would have had to deny what he himself has stressed on numerous occasions: namely, the persevering, clandestine, hazardous activity that Chabad Ḥasidim devoted to the material and spiritual succor of Jews throughout the seven decades of the USSR’s existence.

It was in the 1920s, soon after the Bolshevik revolution, that the Chabad movement, then led by Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn (the father-in-law of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson and his predecessor as Lubavitcher rebbe), first took its communal work underground. At a meeting held in Moscow in 1924, Rabbi Yosef and nine of his followers formed a minyan and together swore to uphold Jewish life in the Soviet Union “until the last drop of blood.” While nearly every other ḥasidic court had fled Russia shortly after the Bolsehviks seized power, Schneersohn insisted on remaining until the end of 1927, by which point the situation had become all but untenable.

As the historian Zvi Gitelman records in Jewish Nationality and Soviet Politics, “Well into the late 1920’s there existed in the Soviet Union a network of underground ḥeders and yeshivas. . . . [Schneersohn] was constantly hounded by the Evsektsiia [the “Jewish section” of the Communist party] and the secret police and was finally forced to leave the Soviet Union, but not before he had trained many teachers whose influence was felt in the USSR long after his departure.” Indeed, so linked was Schneersohn with these efforts that his name became a kind of byword for the stubborn determination of Jews to resist their Soviet oppressors. “We won’t permit the opening of schools in Hebrew, a dead language,” the Soviet commissar of education Anatoly Lunacharsky declared in 1928. “We will combat the relics of the Middle Ages, the Schneersohnovschina.”

The regime’s offensive took a number of forms. In 1930, some 30 rabbis and communal leaders in Minsk were rounded up and accused of counterrevolution. The city’s chief rabbi, Menachem Mendel Gluskin, and his son- in-law Rabbi Avraham Baruch Pewzner, both Lubavitchers, were named as the heads of this illicit ring. According to a contemporary report, “The GPU [Soviet secret police] asserts that it found at Rabbi Pewzner’s home a letter in Rabbi Schneersohn’s handwriting containing instructions as to how to organize illegal rabbinical seminaries and Hebrew schools, and how to strengthen Jewish religious life.”

The Minsk operation was one of the first such cases of mass arrest. Although the group there was eventually released, Pewzner was arrested again in 1939 and died in a labor camp. In 1938, Rabbi Shmarya Leib Medalia, a Lubavitcher Ḥasid who had served as chief rabbi of Moscow’s officially permitted Choral Synagogue, was not only arrested but executed. According to recovered NKVD interrogation documents, he, like the Minsk rabbis, was charged with maintaining contact with the then-Lubavitcher rebbe. Hundreds more Ḥasidim were killed or sentenced to terms in Siberia during those years, including Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson’s father, Levi Yitzchak Schneerson, chief rabbi of Dnepropetrovsk, who was imprisoned in 1939 for his communal efforts and died ill and emaciated in remote Kazakhstan five years later.

Following World War II, a large body of Lubavitcher Ḥasidim escaped to the West. Others, however, remained in the Soviet Union, maintaining their way of life and serving the wider Jewish population at great personal risk. In the late 1950s in the city of Gomel, Rabbi Shmuel Gershon Sorkin, regarded both by Jews and by the KGB as the city’s postwar religious leader, was made a target by the Soviet press, which accused him of reaping illicit profits as a kosher butcher and of demanding exorbitant fees from Jewish parents to circumcise their sons.

Meanwhile, Moscow remained a continuous locus of Chabad activity. Last year, I walked into the sanctuary of the Choral Synagogue and asked whether anyone could point out where Rabbi Getche Vilensky had prayed. “Ah!,” someone responded, “you’re looking for the Chabadnitza?!” A Chabadnitza in Russian ḥasidic parlance is a side room where Ḥasidim devoted to the “service of the heart” pray and meditate at their own pace. Elie Wiesel described this room and its minyan warmly in The Jews of Silence, his 1965 book about his encounters with Soviet Jews. Removed from the “official” synagogue—which, although led by heroic figures, lay under suspicion because of its government-sanctioned status—the small hall was regarded as the place where the serious business of Judaism was conducted. Run by iconic Lubavitchers like Getche Vilensky, it later drew throngs of refuseniks who rejected what they perceived as the Choral Synagogue’s docility.

This is not to say that Lubavitchers didn’t work within the official structure as well. At least three ritual slaughterers at the Choral Synagogue were Lubavitchers, including Yaakov Elishevitz, Velvl Bogomolny, and Mottel Lifshitz, the last of whom also served as the congregation’s mohel.

In these postwar years, just as Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn had once stood at the head of Chabad’s work in the Soviet Union, his successor as Lubavitcher rebbe would now do the same from his headquarters in New York. The rebbe’s pivotal role in the battle for the survival of Soviet Jewry stretched until the fall of the USSR and is attested in numerous sources. In his 2014 biography of the rebbe, the author Joseph Telushkin quotes Aryeh Eliav, who worked in Israel’s Moscow embassy, remarking upon the “staggering range of [the rebbe’s] knowledge of day-to-day life inside Russia, a country [he] had left in 1928.” One characteristic anecdote concerns the moment in 1955 when the first American rabbinic delegation ever to visit the Soviet Union was preparing to set out. In a private audience with the rebbe that lasted until early morning, the delegation’s leaders, Rabbis Dovid Hollander and Herschel Schacter, were given detailed information on individuals to visit in cities across the USSR.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, today the chief rabbi of Efrat in Israel, recalls a similar private audience in the 1970s at which the rebbe asked him to take on a mission to help organize four underground yeshivas. Riskin agreed; upon leaving the rebbe’s room, he, too, was given a list of names and addresses that he was instructed to commit to memory and a pair of shoes, its false heels stuffed with money, that he was to leave at the mikveh in Leningrad. Over the course of his mission, Rabbi Riskin met a succession of underground Jewish activists. “Wherever I went,” he would later attest, “they knew that I was coming; true in Moscow, true in Leningrad, true in Riga, true in Vilna.”

The rebbe’s clandestine network within the Soviet Union initiated and supported underground Torah study and prayer, provided financial and medical aid, and assisted with avenues of escape. The Nativ branch of Israel’s Mossad, which focused on Soviet Jewish matters, was especially cognizant of the network, working closely with it and increasingly relying on it after the rupture of diplomatic relations following the Six-Day War. “If there is one Jew to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude that there still remains a Jewish community in Russia,” Eliav commented, “it is the Lubavitcher rebbe.”

Perhaps the most telling error of omission in Shrayer’s essay is his description of the synagogue in Moscow’s Maryina Roshcha neighborhood (Mary’s Grove):

In 1926, defying historical odds, a wooden synagogue was erected in Mary’s Grove just as synagogues across the USSR were being closed down and turned into storage spaces or temples of atheist propaganda. The wooden synagogue burned down in 1993, and the Moscow Jewish Community Center rose in its place, to open in 2000 under the auspices of Chabad-Lubavitch.

Among refuseniks, Shrayer writes, the wooden synagogue in Maryina Roshcha—a neighborhood he remembers as a place of “lingering squalor”—was known as the “ḥasidic shul,” in contrast to the grand Choral Synagogue, “the main locus of Orthodox Judaism in Russia.” He evinces no knowledge of the role played by Ḥasidim in sustaining the Choral Synagogue itself, to which I’ve alluded above, and no curiosity about the identity of the particular Ḥasidim who kept alive that cold, drafty little shack from its construction in 1927 (not 1926) until the fall of Communism in the early 1990s.

Throughout its lifespan, the Maryina Roshcha synagogue was a center of Jewish activity run by Lubavitchers, in the 1940s by men like Berel Levertov (who perished in the Dubrovlag labor camp in 1949) and in the 1980s by the venerable, wooden-legged Avraham Genin. It was therefore no mystery that, when he arrived in 1990, Berel Lazar became the synagogue’s rabbi, or that the Moscow Jewish Community Center was later built on the same spot “under the auspices of Chabad-Lubavitch.”

Without an elementary knowledge of Chabad’s underground existence and activity throughout the long agony of the Soviet era, and the community of Soviet Jews nourished by that activity, how can one truly understand Chabad’s role today? For decades, Lubavitchers did not merely care for themselves but kept burning the embers of faith in the entire country. My father was not yet religious when his fellow non-Chabad “refusenik zealots,” as Shrayer calls them, arranged to provide him with his first pair of t’fillin. Like many of the Jewish books and publications to which the refuseniks had secret access, these ritual objects came from Chabad’s Ezras Achim organization.

Shrayer cites estimates by acquaintances suggesting that, today, no more than 50 religious families form “the core of [Chabad’s] community” in St. Petersburg, and that the number in Moscow might not be significantly higher. This not only ignores Chabad’s longstanding mission to support all of Russia’s Jews but also misses what is actually taking place on the ground today. Walk into the Maryina Roshcha synagogue and you will see many men without beards and women with uncovered hair, including at prayer services. Today, Moscow has 30 independent Chabad centers, more synagogues than ever in its history. They are filled with non-observant Jews who have been drawn closer to their Judaism without becoming full-fledged baalei t’shuvah, let alone Ḥasidim.

Ever since 1991, writers and demographers have been forecasting the end of Jewry not just in Russia but in all the lands of the former Soviet Union. In each of those lands, Chabad plays a key role in Jewish communal life. Most notable is Ukraine (surely not Putin-friendly territory), where Dnepropetrovsk, the newly renamed Dnipro, is home to the Chabad-run Menorah Center, the largest Jewish complex in the world. Chabad representatives are often the only rabbis in cities throughout the country, from Zhitomir in the west to battle-hardened Mariupol on the eastern front lines of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

What ties these different places together? What do Vinnitsya in Ukraine and St. Petersburg in Russia and Minsk in Belarus have in common that Chabad can successfully lay down roots in each? Asking why Jews should remain in these and other places might make sense to a former refusenik, but the question is far removed from the life of the businessman in Rostov, the elderly couple in Sumy, the inmate in Vladimir, or the orphan in Zhitomir. They remain because that is their home, and for as long as this is the case, it’s a safe bet that Chabad- Lubavitch will continue to perform its longstanding service of connecting them to the heritage of their forefathers. The reason for the extent and the success of Chabad’s activities in the former Soviet Union today is traceable to the fact that it never really left.