The Jews of Contemporary Post-Soviet States: Sociological Insights from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan 9783110791075, 9783110790986

Table of contents :
About this Series “Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition”
Contents
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography
Chapter 3 Jewish Identity
Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity of Post- Soviet Jewry
Chapter 5 The Civic Identity of Russian-Speaking Jews 30 Years After the USSR
Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition
Chapter 7 “Secular” Culture and the Identity of Post-Soviet Jews
Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity
Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR – State-of-Affairs and Prospects
Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure
Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life
Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews
Epilogue: Perspectives and Challenges from Jewish Life in the Former USSR in Light of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict
References
Subject Index
Index of Persons

Citation preview

Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin The Jews of Contemporary Post-Soviet States

Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition

Edited by Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin and Olaf Glöckner on behalf of the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies, Herzliya

Editorial Board Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, North-Western University of Chicago, USA Robert O. Freedman, Johns Hopkins University, USA Valery Dymshits, European University of St. Petersburg, Russia Julia Bernstein, Frankfurt University of Applied Science, Germany Haim Ben Yakov, Tel-Aviv University, Israel

Volume 1

Vladimir Ze’ev Khanin

The Jews of Contemporary Post-Soviet States Sociological Insights from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, and Kazakhstan

ISBN 978-3-11-079098-6 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-079107-5 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-079111-2 ISSN 2751-918X Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938296 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: “Menorah” in Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro), Ukraine, Arthur Lagoda/iStock/Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

About this Series “Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition” Jewish life in Eastern Europe, as in other places of the world, underwent dramatic changes in the 20th century. Following World War II, from after the Shoa until the end of the Cold War, Eastern European Jewry was considered almost extinct and without any future. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and dissolved into 15 independent successor states, the overwhelming majority of its Jewish inhabitants decided to emigrate. Those who stayed behind – including a small number of preserved religious Jewish communities – were perceived as a fragment fallen out of another time. Nobody expected a demographic consolidation, let alone a Jewish cultural and religious revival. History turned out otherwise. For about 30 years now, post-Soviet Jewry has experienced an impressive demographic and cultural strengthening and renewal – both in the “Diaspora” and in the territory of the former USSR. Against all odds, many post-Soviet Jewish emigrants opposed assimilation into their countries of destination, stuck to their own networks and began to form their own institutions, organizations and milieus. Surprisingly, their cultural (often also Russian-speaking) self-assertion became significant, whether in the Israeli educational system, in newly formed Jewish centers in the USA, or in local Jewish communities in Germany – the latter now dominated by a majority of “Russians” or “Ukrainians.” In addition, re-vitalization of organized Jewish life within some successor states of the USSR has become impressive. Since the beginning of the 1990s, many international Jewish organizations and initiatives have been helping to consolidate community structures, enhance Jewish education, train rabbis and strengthen the bonds of vital Jewish centers around the globe. Former Soviet Jews themselves have also succeeded in reviving their former history and cultural roots, regaining traditional Jewish places and building up modern structures of Jewish life. A new collective self-awareness among post-Soviet Jews has emerged that we can sense not only in Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, Moscow, Vienna, Kiev, but also in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Berlin, New York City and Toronto. Expressed in numbers, two million Soviet Jews left their home during the 1990s, mostly for good. They dispersed not only to the United States and Israel, the current Jewish demographic centers of the globe, but also to Central Europe, Canada, Australia and other places. They are at present in five dozen countries on five continents. However, by early 2022, about 900,000 Jews and their family members still lived in the post-Soviet countries, despite negative demographic trends. At the same time, (mainly) Russian-speaking Jewry remains the major source for Aliya (Jewish resettlement) in Israel and a possible factor of stabilization for Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-202

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About this Series “Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition”

In addition to its astonishing cultural self-assertion, based (not always, but often) on the Russian language, blended elements of Jewish and local culture, pronounced intellectualism, and extraordinary work ethic, former Soviet Jewry also aims at the self-realization of its own political and social realization in certain places – including Israel. This is one of the most exciting features of this identity group, and two exciting questions derive from this: Is transnational post-Soviet Jewry a phenomenon of the first and maybe second generation only, or does it constitute another permanent pillar of contemporary Jewry? Our series will accompany Post-Soviet Jewry in transition in a detailed way, and in different places. Established by De Gruyter with the aim to address numerous academically underexplored issues of the third world’s largest Jewish entity – the Soviet and postSoviet one – this series sheds light on post-Soviet Jewry across the globe, highlighting the transition to a new type of modern Jewish Diaspora. Due to its demographic impact, sociocultural weight and political influence, among other things, Eastern European/Eurasian Ashkenazi Jewry will be a major focus of the series. However, other post-Soviet sub-ethnic Jewish groups, such as Bukharian and Mountain Jews, will also be addressed in multi-author volumes and individual monographs in this series. Finally, the series will provide space for publications exploring the location and function of post-Soviet Jewry as part of global contemporary Jewry.

The new series in light of the Russian Invasion in Ukraine Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 marks another dramatic moment in post-Soviet Jewish history. One noticeable effect of this invasion has been the escape of larger numbers of Ukrainian Jews to Israel and to Europe. The long-term consequences of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine are yet unclear, yet there are indications that the ethno-cultural self-assertion of Post-Soviet Jews will continue. In any case, understanding the new and progressing situation will require extensive research into and frequent monitoring of the post-Soviet Jewish communities everywhere. Such work will mark the baseline for the analysis of possible conflicts, policy recommendations, and an improved academic knowledge of post-Soviet Jewry. This series will be open for studies and publications focusing on these new problems and challenges as well. The editors remain committed to the ideals of science and scholarship within a global community and cooperate with authors from any country of the world, including Russia, on an individual basis – provided that authors refrain from advocating the Russian aggression against Ukraine. The war in Ukraine and the massive human rights violations perpetrated by Russian troops have brought into

About the Institute of Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (IEAJS)

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sharp relief the question of with whom the series editors can and cannot collaborate in good conscience.1

About the Institute of Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (IEAJS) This series is edited on behalf of the Institute of Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (IEAJS), based in Herzliya, Israel. The Institute has been established by the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJS) – the transcontinental umbrella organization of Jewish federations of the former Soviet Union as well as the Balkan and Asian states united across the cultural, geopolitical, and national borders within this continent – and in this capacity as a regional branch of the World Jewish Congress. The aim of the institute is to serve as a platform for academic and professional cooperation in studying the Jewish communities of these regions as well as “transnational Jewish Diasporas”—Jewish communities (predominantly, Russianspeaking) that are detached from their countries of origin within and outside of the Euro-Asian space. The IEAJS works in close academic cooperation with the Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Center of Diaspora Research at Tel Aviv University, Israel. ✶✶✶ We wish to express our sincere thanks to De Gruyter, especially to our editor Dr. Julia Brauch, to the President of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress Dr. Michail Merilashvili, and to Dr. Haim Ben-Yakov, the EAJC CEO and Executive Vice-President of the Institute of Euro-Asian Jewish Studies, as well as to the members of the international editorial board of this series, Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition. Prof. Vladimir (Ze’ev) Khanin Dr. Olaf Glöckner

 See also the official statement by DG and other publishers https://mailchi.mp/4851e2a74119/ joint-publisher-statement.

Contents About this Series “Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition” Chapter 1 Introduction 1 The State of the Art 5 Tasks and Research Methodology

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography 15 Estimates by Demographers 15 Assessments by Community Leaders and Experts Jewish and Near-Jewish Environment 24

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Chapter 3 Jewish Identity 29 The Meaning of Being Jewish in Post-Soviet Euro-Asia Ethnicity and Identity 32 Culture-Identity Groups 35 Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models 43 Experience of Kazakhstan and Moldova 52

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity of PostSoviet Jewry 59 Transnational Identity – Meaning and Parameters 59 The Israeli Factor of Post-Soviet Jewish Identity 67 Jews of Euro-Asia and the Arab-Israeli Conflict 75 Chapter 5 The Civic Identity of Russian-Speaking Jews 30 Years After the USSR Civic Identity Patterns 81 Dilemmas of Patriotism and the “Dual Loyalty” Mythology 85 Intermediate Results and New Challenges 92 Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition Religious Patterns 97 Religion: Faith or Culture 101

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Contents

Religious and Communal Function of a Synagogue 106 Holidays, Rituals and Memorial Days of the Jewish Calendar Chapter 7 “Secular” Culture and the Identity of Post-Soviet Jews The Infrastructure of Secular Culture 115 Cultural Needs as Identity Indicator 124 Dilemmas of Our Days 128

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity 130 Communication Models and Ethnopolitical Symbols 130 Language Markers of Jewish Identity 138 New Dilemmas of Our Days 145 Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR – State-of-Affairs and Prospects 149 Personal Space and Social Environment 150 Jewish Family Space: Marriage Patterns and Identity Transfer 157 Contradictions in Jewish Heritage Transmission 164 Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure 168 FSU Jewish Education Structure: An Overview 168 Jewish Education Involvement Patterns 172 Community Activity Resources 177 Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life 191 Anti-Semitism in the FSU vis-à-vis World Trends 191 Regional Differences 194 Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population 203

Contents

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews 214 Waves of Jewish Migration after the Collapse of the USSR: The General Picture 214 Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context 222 Emigration against the Background of the War: Portrait and Trajectories 236 Epilogue: Perspectives and Challenges from Jewish Life in the Former USSR in Light of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict 247 Prospects for Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora Trans-Nationalism 247 Directions of Ethnic Dynamics 251 The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Jewish Communities 257 The Jewish World and Post-Soviet Jewry: Conclusions and Tasks for the Future 270 References

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Subject Index Index of Persons

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Chapter 1 Introduction December 2021 marks exactly thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formation of fifteen independent states in its place. In 1991, this event gave impetus to many social, economic, cultural, and geopolitical processes that affected the fates of these numerous nations. These dynamics involved – perhaps in a special way – the numerous Soviet and post-Soviet Jews alive at that time and since. The reasons why throughout all these years the post-Soviet Jewish communities have remained the subject of unceasing interest to researchers and public figures are obvious. In the last half-century, these communities have become subjects of two counter processes: the revival of the national Jewish movement and, especially in the last three decades, of an organized, collective Jewish life, whose seeds seem to have been completely suppressed by the communist authorities of the USSR by the mid-1960s.2 On the other hand, it was one of the largest migratory phenomena in all of Jewish history, including both repatriation to Israel and emigration to other Western countries. The emigration of more than 2 million Jews and members of their families from the USSR and post-Soviet countries from 1969 has radically changed the geography of the Russian-speaking Jewish communities that exist today in dozens of countries spanning five continents (Tolts 2020). As a result, most of the nearly 3-million Russian-speaking Jews and their families have for the most part retained their own, special type of Jewish identity, which differs from the Jewish identities present in Israel and the West with their largely common values and, to some extent, awareness of a common destiny (Gitelman 2003; Khanin 2003a; Remennik 2012). This Russian-speaking community is distributed among four centers: Israel (about 1.1 million immigrants from the former USSR, who arrived from October 1969 to June 2022, and the first generation of their descendants),3 “the Anglo-Saxon world” (550,000–800,000 according to different estimates: Pew 2021: 54, 179), the countries of united Europe (200,000–250,000), and the 750,000 to 1 million persons who fall under the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return in the countries of post-Soviet Euro-Asia.

 For extensive academic literature on this issue see Gilboa 1972; Gitelman 1988; Pinkus 1988; Ro’i 1991.  Here and thereafter – Israeli Central Statistical Bureau (CSB) and Ministry of Aliya and Integration data, if not stated otherwise. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-001

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Chapter 1 Introduction

Assessments of the state and prospects of the Russian-(speaking) Jewish diaspora among academic researchers and commentators boil down to two positions. Most observers agree that Jewish emigrants from the former USSR, with their children already born abroad, have seriously strengthened their Jewish host communities, making up about 17% of today’s Jewish population of Israel and about 10% of the Jewish (in a broad sense) population of the USA, Canada, and the EU. But in the CIS and the Baltic countries, negative demographic factors, including continuing emigration, assimilation, and a death rate oustripping the birth rate (mitigated by a higher life expectancy than non-Jewish fellow citizens), prompted the process of depopulating local Jewish communities (Tolts 2017). However, forecasts made at the beginning of the century on the complete disappearance of the Jewish population in the CIS have not been confirmed. The phenomenon of the “1.5 generation” and the emergence of new subcultures among the Russian-speaking Jewish youth turned out to be a positive contribution to the upkeeping of local (“Russian”, or “Russian-speaking”) Jewish identity for the mid-term and possibly even the long-term future. (For more details on these processes, see Khanin and Pisarevskaya 2013). Among other noteworthy trends is the gradual stabilization in the number of post-Soviet Jewish communities in ten to twelve major cities with an extensive network of community structures and institutions. This trend, which became particularly clear by the mid-2000s, stands in clear opposition to the general depopulation affecting this group. A recent increase in FSU Jewish emigration from the second half of the following decade may elicit changes to this situation, but at least until very recently, prominent forecasts made at the beginning of the century predicting the complete disappearance of the Jewish population in the USSR successor states have been proven wrong – and it is still unclear whether this trend is going to change, despite dramatic events in local Jewish life due to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Another trend is the absorption of the non-Jewish demographic by Russianspeaking Jewish communities within the framework of an “extended” Russianspeaking Jewish population. This trend is especially noticeable among people of mixed origin with dual identity and is inherent in representatives of the second, third, and sometimes fourth generation of ethnically heterogeneous families. The current situation is significantly different from the Soviet era, when public discourse usually defined a Jew as a person with two Jewish parents or a descendant of a mixed marriage who for various reasons chose – openly, in the documents – a Jewish identity. In most cases, these were children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers who bore Jewish surnames and patronymics, which sharply distinguished them from the surrounding non-Jewish population.

Chapter 1 Introduction

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This pattern remained logical, if not the only possible outcome, as long as the USSR remained a closed society. Democratization and then the collapse of the USSR led to the restoration of contacts between the Jews of the former USSR and their fellow tribesmen abroad. The mass repatriation of Soviet Jews to Israel has created a situation in which the majority of Jews remaining in post-Soviet space have relatives and friends in their ethnic homeland. Under these conditions, the pattern of Jewish identity that had developed in the Soviet times has begun to change. Repatriation to Israel, which has been in constant operation over the past three decades, has had a significant impact on the formation of the post-Soviet model of Jewish identification, since the Law of Return provides the right to repatriate to the Jewish state not only to “pure” Jews (i.e., persons of homogeneous Jewish origin), but also to children of the first and second generations of mixed Jewish-gentile marriages (“half-Jewish” and “quarter-Jewish” in the conventional Soviet and post-Soviet public discourse),4 and even to non-Jewish spouses of all three categories, defining belonging to the Jewish nation according to Halakhic principle. And it is these groups that show obvious interest in finding their (potential) Jewish roots and are becoming increasingly visible among participants in cultural, educational, academic, memorial, social-civil, charitable, informational, and other community and quasi-community projects within local and international Jewish organizations. Another important thing is that members of these groups act as partners in marriage (in demographic, rather than sociological terms), showing that mixed couples will also identify with Jewish communities and their activities. An additional trend that has appeared is the formation of new entities within East European Ashkenazi Jewry, which we propose to call “ethno-civic” groups (elsewhere sometimes called “local ethnic”): Jews that are “Ukrainian,” “Latvian,” “Moldovan,” “Russian” (or more precisely, “Russia’s”5) and so on. This process has

 The terms “half Jew” and “quarter Jew” were common both among Jews and non-Jews already in the early 18th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, respectfully. The author is aware of the fact that since the German Nazis and their allies misused terms like “half Jew” and “quarter Jew” (“Halbjude”, “Vierteljude”) for purposes of repression and persecution, in the contemporary Western countries in general and in Germany in particular, handling this kind of terminology may sound problematic. However, in this book, in line with many other scholars that study Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish communities, we use these terms according to their original meanings.  The English term “Russian” corresponds to two terms in the Russian language – russkiy (русский) and rossiyskyi (российский). The first of these designates a claim to Russian ethnicity and/or culture, and the second to belonging to Russia as a country. Here I use “Russian” to denote the second of these meanings.

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been running in the background of former USSR regions for the last fifteen to twenty years, creating high level of cohesion within the Jewish population. Due to natural demographic realities, the share of people of mixed origin in these groups is high, demonstrating a changing balance with regard to identification with a person’s country-of-residence and the “transnational Russian-speaking Jewish community.” (For more details on this phenomenon, see Khanin 2011a). This process has been progressing against the background of, first of all, the sharp weakening and then gradual disappearance of the former Jewish collective identity that managed to survive the first post-Soviet decade, which, among other things, became the basis for two new trends. The first of these was the strengthening of oriental Soviet Jewish communities, including subethnic groups among Georgian, Bukharan, and, to a lesser extent, Mountain Jews. These groups clarified and bolstered their specific group identifications within and then beyond the phenomenon of “(post-) Soviet Jewry” beginning almost immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. According to Michael Chlenov, already in the first post-Soviet decade, many individuals belonging to these groups began to refer to themselves as “Sephardi” or “Mizrahi” Jews under the influence of Israeli traditions (Chlenov 1998, 8; see also Dymshits 2005). Now this process has progressed and is thoroughly entrenched in local cultures (Shakhbanova 2018; Grebennikov 2015). The second dominant, and much larger process, whose outcome, in fact, is the major focus of the analyses presented in this book, was the gradual dissolution, or at least transformation, of the “old” subethnic or ethnolinguistic group of Ashkenazic Jews in the FSU. This group has witnessed a long process of losing such ethnocultural attributes as the Yiddish language and its associated folklore, as well as many elements of traditional Eastern European Ashkenazi culture. Instead, today, three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, in post-Soviet space, in Israel, and in countries of the “new Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora,” we are witnesses to the development of a new subethnic group of Jewish people – “Russian,” or more precisely, “Russian-speaking, Jewry” (RSJ). The heritage of the East-European Ashkenazi serves as a substrate (including the translation of fiction from Yiddish into Russian) (Chernin 1994; 2019a) for the culture of these new Russian-speaking Jewish entities. Due to the two above-mentioned waves of mass migration from the USSR and its successor states to Israel and the West (in 1969–1980 and from 1989 through the present), this new entity has obtained features of a global (or globalized) community. Infrastructure comes from the above-mentioned local Jewish groups with a specific communal, subcultural, and ethnopolitical identity. Parallel processes are also observed in other segments of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish

The State of the Art

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entity outside of post-Soviet counties, for example in “Russian Israel,” the Russian-speaking Jewish community of the United States, and so forth.

The State of the Art All of these trends, important for the future of Israel and the Jewish people, have become in recent years the subject of various applied studies, including expert analyses and qualitative research observing basic social, cultural, and behavioral phenomena typical of the post-Soviet Jewry at large and their individual segments in particular (see, e.g., Chlenov 2002; Gidwitz 1999; Nosenko-Stein 2004; 2013). The literature has also come to include quantitative studies that have enabled us to track down the origins, the real extent, and the dynamics of these processes as parts of the same overarching trend. There are, however, very few academic studies that would be of interest to us in a comparative interregional context. The first special study of the Jewish population of Moscow, Minsk, and Kyiv was conducted in 1992 by the Canadian sociologist Robert Brym and the Moscow-based researcher Rosalina Ryvkina (1994). From the beginning to the late 1990s, the American sociologist Zvi Gitelman and his Russian colleagues, Vladimir Chervyakov and Vladimir Shapiro, carried out two rounds of a comprehensive study of 6,664 Jews in three Russian (Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Ekaterinburg) and five Ukrainian (Kyiv, Kharkiv, Lviv, Chernivtsi, and Odessa) cities. The results of this study, which aimed to identify the social and cultural picture of Jews in the first post-Soviet decade, and to reveal further possible trends, became the empirical basiss for a series of academic publications that appeared in the course of the next decade (Gitelman et al 2000; 2001a; 2001b; Gitelman 2003; 2012). Next in terms of chronology came a quantitative comparative study of ethnic and religious identity, social and cultural practices, and values among the Jews of Russia and Ukraine. It was conducted in 2003–2005 by Ze’ev Khanin and Velvl Chernin. 470 respondents from Ukraine and Russia who identified with the Jewish community to various extents were chosen mostly via the “snowball method” from two capital cities (Kyiv and Moscow) and from three provincial administrative centers (Vladimir, Samara, and Zaporozhye/Zaporizhia). These subjects were interviewed face-to-face according to a standard questionnaire. The study also included a series of in-depth expert interviews of Jewish organization leaders, community activists, and professionals, as well as foreign Jewish organizations’ envoys who by the time of the interview worked in several FSU countries. (Results of this study were published in Khanin and Chernin 2007 and Khanin 2011a).

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Finally, there is the 2013 work by Ze’ev Khanin, Dina Pisarevskaya, and Alek Epstein based on the comparative analysis of eight 2004–2012 studies, but dedicated only to one, albeit important, category of the researched community – namely the Jewish youth of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (Khanin et al 2013). This exhausts the list of comparative studies known to this author that analyze sociocultural processes in the Jewish communities of at least two post-Soviet states. To complete the picture, we should mention a number of important quantitative studies of the largest local Jewish communities, those of Moscow and St. Petersburg (Ryvkina, 1996; 2005; Shapiro et al, 2006), as well as studies of the Jewish populations of individual countries, in particular Russia. Two of these examinations were especially important. The first is the complex sociological analysis of Jews in Russia (about 1,300 respondents) overseen by Igor Yakovenko in 2010 (see results of in Osovtsov and Yakovenko 2011). The second is the 2007–2010 research undertaken by Elena Nosenko-Stein in five Russian cities: Moscow, Smolensk, Veliky Novgorod, Penza, and Krasnodar. (Nosenko-Stein 2013; 2014b). Unlike the former study, this research by Nosenko-Stein was built on a relatively small sample, which, according to the author, was also initially “biased” in terms of gender, age, and “activism”: women, members of Jewish youth organizations, and clients of the Hesed foundation over 60 years old were disproportionately represented there, with some attempts to “level it out” in the course of the study. Nevertheless, this analysis contains interesting observations and important conceptual conclusions about the preservation and transformation of the sociocultural values of Russia’s Jewish population – both in the capital and in the provinces – in the late 2000s. More recently, a few important studies of recent trends have been undertaken in certain Russian-speaking Jewish communities of the “transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora,” such as those of the USA (Sheskin and Altman 2022; Sheskin et al 2023), Canada (Brym et al 2020), and Israel. The data from two of these, both completed in Israel under the guidance of this author, are used extensively in this book. The first of these latter studies was conducted in February-March 2017 and included a comprehensive survey (a series of the face-to-face interviews) of 915 Russian-speaking olim that arrived in Israel from the USSR and FSU in the “Great Aliya” years since 1989.6 Besides this, the study included an extended sub-sample

 The survey was implemented by the PORI (Public Opinion Research Institute) sociological agency, Tel-Aviv, in accordance with the program proposed by this author. Respondents were selected according to the quota sample, which was a representative sample according to basic demographic parameters of the target population, including sex, age, time after Aliya in Israel, and place of living (city and region) calculated according to the CBS and Ministry of Aliya and

The State of the Art

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of members of what is called “Putin’s Aliya” from 2014–2017 (212 respondents). These were considered in the final sample in accordance with the real share (4%) of this subgroup within the community of repatriates from the former USSR in 1989–2017 (PORI 2017). The second above-mentioned study assessed the motives and circumstances behind emigration, the socio-cultural composition, and the ethnic, religious, and national-civic identity of FSU Jews arriving in Israel between January 1 and April 2022 (MOIA 2022). This research was conducted at the initiative of Israel’s Ministry of Aliya and Integration in April and early May 2022. Respondents, totaling 1,090, were randomly selected from the nearly 20,000 repatriates and returning citizens who were at the time of the survey in the registration database of the Ministry of Aliya and Integration. 1,001 (92.6%) were interviewed by telephone and 81 (7.4%) online.7 However, as far as we know, no such studies were carried out in recent decade within post-Soviet space, which leaves new processes typical of this period out of current applied and academic analyses. Among these processes is the appearance on the Jewish scene in CIS and Baltic countries of new transregional players such as the Genesis Foundation (GPG), Jewish umbrella organizations such as the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, and transcontinental projects such as the educational Limmud platform and groups of activists in Israel and countries of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora affiliated with it. One trend to notice has been the shifting of the leadership of Jewish organizations toward a substantial representation of the post-Soviet generation largely consisting of descendants of mixed marriages, whose worldview is more often dominated by local Jewish identity rather than a “universal” one. Another challenge to

Integration data. Other parameters – education, income level, country of origin, and existing housing – were not initially set as sampling quotas. However, the randomly obtained structure of the body of respondents within these parameters turned out to be close to or identical to the CSB data and to the results of its surveys of the state of repatriates.  Out of the total number of respondents, 592 (54.3%) came from Ukraine, 92 of whom (15.6% of all arrivals from Ukraine) repatriated in January and February 2022 before the outbreak of hostilities on February 24 this year, while the remaining 499 (74.4%) came after this date and received “refugee” status in Israel. 470 (43.2%) of the rest of the repatriates who arrived in Israel from January to the end of April 2022 were from Russia, 19 (1.7%) from Belarus, and 8 (0.7%) from other countries of the former USSR. The sample structure obtained this way turned out to be close to the general population as measured by 10 out of 12 relevant parameters, including country of origin (except for the ratio of the share of people from Ukraine and Russia who had arrived prior to the outbreak of hostilities), gender, and age. The field component of this research, which included a telephone poll and an initial work-over of the data collected by all methods, was done by the Sociological Institute TalDor, Israel.

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the collective identity of post-Soviet Jewry was a new round of conflicts between former Soviet states that demanded a totally new level of loyalty to country. Among these conflicts were the Russia-Georgia war of 2008, two rounds of escalation of military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan (in April 2016 and the fall of 2020), and especially the long-standing Russian-Ukrainian conflict that broke out in 2014 and escalated in February 2022 to the first full-scale war in Europe in 75 years, which actively “played” the “Jewish card” (Khanin 2023). Finally, the new rise (especially since 2013–2014) of Jewish emigration from CIS countries, especially from aliya to Israel, was provoked inter alia by these events and replaced nearly a decade of decline in repatriation, which saw its lowest point in 2008. This trend is once again influencing the socio-demographic and behavioral processes within post-Soviet Jewish environments. In this critical period, the sociocultural dynamics in the post-Soviet Jewish communities certainly require comprehensive quantitative analysis, first of all in the comparative inter-regional context. Some measurements were taken, on par with the 2018 analysis, of Jewish people’s perceptions of the level of anti-Semitism in Russia (517 people over 16 years old, with a set of questions about civil, religious, and ethnic identity). This research was commissioned by RJC and assigned to the Moscow Levada Analytical Center (Levada 2018). The same Center conducted a study of the level of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Russia in 2020, during which 70 Jewish thought leaders were interviewed by telephone on the topic of Jewish identity and scenarios of the Jewish future in the country (Levada 2020a). We can also mention the work carried out in 2018 by Madina Shakhbanova and a group of researchers from the Institute of History, Archeology and Ethnography at the Dagestan Federal Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This was a comprehensive study of the ethnic and religious identity of the Mountain Jews of the North Caucasus (a topic that, as noted above, remains outside the scope of this book). The results of their survey of 726 respondents – selected by the “snowball” method in the cities of Derbent, Makhachkala, Minvody, Essentuki, Pyatigorsk, and Nalchik – were published in several articles in 2018–2019 (Shakhbanova 2018; Shakhbanova et al 2019). These studies, no matter how important, provide only a partial solution to our problem. A large-scale quantitative study conducted in 2019 and early 2020 under the guidance of the author and at the initiative of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) in five post-Soviet states – Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine – provides the main body of empirical data by which this book attempts to fill this gap. This research paid special attention to communities that comprised the infrastructure of the above-mentioned new, predominantly Ashkenazi sub-ethnic

Tasks and Research Methodology

9

group with Russian-speaking Jewish roots, which is developing in European and to a lesser degree in the Asian parts of the post-Soviet space. The purpose of the study was to research these groups’ options for developing ethnic identities (Jewish and otherwise), current trends in the formation of Jewish communities, the choice of mechanisms being used for joining the Jewish community by people of non-Jewish and mixed origin, migration dynamics, and the socio-economic status of various Jewish groups in the country, as well as their attitudes towards Israel and its place in their cultures, values, and behaviors. This study also became in many respects a continuation of the above-mentioned survey conducted by Khanin and Chernin 15 years ago in Ukraine and Russia, and it uses of a similar methodology, which makes it possible to assess the dynamics of the processes recorded at that time among the Jews of the post-Soviet countries. In addition, in relevant cases, the data from our surveys are analyzed in comparison with the results of other recent studies of the same target audience.

Tasks and Research Methodology In accordance with this purpose, the author has set the following research tasks: 1. Find out the socio-demographic profile, areas of activity, and geographical spread of the FSU Jewish population. 2. Outline the cultural identity of this community. 3. Explore the models of national identity among its members, their attitudes to Israel, involvement in the activities of local Jewish organizations, and relations with Israeli and international Jewish structures operating in the postSoviet space. 4. Analyze the operational and potential social, economic, cultural, and humanitarian needs of this group. 5. Identify potential interests and vectors of migration dynamics of people falling under the Law of Return; evaluate the push and pull factors of such migration. 6. Identify the socio-economic status of this group in comparison with various segments of the non-Jewish population and understand to what extent this changing ethnic environment holds potential for Jewish community projects in Israel and the diaspora. 7. Analyze the attitude(s) of this group to various ways that people of mixed and non-Jewish origins might join the Jewish community – both traditional (conversion and clarification of Jewish roots) and ethnocultural.

10

Chapter 1 Introduction

To accomplish these tasks, we conducted the largest possible survey of representatives of the “extended Jewish population” 16 years old and older who currently reside in four countries of the European part of the former USSR mentioned above and in Kazakhstan. These are the people who meet the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return: ethnic Jews, descendants of mixed marriages in the second and third generations, non-Jewish spouses of these individuals, the fourth generation of mixed marriages, and members of Jewish households who do not meet the LOR criteria but who are involved in Jewish community activities. Since it is extremely difficult to build a representative sample of this population group while taking into account the quantitative and relative share of each of these subgroups due to the absence of exact statistical data, the study focuses on the qualitative differences between them on issues pertaining to value orientations and their sociocultural and political identifications, as well as the general features and characteristics of the Jewish people (in the broadest sense of the word) in post-Soviet countries. To develop this concept and build the sample, we accept the hypothesis that 850,000 to 1 million people that fall under the LOR currently reside in the four countries of the former USSR, 40%-45% of whom are ethnic Jews (up to one-third of the total – people of pure Jewish descent and descendants of mixed marriages with a strong Jewish identity). These people embody the potential for both Jewish community activities and repatriation to Israel. – 550,000–600,000 such people reside in Russia today, 35%-40% of whom live in Moscow, 20% in St. Petersburg, and about 40% in the provinces; – 220,000–270,000 live in Ukraine, one-fifth to one-quarter of whom live in the country’s capital city of Kyiv (formerly Kiev); – 35,000–45,000 live in Belarus, 40%-50% of whom live in Minsk; – 15,000–22,000 live in Moldova, 60% of whom live in its capital, Chisinau. The survey was conducted by way of structured personal interviews based on the questionnaire developed by the study initiators and in some cases coordinated with local partners.8 The sample size in four European countries of the former USSR was about 2,200 respondents (2,112 answered all 65 questions of the questionnaire). Of the total number of respondents:

 IEAJS’ partners in this poll were the Levada Analytical Center (Moscow), the Ukrainian Institute of Jewish Studies (Kyiv), the Ukrainian Tkuma Institute for Holocaust Studies (Dnepr/Dnipro), sociologists invited by the Jewish communities of Odessa, Bryansk, Chisinau, and Minsk, as well as the BISAM – Central Asia Center (Almaty).

Tasks and Research Methodology

–

– – –

11

857 people lived in Russia (including 360 in Moscow, 200 in St. Petersburg, and the rest in Voronezh, Kazan, Perm, Bryansk, Novosibirsk, Irkutsk, Birobidzhan, and other cities); 880 people lived in Ukraine (including 301 in Kyiv, 384 in Odessa and Dnepr, and others in Zhitomir, Kremenchug, Poltava, and Mirgorod); 262 people lived in Belarus (including 150 in Minsk, 30 in Vitebsk, and 82 in other cities of the country); 185 people lived in Moldova (97 of them in Chisinau, 88 in Balti, Tiraspol, and Bendery).

Another 250 respondents were interviewed in an additional study conducted in Kazakhstan in early 2020 with the use of the same tools, adapted to the local realities. They lived in Almaty (97 people), Karaganda (53 people), Pavlodar (50 people), and Shymkent (50 people). All of this makes this survey one of the most comprehensive studies of postSoviet Jewry (Ashkenazy, according to their roots) from the former USSR in recent times. A random quota sample was structured in keeping with the demographic structure of the group’s population. The questionnaires collected in each of the post-Soviet countries were proportionally considered in the final sample in accordance with their share in the Jewish population of the region. Since, as was mentioned above, there is no accurate data on the age structure of this study group, age quotas in the sample were determined with a slight decrease in the average age for the “extended Jewish population” of CIS countries compared to the latest calculations of the core structure of the Jewish population by demographers. In keeping with this approach, a quota of up to 20% was determined for respondents under 29 years of age, around 35% was used for the average age of 30- to 54-yearolds, and for advanced middle age and 55+ the quota was around 45%. The second challenge was the division of respondents into the categories of “participants” in organized Jewish activities and those who were “unaffiliated.” In this matter, we relied on comparative data from our previous and other studies demonstrating that in large CIS cities with a significant Jewish population and/ or cities with a high proportion of Jews in a particular country (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Dnepr, Minsk, and Chisinau), 15% to 25% of Jews participate relatively often in the activities of various Jewish organizations. In peripheral cities, the indicator is 30% to 40%. This indicator is typically slightly higher for young people and the elderly than for middle-aged people. Around 35% to 42% of Jewish people participate in certain events from time to time (“provisionally affiliated,” or “contactors”).

12

Chapter 1 Introduction

Based on these data and adjusting for trends in recent years, the corresponding sample quotas were determined as follows: Affiliated respondents – activists of Jewish organizations and frequent attendees of events in their cities, selected according to lists provided by Jewish organizations: up to 30% of the sample in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kyiv; up to 35% in Chisinau, Minsk, and large provincial communities, and as high as 40%–45% in small provincial Jewish communities. Unaffiliated respondents – people who are not actively involved in the life of their city communities on a relatively regular basis: up to 70% of the sample in large and capital city communities, and about 55–60% in small provincial communities selected by the “snowball method.” An equally difficult issue in this kind of research is the question of the representativeness of the ethno-demographic sample. In our 2019–2020 study, quotas for this selection of respondents were not specifically set. As a result, people of completely or almost completely homogeneous Jewish origin (“100%” or “pure” Jews), descendants of mixed Jewish-Gentile marriages in the first (“half-Jewish”) and second (“quarter-Jews”) generations, and members of Jewish families of non-Jewish origin or more distant families, made up 34%, 24%, 25%, and 17% of the sample, respectively. This is very comparable to the data that is present in professional literature – which, unfortunately, is not an absolute guarantee of the correctness of any sample both due to the deliberate approximation of the majority of demographic estimates and because different sociologists and demographers use different criteria to structure the population of the segment we are interested in. This can be illustrated by comparing our data to estimates of the Jewish population of post-Soviet countries by Sergio Della Pergola, where he used slightly different socio-demographic criteria. In particular, the terms he used were “an ethnic core,” “individuals with Jewish parents,” “an extended Jewish population,” and “population that meets the criteria of the Israeli LOR,” whose relative shares make up 28%, 24%, 22%, and 27% (Della Pergola 2019, 19–21) – this is generally comparable to our sociological sample data. Note that a similar sampling technique in the past gave a close and, as it turned out during data processing, sociologically correct result. For instance, in our 2008 study of Jewish youth, 28% of respondents were also ethnic (“pure”) Jews, 45% were descendants of the first generation of mixed marriages, 21% had only one Jewish grandparent, and 6% were non-Jewish spouses. The structure of the random sample in the 2004–2005 study by Khanin and Chernin was also similar. Approximately the same ethnic make-up of immigrants who came to Israel from the CIS in the first decade of the 21st century was derived from the survey of the Russian-language students preparing for giyur (conversion to Judaism) at the Jerusalem Institute for Studies of Judaism. (See MOIA-PORI 2007, 8.)

Tasks and Research Methodology

13

Another screening criterion is the ethno-demographic and ethno-social structure of the new wave of aliya to Israel from the former Soviet Union, which in the last seven to eights years has almost reached critical mass again and, according to experts, is a representative cross-section of the Jewish population in these countries.9 As can be seen from Table 1.1, in eleven out of sixteen cases, the ethnic structures of our sample and the 2013–2019 aliya turned out to be close or identical. Table 1.1: Ethnic Structure of the Sample vs. the Aliya of 2013–2019. # of Jewish grandparents –   None Total

Ukraine

Russia

Belarus

Moldova

Kazakhstan

Sample Aliya Sample Aliya Sample Aliya Sample Aliya Sample Aliya % % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % %

One should also take into consideration that the Israeli authorities and most of the Jewish communities in the diaspora use the traditional Halakhah (Jewish law) criterion in defining a person’s Jewishness, including in their administrative practices. In keeping with this approach, a Jew is a person born of a Jewish mother or someone who has gone through the rite of giyur (conversion to Judaism), which means joining the Jewish people religiously as well as ethnically. This approach is still less relevant to the Jewish context of the former USSR than to Israel or the Jewish communities of the West. Therefore, we deliberately abandoned this criterion in structuring our sample and analyzing the data of our 2004–2005 and 2019–2020 studies. The author, however, took into account the fact that, according to statistics, from one-third to one-half of the “half-Jewish” are usually Jews by Halakhah,10 while among “quarter-Jews” the proportion of Halakhic Jews is up to 25%. In our 2019 study, too, 48% of “half-Jewish” and 23% of “quarter-Jews” met the Halakhic criteria. Thus, about half of our respondents were Halakhic Jews, which accurately

 Personal observations and a series of interviews by authors with employees of Israeli embassies, Nativ consuls, envoys of the Jewish Agency, and representatives of other Jewish organizations in CIS countries in 2015–2020.  Estimates of the ethnic and Halakhic structure of the Russian-speaking Jewish community are presented in detail in Khanin 2014.

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Chapter 1 Introduction

reflects the overall picture.11 In view of these data, our sample can also be considered quite representative in the ethno-demographic sense. In any event, as was the case with our previous studies, we were interested not so much in the quantitative correlation as in the qualitative differences related to issues of identity, value orientations, assimilation, sociocultural realities, and political identification between different segments of the “extended Jewish population” of the former USSR. These items constitute the main objects of analyses presented in this book.

 A similar proportion (51%), for example, was made up of Halakhic Jews among respondents of a representative survey of 1,006 Russian speakers from the former USSR who met the criteria of the Taglit program (young people who, under the Law of Return, have the right to repatriate to Israel) conducted in the summer of 2008 under the auspices of the Jewish Sochnut Agency by Eli Leshem.

Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography As is the case with other studies of this kind, the first difficulty in the survey was to determine the demographic framework of the target population for study since there is no data on the exact size and structure of the Jewish population of the former Soviet countries. Academic circles and various organizations operating in FSU countries run on different criteria and initial assumptions and therefore come to conflicting conclusions on the size of this group.

Estimates by Demographers “Minimalists” from the Jerusalem school of demographers (Mark Tolts and Sergio Della Pergola), who draw their conclusions from extrapolating the data of the last Soviet census of 1989 and two rounds of censuses in post-Soviet countries in the 2000s and in the 2010s, estimate the size of the “ethnic core” of the Jewish population to be 267,500 people. This number signifies people of homogeneous Jewish and mixed origins with a stable Jewish identity, although the Jewish (in the broad sense of the word) community is not limited to them. The “outer layer” of this community in the former USSR and other countries is the remaining segments of the so-called “extended Jewish population” – a term proposed by a group of American researchers (Goldstein S. 1992; Kosmin et al 1991)12 and adapted to postSoviet realities by Evgeny Andreev, Alexander Sinelnikov, and Mark Tolts (Sinelnikov 1994; Tolts 2006). In addition to ethnic Jews, this category includes people of Jewish and mixed origins who identified themselves as non-Jews during the census, as well as nonJewish members of Jewish households. The continuing negative demographic processes (death rate topping birth rate), as well as assimilation and emigration, in researchers’ opinions, have different effects on the size of “ethnic core” and the “extended Jewish population” in CIS countries. The share of mixed marriages (for example, in Russia, according to the 2015 micro- census, 72% of families are created by Jewish men and 53% by Jewish women) is clearly higher in younger cohorts (Population of Russia 2018, 173, 176). Therefore, the effect of depopulation on the reduction of the second

 Theoretical aspects of the “extended Jewish population” concept were also examined in Della Pergola 1993. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-002

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

(“enlarged”) group has not been as great as its effect on the reduction of the “ethnic core;” mixed marriages, on the other hand, erode the “ethnic core” and lead to an increase in the non-Jewish component of the “extended population” and slow down its decline. According to the authoritative opinion of Mark Tolts, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the “extended Jewish population” amounted to 2,170,000. Of these, 910,000 were living in the Russian Federation, 660,000 in Ukraine, 155,000 in Belarus, and 445,000 in other regions of the USSR. By the end of the century, this population declined to 1,030,000, primarily due to emigration. However, while the ethnic core of the Jewish population of the former Soviet Union decreased by almost three times (from 1,480,000 in 1989 to 544,000 in 1999) over a decade, the “non-Jewish” component of the extended population decreased only 1.5 times – from 690,000 to 486,000. This decline was almost entirely due to emigration. The total number of the over-a-million “extended population” has only halved, unlike the two-thirds reduced ethnic “core” (Tolts 2007). The same demographic trends affected the Jewish population in the next decade, therefore the ratio of “extended population” to its “ethnic core” in 1999 was already 1.9:1, and in 2010 around 2.1–2.2:1 (Tolts 2013). In Ukraine, at the time of the last census in 2001, the number of “declared” Jews was 103,600. The new census planned for 2013 did not take place but, according to different estimates, the ethnic core of the Jewish community of Ukraine at the beginning of that decade was about 75,000 to 85,000. Minimalist evaluations of the “extended Jewish population” ranged from 160,000 to 170,000. If one follows this method, the “extended Jewish population” in Belarus was estimated at 40,000 people, in Moldova at 12,000–15,000 people, and so on. Continued assimilation and emigration, primarily through aliya to Israel, which intensified radically in 2013–2014, continues to determine the socio-demographic face of the “Jewish” communities of FSU countries in recent years. This includes further erosion of the “ethnic core” (from 200,000 in 2010 to 186,000 in 2016 in Russia, from 70,000 to 56,000 over the same period in Ukraine, from 28,000 to 13,000 in Belarus, and from 5,000 to less than 3,000 in Moldova). According to refined estimates published by Della Pergola in 2020 and 2022, the number of “core Jews” living in FSU countries (excluding the Baltic states) at the beginning of 2018 and at the turn of 2019–2020 was 267,5000 and 224,000 respectively. Relevant estimates for Russia, Ukraine, and Asian countries of the former USSR were reduced from 179,500 in Russia; 56,000 in Urraine; 18,000 in Asian countries of the former USSR; 10,400 in Belarus; and 3,500 people in Moldova at the beginning of 2018 – to, respectively, 165,000; 48,000; 15,300; 9,000 and 1,900 thousand people two years later (DellaPergola, 2019; DellaPergola and Staetsky 2020, 69). In addition, Mark Tolts, in his annual assessment of the size of the

Estimates by Demographers

17

“ethnic core” of the extended Jewish population in Russia and Ukraine, says it was 155,000 and 45,000 respectively in 2020, 150,000 and 42,000 in 2021, and 145,000 and 40,000 in 2022 (Tolts 2022). At the same time, it was due to mixed marriages, which supplemented the Jewish community’s “cloud” with new groups of mixed and non-Jewish origins, that the total number of the “extended Jewish population” has not decreased so dramatically. Moreover, judging by Della Pergola’s calculations, in two regions of the former USSR – Russia and post-Soviet Asian countries – this population even grew compared to last year’s estimates, and in Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova it remained at the same level despite the decrease in the “ethnic core.” The decline in the “ethnic core” might also be slowed down due to the growing increase in emigration via the “Jewish ticket” among many members of Jewish households of mixed and nonJewish origins with a previously absent or unstable Jewish identity. Finally, one should remember that emigration today is not a road “in one direction.” Over the past 30 years, there have been a certain number of people among the repatriates from the former USSR (by our estimates, up to 10,000–15,000 people in some years) that divide their lives between Israel and one of the CIS countries, as well as a hardly definable number of persons with Jewish roots that divide their lives between the FSU and one of the Western states. Bypassing the emigration statistics, these people are usually also left out of the census data of the post-Soviet countries. A separate case consists in those 20,000–25,000 of almost 130,000 postSoviet repatriates of the last 7–8 years who either returned from Israel to their countries of origin (some almost immediately after emigration) or shuttled between the two countries and therefore are often counted both as citizens of Israel and as residents of CIS countries (Khanin 2022, 22–48). (It is clear that this picture needs substantial clarification in light of the migration outcomes of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.) To summarize: at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the “minimalists” of the Jerusalem school, based on the latest censuses, estimated the total “core” number of post-Soviet Jewry, whose median age is around 56–58 years old and most of whom are in mixed marriages, at 325,000–326,000 persons, and 234,500 at the end of 2020 (DellaPergola and Staetsky 2020, 36; DellaPergola 2022). This is the minimum point of reference for supporters of all demographic approaches. Considering the demographic balance of subsequent years and the 2.2 expansion coefficient for the Jewish population in CIS countries, DellaPergola estimates the current size of the “extended Jewish population” to be over 690,000. In addition to members of the “ethnic core” of the population, this population also includes more than 210,000 people of homogeneous ethnic Jewish origin and Halakhic Jews who do not identify themselves as Jews. (Apparently, among these are tens of thousands of those unaccounted for in the latest post-Soviet censuses of 2002–2015.)

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

Also, do not forget the some 234,000 members of “Jewish” households of mixed and non-Jewish origins. Thus, the total number of people of Jewish and non-Jewish descent living in the former USSR (excluding the Baltic countries) who met LOR criteria in 2020 was, according to the same estimates, more than 900,000 people. These present the potential for Jewish (with or without quotation marks) emigration and Jewish community activities (See tables 2.1 and 2.2 bellow). Table 2.1: Estimation of Total Jewish Population in FSU Countries Outside of the EU (as of early 2020). Jewish population categories Ethnic core Jewish population✶ Population with Jewish parents ✶✶ “Extended” Jewish population ✶✶✶ Persons meeting the Israeli LOR criteria✶✶✶✶

FSU Europe – EU

FSU Europe – non-EU

FSU-Asia

, , , ,

, , , ,

, , , ,

Total , , , ,

✶

All people of homogeneous Jewish and mixed origins who identify as Jews. The sum of the “core” and people of homogeneous Jewish and mixed origins who do not identify as Jews. ✶✶✶ The sum of members of “Jewish” households of Jewish and non-Jewish origins. ✶✶✶✶ People of Jewish and non-Jewish descent entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Israeli Law of Return. ✶✶

Over 90% of people of Jewish and non-Jewish origins that meet the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return (over 843,000 people) lived in the four post-Soviet countries, where the first round of this study was conducted in 2019, and around another 6% lived in the countries of the Southern Caucasus and Central Asia. As mentioned before, a survey using the same methodology was conducted in early 2020 Table 2.2: Estimation of Jewish Population of Post-Soviet Countries where Survey was Conducted as Part of this Study (based on data from DellaPergola 2019, 335). Extended Jewish population categories

Russia

Ukraine

Moldova

Belarus

Total population Core Jewish population Jews per , total population Population with Jewish parents Extended Jewish population Law of Return population % of Total CIS Jews

,, , . , , , %

,, , . , , , %

,, , . , , , %

,, , . , , , %

Kazakhstan ,, ,  . , , , %

Estimates by Demographers

19

in one of them, the Republic of Kazakhstan, and its results are considered in the relevant sections of this book. The invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine in February 2022, as a result of which more than 4.5 million citizens of this country were displaced, could not help but impact the Ukrainian Jewish community. At the time of writing this chapter, almost half of the 40,000 to 45,000 members of its ethnic core are estimated to have abandoned their places of permanent residence, about two-thirds of whom (10,000 to 12,000) have moved abroad. (For this reason, for example, Halakhic Jews in Israel accounted for 50%-60% of the almost 4,500 repatriates who arrived in the weeks of the “excessive aliya” from Ukraine from late February to early April 2022, which was unprecedented in the last decade and a half. Following this, aliya from this country began to decline.) “The story of how Jews have reacted to developments in both countries can also be seen by looking at the proportions of Jews from within both [countries’] Jewish populations emigrating each year,” argued Jonathan Boyd, Executive Director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. “Following the ‘Maidan’ Uprising in 2014, the Ukrainian Jewish population has been declining by about 5% per annum for the past few years . . . Indeed, when one factors in the current conflict, it is likely that an expected increase in migration will further drive the rate of decline” (Boyd 2022, 4). The same events and their possible consequences (deterioration of the economic situation due to western sanctions, strengthening of authoritarian tendencies in the powers that be, and fear of a new “iron curtain”) have led to a new jump in Jewish (in the broadest sense of the word) emigration from the Russian Federation. Most of these emigrants have departed (mainly to Israel) from capital and other large industrial, business, and cultural centers of the Russian Federation (for instance, 53% of olim from Russia that came to Israel between February 24 and July 23, 2022 arrived from the Moscow region, and 13% from St. Petersburg). The proportion of members of the ethnic core of the local Jewish community is significantly higher there than the national average. It is easy to assume that with the continuation of this trend, the processes of decrease of the Jewish ethnic core, may also have a negative impact on the size of the “extended Jewish population” of the post-Soviet Euro-Asia, some 90% of which is concentrated in the two countries mentioned. Nevertheless, at the time of this writing, there is no reason to expect that the community-regional structure of the core or of the extended Jewish population of the former USSR will undergo significant changes, even in light of these dramatic events.

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

Assessments by Community Leaders and Experts We should keep in mind that not all experts, in particular not all community leaders in the former Soviet Union, support the “minimalist” approach to Israeli demographers. Many believe that the ratio of the “ethnic core” to the “extended Jewish population” that includes people of mixed origin and non-Jewish family members is 1:3 or even 1:4. For example, Council member and former President of the Federal Jewish National Cultural Autonomies Association of the Russian Federation, linguist and anthropologist Mikhail Chlenov told us in an interview that the average ratio of the “extended population” to the “ethnic core” is different in different parts of Russia (according to him, “in the Amur province it will be different from Dagestan”). As a result, Chlenov estimates the number of RF Jewry to be 600,000–700,000, and if we include Israelis living in Russia, “even closer to 700,000–800,000.” Even larger was the estimate of Rabbi Dovid Karpov of the Moscow Chabad congregation. According to him, Moscow alone is home to approximately half a million “Halakhic Jews and those who feel Jewish,” while in the country at large there are “about one to one and a half million, according to the same principle.” Chief Rabbi of Russia (according to the Confederation of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities of Russia, CJROC) Adolf Shayevich numbered about 250,000–300,000 Halakhic Jews in Moscow alone and about a million throughout the whole Russian Federation. A representative of another Jewish religious umbrella association – the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FJC) – Borukh Gorin, who once declared that out of all the estimates (“from 230,000 to 10 million Jews”) the most probable figure was one million people (quote from Demoskop 2004), gave us a somewhat more conservative estimate in a conversation in 2015: “According to what I see and hear, 450,000–500,000 people who consider themselves Jewish live in Moscow. Approximately another 250,000 live [elsewhere] in Russia, so there is a total of about 750,000 people in the country.” Finally, Moscow sociologist and demographer and former head of the program of the Jewish people study at the Russian State University of Humanities, Mark Kupovetsky, said that in his opinion no less than 2 million Jews and people of mixed origin lived in Russia in the late 1990s and at least a million Jews live in the Russian Federation today. In general, this was the range of evaluations by several dozen Russian-speaking Jewish community thought leaders polled by Ze’ev Khanin, Elina Bardach-Yalov, and Dmitry Kurs with the use of in-depth personal interviews during the 2015 research initiated by the Genesis Philanthropy Group

Assessments by Community Leaders and Experts

21

foundation (GPG 2015).13 Most of these respondents, including leaders of main umbrella and regional organizations, heads of community structures, influential experts, and senior employees of Russian-speaking Jewish communities of the former Soviet Union, were convinced that the Jewish population of Russia ranges from “600,000–700,000 to a little over a million,” including “half-Jewish and other people with the right of return.” Experts use this model to estimate the size of the Jewish population in other countries of the former USSR. The only exception was executive director of the Riga community, Gita Umanovskaya, who based her opinion on the official Latvian registration and thus estimated the “ethnic core” of the Jews in Latvia “as of 1 January 2015” to be about 9,000 people, which together with “non-Jews who fall under the Israeli Law of Return, make up about 15,000 people.” At the time, this was consistent with the minimalist demographers’ estimations. On the contrary, former rector of the Jewish University of Minsk and one of the former leaders of the local Jewish community, Prof. Zelik Pinhasik, believed the “official” statistics of 30,000 Jewish (in the broad sense) people in Belarus to be severely underestimated. On the basis of the “semi-legal census” that Pinhasik as a professional sociologist carried out together with his wife in the early 2000s, he believes the number of people falling under the Israeli Law of Return in Belarus to be 150,000. If a decrease in this group over the next decade was in proportion to the twofold decrease in the Jewish “ethnic core” recorded in the 2009 census, today’s “extended Jewish population” in Belarus would number at least 75,000–80,000 people. In the early 21st century, local Jewish leaders and experts estimated the number of people falling under the Israeli LOR in Moldova to be 50,000, including 30,000 people with a stable Jewish identity, about 10,000 “partial Jews” and Jews with a lost or incomplete identity, and 10,000 non-Jewish members of Jewish families. However, they predicted that by the beginning of this decade, the size of this community will be reduced to 30,000 people, which coincides with the later estimates of the local Jewish leaders (Bruter 2015). Similarly, when talking about the “Jewish community” of Ukraine, observers believed that the local “extended Jewish population’s” ratio to the core was not 2.2:1 as Tolts and Della Pergola believe, but at least 4:1 or 5:1. Head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, Josef Zissels, told us that “should Ukraine have a census today (in 2015), 75,000 to 80,000 people would identify themselves as Jews. As a rule, these are people whose both parents are

 Opinions presented in this chapter are quoted according to this research repost, unless stated differently.

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

Jewish. This is a part of the mentality. According to the Halakhic standards, there are 150,000–160,000 [Jews] in Ukraine. And according to the Law of Return – no less than 300,000.” This number was presented in the Community Report of the Ukrainian branch of the Confederation of General Zionists at the 37th Zionist Congress (Community report 2015). Approximately the same estimation of the size of the Jewish community of Ukraine “in an extremely broad sense” – 300,000 to 400,000 people (including 50,000–90,000 in Kyiv, 45,000–60,000 in Dnipro, and 30,000–50,000 in Odessa) – was supplied by almost every interviewee involved in that state’s Jewish community activities. Probably the most “generous” estimation was that of Dnepr (Ukr – Dnipro) Jewish community head, Rabi Shmuel Kaminetsky, who informed the President of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, about “no less than 500,000 Jews who live in that country,” according to him (quoted in Jewish News 2019). As one can observe, this was substantially more than the numbers estimated by Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Rozenko, who believed that there were “more than 120,000 Jews and persons with Jewish family roots living in Ukraine” at that time (RBC Ukraine 2019). All of the post-Soviet Jewish leaders’ and activists’ estimates of the size of the Jewish population of their respective countries are at least four times higher than the “core” calculated by demographers and two to three times higher than the “cloud” of the extended Jewish population. What causes this discrepancy? Most of our sources attribute this to imperfections in census methodologies. According to the Director of the Moscow Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, Viktoria Mochalova, “census officials never visited my mother’s place, where three [pure] Jews are registered; nobody even cares to account descendants of Jewish-Gentile marriages. As far as I am concerned, sometimes I see only Jews [around] for a month at a time.” Ethnographer and Professor at the European University of St. Petersburg, Valery Dymshits, gave a more general assessment of this methodological controversy: The smaller the group, and we are talking about a small group of the population, the larger the error . . . Modern census does not make the “ethnicity” entry mandatory at all. So, people fill it in with self-declarations and that only if they wish to. You don’t have to lie; you can simply refuse to fill in this line. Therefore, 250,000 for Russia at large is absolutely the lowest bar . . . the upper border is twice as high. That is, not 25,000 in St. Petersburg, but 50,000, not 250,000 in Russia in general, but 500,000. I am talking from my intuition and feelings.

Similar complaints about the imperfection of the post-Soviet censuses were heard from leaders of the Jewish communities in Ukraine, too. Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Student Hillel Club, Yosef (Osik) Akselrud, explained this problem by the

Assessments by Community Leaders and Experts

23

reluctance of “descendants of mixed marriages and members of all-generationsJewish families to admit their Jewish origin in such polls”. This, however, does not stop them from participating in Jewish community projects. In Hesed alone (Jewish charitable foundation) there are 16,000 in the city and the region, and to have 18,000 in the survey (i.e., census) in Kyiv is nonsense”. President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FJC), Alexander Boroda, also was sure that “the census is selective, and . . . the Jews, having extensive negative historical experience and self-preservation instinct, are not always inclined to advertise their nationality.” As a result, Boroda estimated the number of Jews in Russia to be one million people (including those who “identify as Jews and those who annually begin to feel Jewish [and] find out that their Jewishness is on the maternal side, as well as Jews who just don’t go anywhere . . . ”) (AIF, 2017). His Ukrainian colleagues speak about “approximately 300,000–400,000 people who have the right of return.” Other leaders and experts, such as RJC President Yuri Kanner, base their estimations not on demographic calculations, but on the “Jewish identity” declared during opinion polls. As part of one of such surveys, 2% of Moscow respondents declared themselves Jewish. By this means, the number of the Jewish population in Moscow is estimated to be 240,000. Based on this methodology, Kanner estimates the number of people self-identifying as Jews in Russia to be 700,000–750,000 (“roughly one-half of them are Halakhic Jews”), one-third of whom live in Moscow. According to him, “no less than one million people in Russia have the right of return to Israel,” and they are concentrated mainly in Moscow and St. Petersburg, million-plus cities, and in the towns of the former “Pale,” for example, in Bryansk (“with approximately 7,000 registered Jews”), Smolensk, Rostov, etc. Many people of this category live in “regions that are more or less favorable from the climate and economic perspectives.” They include Crimea, which is home to about 15,000 Jews, according to Kanner, Caucasian Mineral Waters, and the Moscow region. But if this is all true, then it is unclear what prevents these people from declaring their Jewish identity during population censuses as well. That is why some experts doubt this sociological approach. For example, head of the Department of Jewish Studies of Moscow State University, Professor Arkady Kovelman, admits that “the census was not done very diligently,” therefore “the real number of Jews in Russia is somewhat larger than those 156,000 that were registered in the 2010 census.” Nevertheless, he does not believe we can rely on the selfidentification of respondents no matter how representative the polls. According to Kovelman, “[people’s] self-awareness changes, in the future those who do not consider themselves Jewish today can [view themselves as such], and tomorrow 3 million can declare themselves Jewish. These are historical speculations.” He is

24

Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

joined by Kyiv researchers Akselrud and Dolinsky, according to whom “Jews constantly ‘appear’, if you go into the Israeli embassy you will see such types . . . Rural Ukrainians. And they don’t lie, they do have [Jewish] roots.” But social psychologist Eliezer (Albert) Feldman perhaps has gone the furthest in his assessments after suggesting that the Jewish community of Ukraine be considered the core consisting of those with the right of return to Israel. This includes Jews and their close relatives, who, in his opinion, make up “no more than 250,000 all over Ukraine.” To them Feldman wants to add a second “cloud” consisting of “sympathizers with the Jewish people with some Jewish roots.” Putting these two “clouds” together, the expert estimated the size of the “extended Jewish community of Ukraine” to be about 5 million people. But he noted that the size of the community in the usual sense of the word is 250,000–270,000 people. Feldman is clearly not alone in this broad vision. Russian researchers from the Kordonsky laboratory at the Moscow Higher School of Economics, Michail Chernov, and their co-authors, tried to estimate the number of Jews in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, while clearly bearing in mind the situation in the country as a whole. They considered not only the formal registration (or, as they are called, “ethno-class” – etno-soslovnyye) criteria of Jewishness, but also selfidentification and other restrictive census features as “completely insufficient sources for determining the number of the Jews”. That is why there are more people related to Jewry in the Jewish Autonomous Region (and, as seen from the context, in Russia and the CIS as a whole), in their opinion, than [the number of] selfidentified Jews (Kordonsky et al 2018).

Jewish and Near-Jewish Environment Such cases usually focus not on demography as such, but on other subjects – to an even lesser degree on political interests of the post-Soviet Jewish leaders most often mentioned in this regard, although they are definitely part of it. Just as Valery Dymshits quite frankly said, “When different organizations say that millions [of Jews] live in Russia, they simply want to increase their funding.” On the other hand, there exists a real phenomenon in the shaping of a “near-Jewish” community and cultural environment, a type of subculture. Its agents are: – the activities of foreign and local Jewish organizations; – a sharp increase in the status of the post-Soviet Jewish community due to changes in the sociopolitical situation at the end of the Soviet era and following; – opportunities to emigrate to more prosperous (in different meanings of the word) countries granted by one’s Jewishness – after a decline in emigration at the beginning of the century, this topic became relevant again in the last decade.

Jewish and Near-Jewish Environment

25

Nikolai Propirny, former editor-in-chief of a number of Jewish media outlets and later deputy head of the Department of Public Relations of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, observes that if instead of the Halakhic (the Jewish religious law) approach we follow the “Russian formula of “a Jew is someone who agrees to be one,” then we will find several hundred thousand people in Moscow alone.” And in Russia, the number of those who “remember their Jewish roots one way or another can get up to several million.” “Those ready to come to a Jewish event, those invited to synagogue celebrations are much less. But if something happens in Russia, they will become quite a lot . . . In the census [of 2010 in Russia there were] several thousand goblins, hobbits, and so on. These frolics also come from smart Jewish boys and girls. So, in all reality, there are many more Jews than are declared. However, this is a “sponge” that can decrease and increase. People can be Jewish when it’s comfortable and interesting and move away from it if they become uncomfortable and uninterested.” Indeed, many people of mixed origin and non-Jewish members of Jewish families in modern Eastern Europe tend to keep in touch with Jewish communities and obtain educational, informational, cultural, and social services. According to President of the Jewish National and Cultural Autonomy of St. Petersburg, Director of the Adain Lo Jewish Educational Center, Eugenia Lvova, “there are a lot of people with Jewish roots to whom [often in ordinary life] it does not mean anything, but under certain conditions their Jewishness may play a role.” I would say these are people whose children will not refuse to take part in the Taglit program.14 This may be the only program they will take part in, but they will not refuse.” The post-Soviet situation, says Josef Zissels, might be “pushing many people of mixed origin to seek their national and religious roots, not only for the sake of emigration or to get assistance, but also to find a new mental balance by restoring a renewed system of traditional values” (Zissels 2002). Eliezer Feldman also followed this logic when he described the community of millions of “sympathizers with the Jewish people” he discovered in Ukraine as a group whose members “also belong to the [Jewish] community . . . They willingly attend Jewish events, come to the synagogue, know holiday dates.” But since they possess only some elements of Jewish identity, they “understand poorly why they are Jews” and do not see Israel as a “second Motherland.” Frequently they “constitute the periphery of Jewish communities where there are no more Jews left. They gather around a

 Taglit (“Birthright”) is an international Jewish community project of trips to Israel for young people, organized to strengthen their Jewish identity and supported by the Israeli government and the Jewish Agency for Israel (Sochnut).

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

Jewish entity or an event. To arise and not to disintegrate later . . . Crystallizations appear around “performances.” A postmodernist situation.” “Please understand, I meet people who (seemingly) have nothing to do with Jewishness. If you scratch them a little, you will find a grandfather Solomon, a grandmother Ida. And they sympathize with Israel today. They understand that it has some kind of unattainable dream. This is true for Ukraine. Ukraine is like a dirty lizard that looks at a beautiful butterfly flying somewhere in the Mediterranean region. Very often, they form the periphery of Jewish communities where there are no Jews anymore. In Vinnitsa, for example, or Uman. They gather around the Jewish essence or event. To arise and to not fall apart later.” As an illustration, Feldman cites the situation in Berdichev, where a “Jewish” community arose after a music theater visited from Moscow. Another example is Bila Tserkva, where at the time of the arrival of the son of the head of the Kyiv Jewish community of Chabad, Rav Moshe Asman, there were practically no Jews. But he organized a Jewish school there, and a Jewish community emerged around it. First “those five Jews who were still there came, then 15 other people with some [Jewish] roots, and then 20 more who had heard that it’s not too bad in Israel – and as a result, some [Jewish] life emerged there. And it would have continued had the rabbi not left. As soon as nourishment disappeared, everything fell apart.” “Crystallizations emerge around the “Performances.” It’s a postmodernist situation. There are about eighteen Judeo-Christian congregations in Ukraine. There are almost no Jews there. The tone is set by ethnic Slavs wearing kippas, who for some reason decided they are Judeo-Christians. The most grandiose celebration this year, the Jewish New Year, was done by Judeo-Christians. They rented the premises, brought artists. People stood in line. I was surprised . . . So many people came to listen to Songs of Israel.” A special model of this process is, in some researchers’ opinion, the situation in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Russia, where the remaining (almost “relic”) part of the titular national administrative unit is drawn into the near-Jewish environment by the general population of various ethnic origins. “The constructed Jewish Soviet culture, viewed with absolutely no enthusiasm in any other region of the USSR, turns out to be the “folk culture” here, and Jews – an ethnic estate [i.e., an ethnic group with a certain socio-legal status], just like other ethnic estates of this country,” says Blacher. “The rights and the status of the Jewish ethnic caste in the JAR came close to the rights of other ethnic autonomies of the Russian Soviet Republic: an ethnic representation in the government, presence of “local cadres” among the leadership and intelligentsia, media, and institutions of culture in the national language. But since the local personnel (with nationality fixed in their passport) was not too

Jewish and Near-Jewish Environment

27

many . . . any resident of the region becomes a carrier of the special (“Jewish”) status. This is how “Jewish folk” are formed. The presence of a titular ethnicity here serves as the basis for a dialogue with the authorities . . . strong family ties, friendship, and local ties create stability in crises situations and serve as the basis for survival. But even after the collapse of the Soviet power, when it would make no sense to preserve the Soviet construct, it performed a rather significant function . . . a protective layer for the local community retaining its orientation at network interactions and autarchy” (Blacher 2018).15 As a result, Board Chairman of the Russian Fund for Support and Development of Jewish Culture, Traditions, Education and Science, Mikhail Chernov, noted in correspondence with this author: There really is a certain [quasi-Jewish] community there. Everything is very evaluative, but [it can make up] half or more of the [170,000 population] of the region, and this even applies to newcomers,” even though Jews, according to various estimates, range from 1,000 to 5,000 in the region. Our source believes that the point at issue is not belonging to a community in the classical sense of the word – even among the Jews only a few sense such connection – but rather the ownership of the “Jewish” (no matter how it is understood) culture (“in its urban Birobidzhan version”), the culture and the heritage of the region, those of its elements that are considered Jewish, often mistakenly. Thus, the identification factor, according to Chernov, “is not the titular nation, but the titular culture,” and, oddly enough, Israel is also present in all of this.16

Apparently, this view allowed former Russian Jewish Congress (RJC) President and Moscow State University Professor, Yevgeny Satanovsky, to insist that “the number of Jews in the broad sense, regardless of who in their family is Jewish, makes up more than 1.5 million in Moscow city and region, and from 2.5 to 3 million in the Russian Federation. These are people with some relation to the Jewish people, and this may interest them.” All of this provides additional legitimacy to the position of the majority of local Jewish leaders who make these individuals their “target groups” of community activities, which applies to everyone falling under the Israeli Law of Return and sometimes to those beyond it (the fourth generation of mixed families). As Akselrud and Executive Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Council, Eduard Dolinsky, said, “We still work with them. To us, they are community members. We are not even talking about the affiliated. The community is scattered throughout the country, around many cities.”

 It is quite clear that Kordonsky, Blacher and other authors who use this term “evreytsy” (“Jewish folk”) meant not only territorial-civil, but also some quasi-ethnic identification with the JAR, including a noticeable Jewish diaspora cultural component.  Received by Facebook Messenger on January 24, 2020.

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Chapter 2 Ethnic and Political Demography

So, while agreeing with the ambiguity of the purely demographic estimates, most community leaders and experts are likely to use highly exaggerated data. Nevertheless, if we abandon maximalist demographic speculations, which can neither be confirmed nor disproved, “Jewish activities” (in any sense of the word) not only make the content of life, but actually define the framework of the FSU Jewish collective. Contrary to the family, whose role has been declining in recent decades, these activities are now a major factor in Jewish identity reproduction and a channel that different groups previously not identifying with the Jewish community can now use to join the Jewish collective, especially in recent years. Verification of this conclusion undoubtedly required the acquisition of a new array of empirical data, which, as mentioned above, was the goal of the study undergirding this book.

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity The Meaning of Being Jewish in Post-Soviet Euro-Asia It is well known that the definition and self-identification of the Jewry in today’s world is a diverse phenomenon that often contains a complex set of categories such as religion, ethnicity, parentage, heritage, culture, and a few others. In Israel, for example, 22% of Jewish respondents interviewed in 2015 by the Pew Center said their understanding of “Jewry” is first of all defined by religion, 55% defined it by origin and culture, and 23% by a combination of the two (Pew 2016, 77). In the USA, the same poll in 2020 showed that in speaking of the meaning of being Jewish, half (more precisely, 52%) of local Jews mentioned ancestry among their responses, 55% pointed to culture either alone or in combination with other answers, and 36% mentioned religion (Pew 2021, 65). Among single-answer respondents in Europe, religion is the leading definition (35%) before parentage (23%) and culture (11%). But in multiple answers, 68% mentioned parentage, compared to 58% who mentioned religion (Della Pergola and Staetsky 2022, 4–7). In this sense, the Jewish identity of members of the world’s fourth largest Jewish community of the former USSR (after the three just mentioned) is primarily ethnic in nature. It established itself under practically complete suppression of external manifestations of Jewish self-identification. Nevertheless, the acculturation of Soviet Jews in the Russian sociocultural environment has not led to a massive escape from Jewishness. Instead, this community developed a unique type of ethnic Jewish identity, established primarily on a secular basis (Gitelman 1991; Ryvlina 1996; 2005; Osovtsov and Yakovenko 2011; Bemporad 2013). Other identity models (for example, religious identity) take a very modest place in the collective identification of Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry and are significantly inferior to the ethnonational dimensions of this phenomenon (Khanin 2015; Nosenko-Stein 2009b). All of the above also applies to the mixed-origin part of the “Jewish community” of the CIS (Nosenko 2004). The only exceptions to this general principle are the small subethnic groups of Georgia, Bukhara, and, to a lesser extent, Mountain Jews, whose total number in the USSR at the end of its existence was around 150,000.17

 Determining their exact number is not possible, since some of them were registered in population censuses simply as Jews, while a significant portion of the Mountain Jews were registered as Tats. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-003

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Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

Unsurprisingly, as was mentioned above, these Oriental Soviet Jewish communities were the first to obtain specific group identification from within and then from without the phenomenon of “(post)-Soviet Jewry” immediately after the fall of the Soviet Union. As far as Soviet Ashkenazi Jews are concerned, their ethnic secular Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish identity models at first appeared to continue into the post-Soviet era, both in the FSU regions and in the Russian-speaking Jewish emigrant communities elsewhere (Ryvkina 2005; Osovtsov and Yakovenko 2011; Ben-Rafael et al 2006; Gitelman 2003; 2012, 107–118; Khanin 2003a). Numerous studies show that such ideological patterns continue among former Soviet Jews for many years after emigration (see, for instance: Khanin 2014a; Remennick and Prashizky 2010). Ira Sheskin and Daniel Altman analyzed the database collected during the 2020 Pew Center’s survey of the American Jews in the USA and found that almost half (49%) of Russian-speaking Jewish emigrants in the United States understand “Jewry” primarily as a national cultural heritage, 58% as ethnic origin, and only 21% (half the number of non-Russian-speaking Jews in the United States – 42%) mentioned religion. Russian-speaking Israelis polled by the Pew Center from October 2014 to May 2015 turned out to be even more radical. Only 5% of respondents said “Jewishness” for them was a matter of religion, while 78% felt it was a matter of origin and culture, and 16% a combination of the two (compared to 23%, 54%, and 23%, respectively, among non-Russian-speaking non-ultra-religious Israelis) (Pew 2016, 77). The stability of this phenomenon is confirmed by the comparison of the data of our current research in five post-Soviet countries with our much smaller study in 2004–2005 in five cities of Russia and Ukraine (Khanin and Chernin 2007). In both cases, respondents answered the question of what it means, in their view, to be a Jew. They had to choose no more than three to four of the fourteen parameters on the scale of value priorities. Nine of these fourteen parameters eventually took identical places in the ranking of respondents’ priorities, although the proportion of respondents who chose certain answers in 2019 was significantly lower than in 2004–2005. This can be explained by a much larger sample in terms of the number of respondents and a broader geographical coverage in the second study, and, even more likely, by a change in the ethnic structure and sociopolitical context of “Jewish communities” and the diversification of their values. One way or another, respondents of both polls placed ethnic and cultural values connected with national self-identity in the first three places – “the feeling of belonging to the people” (73.5% and 72%), “pride in Jewish culture” (65% and 58%), and “the need to keep Jewish traditions, customs, and culture” (58% and 38%). The fourth place in the ranking was also ethnic, in this case the ethnogenetic requirement “to have Jewish parents” (chosen by 42.8% and 33% of respondents, respectively) (Table 3.1).

31

The Meaning of Being Jewish in Post-Soviet Euro-Asia

Table 3.1: Parameters of Belonging to the Jewish people: Comparison of 2004/05 and 2019 Studies. What does it mean to be a Jew today?

– Rating

To feel a belonging to Jewish people To be proud of Jewish history and culture To know and speak Yiddish or the Jewish languages of Bukhara, Mountain, and other Jews of the diaspora To know and use Hebrew To have Jewish parents To have a Jewish spouse To observe religious commandments, attend synagogue To keep Jewish customs, traditions, and culture To try to obtain and give children Jewish education To be a patriot of the Jewish state To participate in Jewish community life To fight anti-Semitism To help your fellow Jews To live in Israel Total

%

 Rating

%

  

.% .% .%

  

% % %

          

.% .% .% .% .% .% .% .% .% .% .%

–  –   – –    

% % % % % % % % % % %

%

%



,

Meanwhile, having a Jewish spouse placed only twelfth both in the 2005 and 2019 ratings, and the share of those who marked it among top priorities decreased 2.5 times over the past fifteen years. Only about one quarter of respondents in 2005 and 16% and 13% respectively in 2019 believed that to be Jewish means to “keep mitzvot (religious commandments), go to the synagogue,” and “seek to obtain and provide children with Jewish education.” Knowledge of Hebrew placed ninth and eleventh respectively, and knowledge of Yiddish and other languages of the Jewish diaspora placed fourteenth (last) in both rankings. There was no significant difference between age categories on these issues, except that respondents older than 61 more often marked ethno-genetic factors (parentage), and younger ones ethnocultural factors (Table 3.2). In light of the fact that Jewish people demonstrated similar priorities in the first post-Soviet decade (Khanin 1998; Gitelman et al 2000), we must recognize that the conclusion we made fifteen years ago has not changed. In “extended Jewish population” identities (including in the Soviet times), a significant gap remained between the symbolic nature of ethno-genetic and ethnocultural values and their practical implementation in everyday life. Today Jewish initiatives perform the function of the material framework necessary to maintain one’s Jewish

32

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

Table 3.2: Factors of Jewishness / Age of Respondents. What does it mean to be a Jew today?

To feel belonging to Jewish people To be proud of Jewish history and culture To know and speak Yiddish or the Jewish languages of Bukhara, Mountain, and other Jews of the diaspora To know and use Hebrew To have Jewish parents To have a Jewish spouse To observe religious commandments, attend synagogue To keep Jewish customs, traditions, and culture To try to obtain and give children Jewish education To be a patriot of the Jewish state To participate in Jewish community life To fight Anti-Semitism To help your fellow Jews To live in Israel Other answer Total

Total

Age, years Up to 

–

–

+

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % % % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % % % −

% % % % % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









identity in the absence of official anti-Semitism and the previously authoritiesimposed Jewish “ethnic caste” status. Our polls showed that second on the scale (places 5–8) were values of national and community activism: “helping your fellow Jew” (41.3% and 15%), “fighting anti-Semitism” (35.7% and 17%), and “participation in community life” (34.8% and 22%). These figures are comparable to the share of respondents who take regular part in Jewish events. Apparently, this framework must be kept in mind when talking about culture-identification processes in groups of different ethnic and mixed origins inside the “extended Jewish population”.

Ethnicity and Identity The importance of ethnogenesis also manifests itself in correlation between ethnic origin and self-awareness of members of the “extended Jewish population” in FSU countries. For example, studies conducted around the turn of the 1980s-1990s noted differences between ethnic (“pure”) Jews with a sufficiently stable Jewish identity and descendants of mixed marriages. The latter often declared their non-Jewish

Ethnicity and Identity

33

identity, falling, according to these studies, into the category of “fully assimilated” persons (Gitelman 1991; Altshuler 1987, 326; Brym 1994, 19–16). These developments were reflected in a series of surveys and qualitative studies conducted in the first decade of the 21st century. Thus, Elazar Leshem, Rozalina Ryvkina, and this author independently came to the same conclusion: respondents’ Jewish identities depend on the homogeneity of their ethnic origin. In the beginning of the century, this identity was demonstrated by over 80% of ethnic (“pure”) Jews, about 50% of the firstgeneration descendants of mixed marriages, and no more than 25% of the third generation of mixed families and non-Jewish spouses of all three categories of Jews and their descendants (Leshem 2002; Ryvkina 2005, 65, 69–70; Khanin and Pisarevskaya 2013, 169–197). Our 2019–2020 study demonstrates that this trend continues today. Our survey found a high level of current preservation of Jewish identity (as declared in some way by 81% of our respondents) among post-Soviet Jews; however, the direct correlation between the ethnic origin and identity of the extended Jewish population’s members was also clear. At the same time, a relatively large sample made it possible to consider some other factors as well. For example, it showed that a stable Jewish identity was more often observed among residents of provincial cities than among Jews and members of their families living in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the capitals. However, homogeneity of one’s Jewish origin remains the main factor. As was mentioned in the introduction, we deliberately refused to use the criterion of religion in this case, for it is not entirely relevant to the post-Soviet space (unlike for Israel and the Jewish diaspora in the West). Both our and almost all other studies we know confirm that the situation of the Soviet period is still relevant today: most Jews do not even know the word Halakhah or the Halakhic definition of a Jew as a person with only a Jewish mother or even a grandmother on the maternal side, but never on the paternal side. A Jew (“a yid” to many Soviet Jews, even in the Russian language) has usually been defined as a person who had both Jewish parents or who was a descendant of a mixed marriage with a stable Jewish identity. Meanwhile, the term for a “half-Jew” (“a galber id”), or “half-breed”, referred to persons who had only one Jewish parent, no matter whether father or mother. Most of the “half-Jewish” claimed non-Jewish ethnicity when obtaining an internal Soviet passport, but they could not completely avoid discrimination, since some documents (birth certificate) and questionnaires indicated the ethnicity of both parents. So, “half-Jewish” de facto took on an intermediate legal position in the USSR between Jews and non-Jews. As for the “quarter-Jews” – those who had only one Jewish grandparent, no matter on which side, – the word “Jew” almost never appeared in their documents. They could become the object of anti-Semitic

34

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

discrimination only if they were descended from Jews in a direct male line and had a pronounced Jewish surname. And so, we chose our analysis criterion to be the number of respondents’ Jewish grandparents in both lines. Four groups of respondents ranged in accordance with this principle are: “100% Jews” (with at least three Jewish grandparents);18 “half-Jewish” (two Jewish grandparents), “quarter-Jews” (one Jewish grandparent), and people of non-Jewish or very distant Jewish origin (fourth generation of mixed families), making up 34%, 24%, 25%, and 17% of our sample, respectively. As a result, a total of 85% of fully Jewish respondents declared their Jewish feeling was unconditional, as did over 60% of “half-Jewish,” 38% of “quarter-Jews,” but less than a third of people without Jewish roots. Compared to other groups, the proportion of those who admitted that their Jewish feeling awakens “only in certain circumstances” is higher among “half-Jews” and “quarter-Jews” (around onethird and over one-third respectively). Finally, the relative majority of non-Jewish members of Jewish families (31%, three times more than the sample average) insisted they had no Jewish feelings at all. This subgroup, together with “quarterJews,” had the highest proportion of individuals who never considered this question (Table 3.3). Table 3.3: Correlation between Respondents’ Ethnic Origin and Jewish Identity. Do you feel Jewish?

Total

Number of Jewish Grandparents –



None

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,









Yes, absolutely Not always, depends on circumstances No Never thought about it Did not answer Total



As one can see, real processes among the “extended” Jewish population of the postSoviet countries are not limited to a simple or clearly defined “Jews/non-Jews” dichotomy, nor are they reduced to a primitive “assimilation” or rejection of it, as

 This group also includes people of completely non-Jewish origin who underwent giyur (conversion to Judaism), i.e., joined the Jewish people in the ethnic sense as well. But we found only a handful of such respondents in our sample.

Culture-Identity Groups

35

seen across many years of research. Rosalina Ryvkina identified four social types of Jews living in Russia back in 2005. The first type is the “non-Jewish” (“Russian”) ethnic identification, typical of people who never considered themselves Jewish and knew nothing about Jewish tradition, culture, or Judaism. The second type is the “internationalist” type – these are the people who usually want nothing to do with their “Jewish status”, although they do not deny their Jewish “roots.” The third is an “ambivalent” or “dual” type who alternately “feel” either Jewish or Russian. And the fourth is a “new Jewish” type of self-identification, alternative to both the traditional Jewish identity that existed in the Russian Empire and to Soviet Jewish identity (Ryvkina 2005, 54). On the other hand, using the methodology of in-depth interviews, the Moscow social anthropologist Elena Nosenko-Stein discovered four types of identity among the descendants of Jewish-Gentile mixed marriages in Russia: “Russian, or nonJewish”, “international, or non-ethnic,” “mixed, or intermediate”, and “Jewish as such” (Nosenko-Stein 2009a, 20–29). The “synthetic” scheme presented by the same author in later works, however, included five types of self-identification among the Russian population that met the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return. These were: 1. The traditional ethnocultural self-identification type that preserved the residual elements of traditional Eastern Ashkenazi culture (in its Yiddish and Russian versions). 2. The “non-Jewish” type, whose carriers do not consider themselves Jewish, being fully acculturated, usually into Russian culture. 3. The negative type of cultural self-identification, whose bearers usually do not want the “Jewish status”, although they do not deny it, viewing it almost exclusively through the prism of negative experience (anti-Semitism). 4. “Ambivalent” or “dual”, whose carriers, depending on specific situations, “feel” either Jewish or Russian. 5. The “new Jewish” type of self-identification more common among young people (including those of very mixed Jewish-Gentile origin) who strive to “be Jewish” by studying the Jewish tradition and in some cases by taking an active part in the activities of various Jewish organizations (Nosenko-Stein 2013, 64–70).

Culture-Identity Groups An analysis of this phenomenon certainly requires a much finer culture-identifying structuring of the “extended Jewish population” than a simple comparison of its “Jewish,” “half-Jewish,” “quarter-Jewish,” and “non-Jewish” components. The “ethnic core” and ethnically mixed representatives of the “extended Jewish population” in the FSU (and partly in the “new Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora” outside the FSU) exist in more complex interrelations than believed earlier. Upon closer examination, one will notice that the strengthening of traditional models and the formation

36

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

of new models of Jewish identity take place within the framework of demarcation between the “culture-identifying communities” that cover every part of the “extended Jewish population” of post-Soviet countries. This understanding allowed us at one time to single out four cultureidentification groups that appear in the sphere of attraction of the local “organized Jewish community” (in the broadest sense of the word) and its near and far periphery to different degrees (Khanin and Chernin 2007, 78–80). 1. Jewish universalists – carriers of the “general Jewish” or “just Jewish” identity with a strong national component; they usually believe that “Jews of the world are all one nation.” 2. Local-ethnic Jews – carriers of a new ethno-civil/civic Jewish identity, identifying themselves as “Russian (or Ukrainian, Belorussian, etc.) Jews,” a relatively high percentage of whom believe that “Russian (Ukrainian, Moldavian, etc.) Jews” have more in common with ethnic Russians (Ukrainians, etc.) than with Jews living in other countries. 3. Carriers of dual Jewish-Gentile identity (dual, or multi-ethnic identity Jews) who identify themselves both as Russians (Ukrainians, Belarusians, etc.) and Jews: a phenomenon that was perceived as an oxymoron in Soviet times but became established in the post-modernist atmosphere of the post-Soviet societies. 4. Non-Jews – non-Jewish spouses of Jews and assimilated descendants of Jews, carriers of any non-Jewish (ethnic or cosmopolitan) identity, who by virtue of origin sometimes become objects of attention from Jewish organizations and therefore in some cases realize their belonging, if not to the Jewish ethnic group, then at least to the organized Jewish community. Of course, each of these groups could also be named in a different way. There were suggestions, for example, to name the first two groups, carriers of the “general Jewish” and local ethno-civic Jewish identity, “integrists” and “separatists,” respectively.19 Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern proposed an alternative option of naming the four groups we have identified as, respectively: (1) Diaspora-network; (2) Local network; (3) Dual-network; and (4) Reference network Jews.20 Obviously, each of these terminological systems reflects one or more essential aspects of the phenomenon we are exploring. On the other hand, some of these terms have already been extensively used by social scientists to describe various, sometimes contradictory social,  The author is grateful to Dr. Velvl Chernin (Jerusalem), Prof. Valery Dymshits (St. Petersburg), Dr. Petr Oskolkov (Tel-Aviv), and Dr. Olaf Glöckner (Potsdam) for their ideas and stimulating brainstorming discussions.  Author’s conversation with Prof. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, Jerusalem, July 2022.

Culture-Identity Groups

37

cultural, and political phenomena, including in the Jewish context. However, since no consensus exists on this topic in the academic literature, we will continue to speak about each of the defined culture-identity subgroups by interchangeably using our own terms and their synonyms the way we presented them. Also, each of these groups contains certain subcategories with their own nuances of cultural identifications, whose ratio has undergone a certain evolution over the past few years. In FSU countries, this process is most noticeable in the fourth, “non-Jewish,” category that contains, in addition to carriers of actual Russian, Ukrainian or another non-Jewish identity, a “citizens of the world” subgroup, whose representatives declare their lack of belonging to any ethnic group. Researchers have observed this subcategory before. In particular, about 10% of respondents in a survey of student youth of Jewish (including mixed) origin in the CIS countries, conducted by Alek D. Epstein in 2008, responded to the question of identification by choosing the option “I do not believe nationality (ethnicity) is important”. Given the limited nature of his sample and the absence of this answer option in other surveys of this group, Epstein considered it premature to draw conclusions on the proportion of “ideologically concerned cosmopolitans” among postSoviet Jewish youth and Jews in general at that time (Khanin et al 2013, 40–41). Judging from our 2019–2020 study, this process has developed a lot both among already mature young people and in other socio-demographic categories of the “extended Jewish population”. For instance, respondents who chose the answer “just human, nationality does not matter” made up almost 4/5 of “non-Jews” and 20% of the whole sample, which, according to our observations, reflects the general trend of recent years. And yet, “cosmopolitans” differ less from ethnic non-Jews than from carriers of Jewish ethno-civic and dual Jewish-Gentile identifications in most comparable parameters. In the past and nowadays, these groups (whose weight in our 2019–2020 study made up 21%, 33%, 18%, and 25%, respectively) reflect, we believe, the real structure of the “extended Jewish population” of the former USSR.21 This structure has its parallels in Israel and other countries of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora (Kliger 2014; Cohen R 2006; Glikman 1996). (For example, in Israel, according to the 2017 research data [PORI 2017], 36.9% of repatriates from the former USSR considered themselves “simply Jewish Israeli,” 31.1% considered themselves “Russianspeaking Jews,” 13.7% considered themselves “Russian, Ukrainian, etc. and Jewish at the same time,” 1.7% considered themselves “only Russian or representative of  In our 2019 survey, 47 respondents (a little over 2.2% of the sample) marked the “Other” option. Although this fits the acceptable borders of statistical minimum in applied sociology, the significant variety of “Other” options does not make it possible to view this group as an independent identification category.

38

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

another non-Jewish nationality,” and 16.6% responded that they were “simply a human being”). Representatives of all categories, according to our 2019–2020 study, are clearly spread out onto successive stages of sociological scales by at least two parameters. First, the share of those who supported the notion that “Jews of the world are all one nation” (77% of “Jewish universalists” and only 32% of “non-Jews” supported this idea) decreased consistently from category to category. At the same time, the percentage of those who supported the idea that “Ukrainian, Russian, etc. Jews have more in common with ethnic Ukrainians, Russians, etc. than with Jews living in other countries,” grew from 8% to 29%, while the share of those who found it difficult to answer this question grew from 13% to 35%. Secondly, as can be seen from the table 3.4 below, there is a clear correlation between belonging to one of the culture-identification categories and a respondent’s degree of Jewish identification. For instance, almost all the “universalist Jews” and three-quarters of “ethno-civic Jews” defined their Jewish identity as “unconditional”. The relative majority of the other two groups – around one-half of “postmodernists” (i.e., carriers of a dual Jewish-Gentile identity) and one-third of “cosmopolitans,” on the contrary, stated that their Jewish identity was conditionally situational in nature. Unsurprisingly, the percentage of those who do not think much about their Jewish identity among “cosmopolitans” was 2.5–8 times higher than in any other category (and none among “universalist” Jews). Finally, 77% (7.5–8 times more than the sample average) of respondents that felt they belonged to a non-Jewish ethnic group declared they had no Jewish identity. Table 3.4: Culture-Identifying Categories of the FSU Extended Jewish Population / Jewish Feeling. Feeling Jewish

Total

Ethnic identity (consider themselves): Jewish Russian/ Both Russian / Non- “Cosmo- Other other Jew etc. and Jewish Jews politan”

Undoubtedly Depends on circumstances No Never thought about it Did not answer Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

,





% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% %

%

%









The data presented in this table allows us to conclude that the categories we outlined correspond to real sociocultural processes in this environment. Furthermore, this

Culture-Identity Groups

39

illustrates a direct connection between belonging to a culture-identification group and the ethnic background of respondents. In the 2008 survey conducted by Khanin in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Samara, 86.8% of those born into families with two Jewish parents regarded themselves as “Jewish only,” in contrast to 9.6% of those born into mixed families with only one Jewish parent and almost none the of descendants of third-generation mixed marriages and non-Jewish spouses of all categories. On the other hand, 78.7% of descendants of first-generation mixed marriages insisted on their ethno-civic Jewish identity while defining themselves as “Russian Jews,” and over 84% of those with Jewish grandparents insisted on dual identity, defining themselves as “both Russian and Jewish.” 7.7% of respondents chose a nonJewish national identity. Results obtained by A. Epstein in his survey of students in Russia and Ukraine were very similar to our own: 34.8% defined themselves as “Jews only,” 26.3% insisted on their ethno-civic (Russian-speaking Jewish) identity, almost 22% claimed they belonged to both ethnic communities, and almost 7% considered themselves only Russians or Ukrainians. The remaining 10% said they “do not believe nationality is important” (For more details on these and other surveys of those years, see: Khanin, Pisarevskaya, and Epstein 2013, 32–47, especially 39–46). In general, the same similarities were found in the present study of 2019–2020, although in somewhat more complex combinations – whose reasons will be discussed later. Almost equal shares of people of homogeneous Jewish descent defined themselves as “universalist Jews” and “ethno-civic Jews.” A relative majority of “half-Jewish” also chose a new ethno-civic Jewish identity, but their share of carriers of the dual Jewish-Gentile identity is relatively high. A similar pattern, but with a significantly lower share of ethno-civic “Jews of the countries of residence,” describes “quarter-Jews.” Finally, those who indicated they did not have any Jewish identity still dominated among respondents without Jewish roots. At the same time, two-thirds of the representatives of the subgroup that made this declaration (37% of its total number) preferred to define themselves as “citizens of the world” (“without any nationality”) – and this is an obvious trend of recent years. Only a third (16%) declared themselves carriers of Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, or other nonJewish identities (Table 3.5). On the other hand, almost 60% of universal Jewish identity carriers, over 40% of ethno-civic Jewish identity carriers, one-fifth of “postmodernists,” and only 3% of “non-Jewish” identity carriers are 100% Jewish. “Half-Jewish” were made up of 20% universal Jewish identity carriers, slightly more than 25% of ethno-civic, a third “postmodernist,” and 13% “non-Jewish” identity carriers. “Quarter-Jews” included 12% and 20%, respectively, of the two former and more than one-third of the two latter identification categories. Respondents with no Jewish grandparents made up 8% of Jewish “universalists” (among them a significant proportion of

40

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

Table 3.5: Relation between Respondents’ Ethnic Origin and Culture-Identification. Culture-identification categories

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –

“Universalist Jews” Russian, Ukrainian, etc. Jews Both Russian/another and Jewish at the same time Ethnic Gentiles Simply human Hard to say Other No answer Total





None

% % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%











descendants of mixed marriages in the fourth generation and non-Jewish family members that are deeply integrated into Jewish activities, as well as those who have converted to Judaism). And one in ten “ethno-civic Jews” and persons of combined Jewish and Gentile identity, a third of “postmodernists,” and almost half of respondents of non-Jewish ethnic identification were part of that group, too (Table 3.6). Table 3.6: Correlation between Respondents’ Ethnic Identity and Ethnic Origin. # of Jewish Grandparents

Total

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Both Rus /other Jewish other Jew and Jewish

Only Rus / A human Other being

Other

–   None

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Total

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













To compare, a study of FSU olim in Israel conducted in March 2017 shows a nearly identical layout, with the only difference being that the Halakhic norm (to consider only “Jews by mother” as 100% Jews and “Jews by father” as not Jewish at all) was also accepted by Russian-speaking Israelis. But in general, it is obvious that this is a phenomenon typical of the “global Russian-speaking Jewish community (Table 3.7).”

41

Culture-Identity Groups

Table 3.7: Culture-Identification Categories vs. Ethnic Origin of “Russian” Israeli Community, 2017 PORI Research. Who is Jewish in your family?

Total

Ethnic Identity Just Russian / Rus / other Only Rus / A human Jewish other Jew and Jewish Other being

Everyone Only my mother Only my father One of my grandparents Only my spouse Nobody No Jewish roots, but I converted to Judaism (or in the process) Total % N

.% .% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.%

% .% N=

N=

.% .% .% .% .%

.%

.% .% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .% .%

.%

.%

.%

.%

N=

N=

N=

N=

Some respondents gave more than one answer, so their sum total may exceed %

Despite its critical importance, ethnic origin only partially explains the difference between culture-identification groups on issues of identity, values, sociocultural, and political identification. One should also take into account the social environment, family atmosphere, education, familiarization with Jewish heritage, influence of community structures, and, last but not least, the general cultural and sociopolitical context of the city, region, and country of residence. In their answers to the question of when and under what circumstances respondents felt their Jewishness, universal Jewish identity carriers mentioned family (“family traditions and atmosphere”) 1.5 times more often than the sample average. For this group, institutionalization is also important: going to a Jewish school, learning about Jewish rituals in the synagogue, activities of the Jewish community, etc. (See Table 3.8 below.) Representatives of two groups whose identity has a more pronounced local connotation – carriers of Jewish ethno-civic identity and dual Jewish-Gentile identity – also mentioned family experience, although less frequently than “universalists.” They more frequently mentioned social environment (“thanks to friends and surroundings”) and an awoken interest in Jewish history, traditions, and culture. In addition, ethno-civic Jews remembered their anti-Semitic environment more often (those “half-Jewish by father,” disproportionately represented in this subgroup, are particularly pained by this phenomenon), and, consequently, their interest in the Holocaust of European Jewry. Dual identity carriers focused on

42

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

their interest in the Jewish “accent” in music, theater, and films, as well as tourism and educational or personal trips to Israel, meaning that they felt Jewish when they found themselves “in the right place at the right time.” Finally, almost 70% of those who declared their non-Jewish ethnic identity confirmed their lack of any Jewish feeling. (In our previous research representatives of the “non-Jewish” subgroup, while answering the question about what makes them feel Jewish, most often chose the option “because my spouse is Jewish.”) Let us look at a certain difference between “citizens of the world” and respondents who declared their other, non-Jewish, ethnic identity. A relative majority (almost a third) also admitted they had no Jewish feeling, but they make up half of the “non-Jewish” subgroup. Additionally, in comparison with “non-Jews,” “cosmopolitans” mentioned family traditions and the atmosphere five times more often, events of the Jewish community almost three times more often, and trip(s) to Israel over three times more often. All of this allows us to see that “citizens of the world” are not completely lost to the Jewish people. This is especially true since this subgroup turned out to contain 15% of descendants of homogeneous Jewish marriages, 18% of “half-Jewish,” and 35% of “quarter-Jews” – in other words, about one-third of “citizens of the world” are Halakhic Jews. Table 3.8: Ways to Acquire Jewish Feelings among Members of Culture-Identification Categories of Respondents. Ways to acquire the Jewish feeling

Total

Ethnic identity Simply Russian/ Both Russian/ Non- “CosmoJewish etc. Jew etc. and Jewish Jew politan”

In family (family traditions and atmosphere)

%

%

%

%

%

%

Through friends, communications zone

%

%

%

%

%

%

Through Jewish music, songs, plays, films

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

At events in the city Jewish community

%

%

%

%

%

%

In synagogue (or a similar place)

%

%

%

%

%

%

At a Jewish school

43

Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models

Table 3.8 (continued) Ways to acquire the Jewish feeling

Total

Through an interest in Jewish history, tradition, culture

%

%

%

%

%

%

I was not allowed to forget about this by my anti-Semitic environment

%

%

%

%

%

%

Holocaust of European Jewry during the Second World War

%

%

%

%

%

%

Due to interest in Israel, solidarity with the Jewish state

%

%

%

%

%

%

Through a trip to Israel – tourist, educational, business, or visit

%

%

%

%

%

%

Nothing special, my Jewish feeling came to me on its own

%

%

%

%

–

%

I have no particular Jewish feeling

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% %

%

,





No answer / another answer Total

Ethnic identity Simply Russian/ Both Russian/ Non- “CosmoJewish etc. Jew etc. and Jewish Jew politan”







Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models Leshem’s and Ryvkina’s methods of calculating the ratio of carriers of different types of stable and “blurred” Jewish identities among the Jewish (in the broadest sense of the word) population in our and other research show that it had been roughly 60:40 for years. In this study, the ratio of 55% to 45% between carriers of a stable Jewish and a “blurred” or non-Jewish identity in the “extended Jewish population” also corresponded to this picture. However, the ratio of specific identification subgroups within these categories as compared to the first years after the collapse of the USSR gradually changed. For instance, among carriers of an unstable Jewish identity (18%), the share of those for whom the Russian identity was not the only alternative to belonging to the Jewish ethnic group increased slightly (compared to a study 15 years ago). And in the group with predominantly non-Jewish ethnic identity (25%), the share of “cosmopolitans” had been growing

44

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

all these years and is now five times higher than the share of those with nonJewish ethnicity. On the other hand, the universal Jewish identity is weakening, and local Jewish identity is strengthening among people with a stable Jewish identity. In fact, in the new century (especially in the second decade), this process has significantly accelerated. A similar trend was observed in the course of our survey of Jews in Russia and Ukraine in 2004–2005 (Khanin and Chernin 2007, 80). In our 2008 study of the Jewish youth of Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Samara, despite this category’s higher proportion of people of mixed origin, a similar process was observed: 32.5% of respondents identified themselves as “Jews only,” 36% declared they were of an ethno-civic (“Russian Jews”) identity, almost 24% insisted on belonging to both ethnic communities, and about 8% considered themselves to be “Russian only”. Epstein, Pisarevskaya and Khanin, summing up a series of monitoring surveys of participants within 2004–2012 Jewish youth projects, also concluded that, in spite of the differences in wording, the dominant identity for years combined a Jewish component with the national and cultural identity of the ethnic majority of the community of which Jews are a part (Khanin et al 2013, 37–38). As our 2019–2020 study confirmed by more extensive empirical material, this trend is not accidental: there were 1.5 more “ethno-civic” Jews in our sample than “universalists” (33% and 21% respectively). In fact, almost two decades ago, several researchers put forward the idea of such ethnopolitical groups being formed in some republics of the USSR (they called them “subethnic”), such as “Russian Jews” (Yukhnyova 1999) and “Ukrainian Jews” (Petrovsky-Shtern 2009), although at that moment it was a question of the historical and cultural premises of such a phenomenon or of political and philosophical quests by specific intellectuals. Now, judging from the big picture we have, this process has moved on to a qualitatively new level. In the past, local Jewish identity was largely admitted to by young people, among whom a relatively high proportion were people of mixed origin, and today it has become almost mainstream. And this is despite the fact that the relationship between age and the level of homogeneity of Jewish origin looks even more prominent than before. (In our current study, “quarter-Jews” made up 41% of young people under the age of 25, a third of 26- to 40-year-olds, slightly more than a quarter of 41- to 60year-olds, and only one tenth of those older than this). On the contrary, the lower the level of homogeneity of Jewish origin, the younger the corresponding subgroup was on average (with the exception, of course, of non-Jews with their prevalence of spouses who were descendants of homogeneous Jewish and mixed marriages). In any case, the proportion of those who chose this option among ethnically mixed young people and in the 61+ cohort (for the most part consisting of respondents of homogeneous Jewish origin) turned out to be almost identical, and in both cases higher than the sample average (See Tables 3.9 and 3.10).

45

Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models

Table 3.9: Age and Ethnic Origin of Respondents. Number of Jewish grandparents/N

–

Total

Age Up to 

–

–

%

%

%

%



%





%

%

%

%









%

%

%

%









%

%

%

%









%

%

%

%

%

,









% % (N=)



% % (N=)



% % (N=)

None

% % (N=)

Total

+

Table 3.10: Age of Respondents / Ethnic Identity. Ethnocultural identity (how they feel)

Total

Age –

–

–

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

Total%

%

%

%

%

%

Total, N

,









Simply Jewish Russian/Ukrainian, etc. Jews Both Russian/another and Jewish at the same time Only Russian / member of another non-Jewish ethnicity Simply human being Difficult to say / other / no answer

+

This phenomenon is certainly no reason to revive the classic Ashkenazi local subcultural groups, i.e. the “Pale of the Jewish Settlement” of the Russian Empire, or the Soviet-style Jewish national-territorial autonomy of the 1920s. The first category might just include a few neo-traditional communities of former villages in Ukraine and Belarus (Veidlinger 2013) that survive only due to charity. They have partially preserved spoken Yiddish, which an average of 5% of the sample can speak and another 11% can understand. (Any progression of this phenomenon is

46

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

not yet obvious in the light of a new wave of mass migration of Ukrainian Jews after the start of the Russian military invasion). The second model today can be found only in the Jewish Autonomous Region of the Russian Federation. It is a phenomenon where a territorial model of Jewish autonomy exists at the level of an abstract symbol, although perhaps slightly more than just a historical curiosity or political artifact (Khanin 2019a). This is a sociological phenomenon of structuring fundamentally new Ashkenazi Jewish entities in the European countries of the former USSR with the demographically and symbolically significant Jewish population (primarily Russia and Ukraine). They cannot be called subethnic groups, unlike Georgian, Mountain, Bukhara, or, with some reservations, Russian-speaking Jews. Communities of this kind are very close to each other in cultural and linguistic terms, although one can expect a significant cultural divergence among them in the future.22 At the moment, differences between them come down mainly to their civil and political loyalties, which is why we propose to designate these new communities as “ethno-civic groups.” In this sense, the situation in the CIS differs from the situation in countries of post-Soviet Jewish emigration (Israel, USA, Canada, Germany, etc.). In these countries, on the one hand, the identity of a “Jew of the country of origin” is preserved and, as shown by a series of representative “Russian Israeli” surveys conducted in 2009–2017, it actually increases the longer the person stays there.23 On the other hand, there is an obvious process of erasing the regional differences between the first, the “1.5,” and sometimes even the second generation of Ashkenazi immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their integration into local “Russian” (or Russian-speaking Jewish) communities (Khanin 2014a). (Table 3.11). This means that we are talking primarily about the Jewish diaspora phenomenon, whose existence in the post-Soviet space is obvious in light of the data above. And in this we disagree with researchers who deny the formation of various ethnocivic, most often Russian-speaking Ashkenazi groups both within the borders of the newly independent states and in the post-Soviet space as a whole. This conclusion usually stems from these authors’ belief that Jews in general are not a single ethnic

 This prognosis already finds some confirmation in the face of trends that are observed among the Jews of Ukraine after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion. More details on this trend are presented in other chapters of this book.  Each of these studies included personal interviews of 950–1050 respondents who came to Israel from the former Soviet Union beginning in 1989. The respondents were selected by the quota random sampling method in keeping with the basic socio-demographic characteristics of the target population: sex, age, time spent in Israel, and place of residence (region) calculated on the basis of statistical data from the Central Statistical Bureau and the Israeli Ministry of Aliya and Integration.

47

Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models

Table 3.11: Comparison of Ethnic Identities of Russian-Speaking Israelis and CIS Jews. Feeling

“Russian Israel”

FSU

Survey, year:

Europe✶ Asia✶✶





 



Simply Jewish Russian-speaking Jew, representative of the country’s Jewish community Both Russian (or Ukrainian, etc.) and Jewish Only Russian / another ethnicity Simply human being / other

.% .%

% .% % .%

% %

% %

.% .% .%

% .% % .% % .%

% % %

% % %

Total

% % %

%

%

✶

Survey in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. Survey in Kazakhstan.

✶✶

group. (Ethnographer, cultural expert and linguist, Mikhail Chlenov, for instance, supports this opinion and defines Jewry as a “civilization”) (Chlenov 1999). It seems that this particular approach has made Elena Nosenko-Stein conclude that “people of Jewish origin living in post-Soviet Russia and beyond, in the post-Soviet space, have turned from a diaspora group (or a set of such groups) into an ethnic community.” And in this capacity, they form a part of the “Russian people” (Nosenko-Stein 2017). But she simultaneously insists that “mainstream” Jewish identification in the former USSR is situational in nature, which, following her logic, means that this group has no stable physical borders. Other scholars do not deny the existence of such new groups, but the question of which society they are part of – predominantly Jewish or non-Jewish – remains disputable to them. For instance, culture studies expert Aleksey Levinson and his colleagues from the reputable Russian Yuri Levada Analytical Center summed up their observations on the processes taking place in the Jewish environment in recent years and came to the following conclusion: “Jewish people are firm at recognizing the leading role of the Russian majority, they accept a number of its social and anthropological features, but they retain the awareness of their uniqueness and identity. There is no need to talk of any serious discrimination against the Jews, but neither can we talk about their complete assimilation” (Levada 2018, 30). On the contrary, Natalia Yukhneva, a long-time opponent of Elena Nosenko, believed the community of Russian-speaking Jews to be a subethnic group (or ethnolinguistic group, a sort of classical Hebrew eda) within the Russian ethnic group with which Jews, in her opinion, share a common culture. (And to those criticizing the artificiality of such a structure, she correctly noted that in the context of building “Soviet socialist nations” in Central Asia, Russian Jews do not look

48

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

like the most “made-up” community; Yukhnyova, 2008. On the essence of disagreements between these researchers, see Nosenko-Stein 2014a). It seems, nevertheless, that the data we have collected allow our own interpretation of this process (Table 3.12). The proportion of our survey respondents in the countries of the former Soviet Union who fully supported the 2019 assertion that “Jews of the world are all one nation” was 1.5 times lower than fifteen years ago (58% and 79.3%). At the same time, the percentage of those who are absolutely sure that “Russian/other Jews have more in common with ethnic Russians or Ukrainians than with Jews living in other countries” grew less rapidly – from about a third to almost 40%. Together with those who partially agreed with these statements, 82% and 75% of 2019 respondents shared the belief that “Jews of the world are all one nation” and that local Jews have more in common with their nonJewish counterparts in their countries of residence. Both statements show the dominant version of identification shifting towards local Jewish identity but no longer excluding each the other: the first alternative is an indicator of ethnicity, the second, of its cultural content. Table 3.12: Comparison of Universal and Local Elements of Jewish Identification of CIS Jews in 2004–2005 and 2018–2019. Do you agree or disagree that:

Jews of the world are all one nation

Russian (other) Jews have more in common with ethnic Russians (Ukrainians, etc.) than with Jews of other countries of the world

– Agree

.%

.%

 Agree Partly agree Fully disagree No opinion Total

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

If to these we add answers from respondents who, for technical reasons, were offered a linear opposition to each of the statements rather than a scale of answers (a total of 865 of them), then an equally interesting picture emerges. Confronted with an ethnic choice, 57% of our respondents chose in favor of the common Jewish ethnic group and only 20% in favor of the host countries’ nations: Russians, Ukrainians, Moldavians, etc. (21% found it difficult to answer, the rest

Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models

49

suggested another option).24 In this case, there was no significant difference between “pure Jews” and “half-Jewish,” only among “quarter-Jews” were there noticeably more than average supporters of the second version or those who found it difficult to answer the question (Table 3.13). Similar data were obtained by researchers at the Levada Center in Moscow: in 2018, the proportion of Jews of Russia who believed that “all Jews, even those living in different countries, are part of one nation,” was 49%. And the opinion that “Jews living in the same or neighboring, or culturally close countries are similar, but the Jews living in different parts of the world differ from each other” was shared by 39% of respondents, just like in our study (Levada 2018, 62). But among the group of “non-Jews,” there were noticeably more supporters of the first, “global Jewish” version than in any other category and in the sample average. And this is an indicator of the direction of the process. In fact, motivation does not matter here – whether these people are aware of a clear line between ethnic groups or, on the contrary, are non-Jewish spouses of Jews or the fourth generation of mixed families involved in Jewish community life, they emphasize the Jewish status of the community they want to belong to for economic, value-psychological, or migration reasons. Table 3.13: Comparison of Ethnicity and Respondents’ Perceptions of Processes in the Jewish World. Opinions:

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –

Jews of the world are all one nation Russians (Ukrainian, etc.) Jews have more in common with ethnic Russians (Ukrainians, etc.) than with Jews of other countries of the world Hard to say Another opinion Total





None

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% –

%

%

%

%

%

In light of these data, it would be logical to assume that the new Jewish ethnocivic groups taking shape in the countries of the former USSR are, above all, part

 Similar data was obtained by the Levada Center. In 2018, the share of Russia’s Jews who believed that “all the Jewish people, even those living in different countries, are all part of one nation” made up 49%. 39% of respondent shared the view that “Jewish people living in one or neighboring or culturally close countries are similar but Jews who live in different parts of the world are different” (Levada 2018, 61).

50

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

of the Jewish nation by joining it either directly or (more often) through one of its segments, in this case – Russian-speaking Jewish, which, similar to the opinion of other researchers (Chernin 1994; 2020; Militarev 2010, 12–23), we tend to view as a relatively new subethnic group of the Jewish people.25 In the first years after the collapse of the USSR, the borders of the core of this segment largely coincided with the conceptual and geographic borders of the postSoviet Jewish community that existed back at the turn of the millennium. Today, the situation looks different. According to 2019–2020 research data (Table 3.14), from over a quarter to one third of those polled in former republics of the European part of the former USSR identify themselves with the “titular” Jewish community of their countries. That means that they identify themselves with the ethnocivic groups of “Russian,” “Ukrainian,” “Moldovan,” or “Belarus” Jews. Moreover, only 5–6% of respondents chose the option of a “Russian Jew,” which in this context, as we may assume, meant belonging to the community of “Jews of the USSR/ CIS” in the former Soviet republics outside the Russian Federation. Table 3.14: Models of Ethnic Identity of Members of the “Extended Jewish Population” in Five CIS Countries, 2019–2020. What do you consider yourself first of all? Russia Ukraine Belarus Moldova Kazakhstan Simply/just Jewish A Russian Jew Ukrainian, Byelorussian, etc. Jew Both Russian/Ukrainian, etc. and Jewish Non-Jewish Identity Other or Hard to say Total

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % –

% % % % % %

% % % % % –

%

%

%

%

%

In fact, back in the early 1990s, Fran Markowitz (1995, 409–410) believed it was time to abandon the concept of “Soviet Jewish identity”, since former Soviet Jews were given a free choice between emigration and continuing to live in their native countries as the “new Jews” of Russia, Ukraine, etc. It seems, however, that at that time, this trend was more of a political move than a substantial culture and identity practice. And so, two decades later, Nosenko-Stein (2014) argued that this was mainly true about the young people, while people of medium and senior

 Alexander Militarev in his book used the term “Russian Jewish ethnicity,” specifying later in personal correspondence with this author (December 2020) that he really meant the identity of a subethnic Russian-speaking group of the Jewish people.

51

Local and Universal Jewish Identity Models

age groups usually keep their Jewish identity in its Soviet form, albeit somewhat modified (Nosenko-Stein 2014a). This conclusion was not supported by our 2019 comprehensive quantitative study: for instance, in Belarus, carriers of “ethno-civic” identity were in a relative majority (25%-30%) in all age groups, while their share was close to average in the sample at large. The same was true in Ukraine except for the subgroup of 16- to 25-year-olds, where the share of “Ukrainian Jews” (39%) was a quarter higher than in the sample average (29%). (Table 3.15). Table 3.15: Models of Ethnic Identity of Members of the “Extended Jewish Population” Three FSU Slavic Countries / Age, 2019. What do you consider yourself first of all?

Total

Age Up to  – – +

Ukraine Just Jewish A Russian Jew A Ukrainian, Belarussian, or other Jew Both Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian, and Jewish Only ethnic Russian/Ukrainian or other ethnic affiliation A human being, regardless of nationality or ethnicity Other, or hard to say Total

%% N

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

%

%

%











% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% %

% %

% %

%

% %

%

%

%











% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% %

Russia Just Jewish A Russian Jew A Ukrainian, Belarussian, or other Jew Both Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian, and Jewish Only ethnic Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian or other ethnic affiliation A human being, regardless of nationality or ethnicity Hard to say, or other Total

%% N

% %

Belarus Just Jewish A Russian Jew A Belorussian Jew Both Russian/Belarussian, etc., and Jewish

52

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

Table 3.15 (continued) What do you consider yourself first of all?

Total

Age Up to  – – +

Only ethnic Russian, Belarussian, or other ethnic affiliation A human being, regardless of nationality or ethnicity Hard to say or other Total

%%

% % –

– % –

% % –

%

%

%







N

– % –

– % %

% % 



Experience of Kazakhstan and Moldova The direct correlation between the homogeneity of Jewish origin and type of ethnic identity, standard for the Jewish population of the European states of the former USSR, was visible in this country when respondents chose only two answers: “I feel simply Jewish” and “I consider myself an ethnic Russian / representative of another non-Jewish nationality.” No less remarkable is this: the “Russian Jew” option was chosen by 18% and the “Kazakhstani Jew” by a mere 13% of respondents (Table 3.16). The reason for this phenomenon seems to be the following: the Jewish population of this country mainly consists of Ashkenazi Jews who were evacuated to Kazakhstan from the western USSR lands during the Second World War and their Table 3.16: Correlation of Ethnic Origin and Ethnic Identity of Members of the “Extended Jewish Population” of Kazakhstan, 2020. What do you consider yourself first of all?

Total Kazakhstan

Number of Jewish grandparents –

Simply Jewish A Russian Jew A Kazakhstani Jew Both ethnic Russian/etc. and Jewish A member of a non-Jewish ethnic group Simply human Total





None

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

− − − − % %

%

%

%

%

%











Experience of Kazakhstan and Moldova

53

offspring (Grinberg et al 2008), as well as families of Jewish specialists sent to work in local industrial and social-infrastructure enterprises. This predominantly Russian-speaking group, along with most other urban groups in the country, look to Russia as their cultural metropolis. The choice of such identification may also be an Ashkenazi alternative to the local Bukharian Jewish identity (a large community of Bukhara Jews used to live in Shymkent, Taraz and Kazalinsk in southern Kazakhstan). This group is apparently viewed as consisting of “Kazakhstani Jews” (see Table 3.17). Note, however, that such self-identification is twice as popular among respondents in Karaganda, while in Shymkent this parameter turned out to be slightly lower, and the proportion of carriers of universal Jewish identity is 1.5 times higher than in the sample average.26 Therefore, this assumption needs further analysis. Table 3.17: Ethnic Identity of Members of “Extended Jewish Population” in Different Communities of Kazakhstan, 2020. What do you consider yourself first of all? Total

Kazakhstan City Almaty Karaganda Pavlodar Shymkent

Just Jewish A Russian Jew A Kazakhstan Jew Both ethnic Russian/other and Jewish Only ethnic Russian/other A human being Total, % N

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%











Even on the basis of the data already obtained, some preliminary hypotheses can be proposed. Ashkenazi Jews of Kazakhstan, unlike the Jews in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova, do not feel they belong to one of their country’s indigenous nationalities with its tribal-clan traditions (the system of three tribal zhuzes and their units). Therefore, they might realize their lack of identification combinations with local ethnocultural groups – they identify neither with the Muslim ethnic group of Kazakhs, nor with the “fourth zhuz,” i.e., ethnic Slavs, who are losing their

 It is interesting that at present, not a single Bukharian Jewish name can be found among activists and leaders on the website of the Jewish Community Center of Shymkent. See: http://www. mitsva.kz/regkaz/shymkent/comcntr/comcntr.shtml (accessed 17 July 2022).

54

Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

influence on state authorities and are experiencing the strengthening of the cultural and linguistic aspects of this phenomenon (Umbetaliyeva 2020, 93). It is no accident that the share of those who reported mixed Jewish-Gentile identity in Kazakhstan was 1.5–2.5 times smaller than among the Jews in the postSoviet Slavic countries of Euro-Asia. It is possible that due to much more frequent refusal to choose the Jewish-Gentile identification options by persons of mixed origin and non-Jewish members of Jewish families, the share of carriers of the nonJewish identity among members of Jewish families in Kazakhstan made up 1.5 times more than in Russia, twice as much as in Ukraine and Belarus, and four times more than in Moldova (Table 3.18).

Table 3.18: Share of Carriers of Mixed (Jewish-Gentile) and nonJewish Identity among Respondents in Five FSU States / Homogeneity or Heterogeneity of Ethnic Origin, 2019–2020. Total –

FSU states





None

Feel simultaneously ethnic Kazakh/Russian/Ukrainian/Belarusian/ Moldovan and Jewish Kazakhstan

%

%

%

%

–

Russia Ukraine Belarus Moldova

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % –

% % % %

Non-Jewish (ethnic and cosmopolitan) Kazakhstan

%

%

%

%

%

Russia Ukraine Belarus Moldova

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Total

%

% % % % %

However, in Kazakhstan, just like in other regions of the former USSR, people make their “non-Jewish” choice in favor of the “cosmopolitan” identification rather than any other ethnic identity: the ratio of these two non-Jewish submodels averaged 6:1. An exception was the category of people without Jewish roots, a quarter of whom declared their non-Jewish (most often Slavic) ethnic identity, with no carriers of a stable or blurred Jewish identity among them. The

Experience of Kazakhstan and Moldova

55

share of “cosmopolitans” in this group was only three times higher, rather than six, than the share of ethnic non-Jews. This pattern of self-identification has received some theorization at the hands of Israeli-British demographer Daniel Staetsky, who commented on the previous version of this chapter. Staetsky said the data from Kazakhstan show that these people are the most assimilated. In our Kazakhstan sample, 46% have just one Jewish grandparent, while in the overall sample this figure is 25%. This means that many are intermarried across generations. But another peculiarity appears: people with Jewish roots in Kazakhstan are not likely to marry native Kazakhs, the titular nation. So how does appear the Kazakhstani-Jewish identity emerge? There seems to be no clear answer. In Ukraine, Belarus, etc. intermarriage would involve Ukrainian/Belarusians, etc., local identities strengthened in these places since the collapse of the USSR along with the development of parallel local Jewish identities. Jews in such places had good reasons for people to get mixed with genuine locals. Jews in Kazakhstan are in a totally different situation, and the Russian-speaking Jewish or UkrainianJewish identity models are impossible there. So, the high percentage of those who chose a ‘human being’ as their identity are not surprising.27 On the other hand, a noted Kazakhstan sociologist Leonid Gurevich commented on the studies extant at the end of the second decade of this century and suggested paying attention to something else – the involvement of local Jews, as well as representatives of other ethnic groups of the country, in the process of mass assimilation to the civil-national identity of “Kazakhstani,” which, in his opinion, is taking place against the backdrop of a declining role of tribal selfidentification (Gurevich 2020, 97). In fact, the essence and breadth of perception of this category in Kazakhstan, Gurevich believes, has almost no analogy in other post-Soviet states, with the exceptions of the concept of “Russian” in Russia, which for local ethnic groups is much less often prioritized as an identity. Therefore, had the category of “Kazakhstani” been inserted separately in the questionnaire, “we might have been able to achieve quite interesting results,” he said.28 But even if this is true, it does not explain why the proportion of those who called themselves “Russian Jews” in Kazakhstan was three times higher than in the other three post-Soviet states outside of Russia. Most importantly, it leaves open the question of the extent to which it is correct to consider the civil identification of “Kazakhstani” as an alternative to ethnic identity (Russian, Jew, Kazakh Jew, etc.) or as a quasi-ethnic replacement of one of them. In principle, this option cannot be

 Dr. Daniel Staetsky’s assessment was received by e-mail, April 4, 2021.  Prof. Gurevich’s assessment was received by e-mail, May 4, 2020.

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Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

completely ruled out either: something similar took place in Israel, where in some cases polls of immigrants from the former USSR of mixed and non-Jewish origin recorded the replacement of Russian ethnic identity with Israeli civil identity (in its national and cultural incarnation). This process was particularly noticeable among individuals with a high degree of identification with the State of Israel and among youth aged 18 to 24, who quickly lost a not fully-developed ethnocultural orientation to their country of origin (Khanin 2014a, 17–18). Although to the best of our knowledge nothing similar was discovered in other communities of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, this phenomenon’s occurrence in Kazakhstan is only theoretical. For example, one may assume that by choosing the “human being, regardless of nationality or ethnicity” option, some of our 2020 survey respondents wanted to demonstrate that the “Kazakhstani” version was missing on the list of ethnic identity options. It seems, however, that such an assumption, without additional evidence, would be too bold. In any case, in Israel, as shown by our study of Russian-speaking repatriates in 1989–2017, the proportion of those who speak of their civil identity as “Israeli and nothing else” among “cosmopolitans” was lower than in all other culture-identifying categories, with the exception of ethnic non-Jews (see Table 3.19 bellow). Table 3.19: Ethnic and Civil Identity of Russian-Speaking Israelis who Arrived in 1989–2017. Feeling Israeli:

Absolutely not To some extent To a large extent Only that Hard to say Total N

Total

Ethnic identity of Russian-speaking repatriates, – Jewish

“Russian” Jew

Russian/other ethnos and Jewish

Only Russian or other ethnic group

A human being

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

N=

N=

N=

N=

N=

N=

Moreover, the violent events of January 2022 posed a difficult challenge to this assessment (including the accompanying conviction in the effectiveness of Nazarbayev’s policy to limit the “zhuziness” in the distribution of power and opportunities in business, which had been in effect under Soviet Kazakhstan’s Communist leader, Dinmukhamed Kunaev). According to observers, in addition to the social class component, these events also had a pronounced ethno-clan aspect (Strigunov and Manoilo 2022).

Experience of Kazakhstan and Moldova

57

A unique finding was also made in Moldova (Table 3.20). This was the only country where the share of supporters of “universalist Jews” (43%) and “local” Jewish identities was comparable. (The share of persons identifying as “Moldovan” or “Russian” Jews ended up amounting to 47% of the local sample). The share of carriers of non-Jewish identity turned out to be lower than anywhere else in the CIS. In fact, almost all respondents in this category preferred to call themselves “cosmopolitans,” and only a few referred to their ethnic Moldovan or another non-Jewish ethnic identity. This was true even of non-Jewish family members of the Jews, who, among other things, spoke about their mixed JewishGentile identity 2.5 times more often than the sample average in this country. This anomaly can be explained by the technical complexity of organizing a representative survey under conditions of significant mobility of the population (including its Jewish part) in an economically underprivileged country divided by an old conflict. The phenomenon is also facilitated by the high proportion of the small Jewish population “under the radar” of local Jewish organizations (see, for instance, Dmitry Shevelev 2019). Table 3.20: Correlation of Ethnic Origin and Ethnic Identity of Members of Extended Jewish Population of Moldova, 2019. What do you consider yourself, first of all?

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –

Just Jewish A Russian Jew A Moldovan Jew Both Russian/Moldovan and Jewish Ethnic Moldovan/other, or “just a human being” Hard to say Total





None

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % – % –

% % % % % –

%

%

%

%

%











Finally, both in Moldova and Kazakhstan, we are facing demographically weak communities whose aspirations are focused externally: in Kazakhstan – in the direction of Russia, in Moldova – in the direction of Israel and the EU (which explains the higher proportion of supporters of the Russian-speaking Jewish identification in the first case and the “commonly Jewish” identification in the second). Characteristically, both Moldova and Kazakhstan have a disproportionate number of respondents convinced of the existence of a “transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora” in which members of these communities are closely involved.

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Chapter 3 Jewish Identity

It will not come as a surprise if research uncovers similar phenomena in other communities on the periphery of the Russian-speaking Jewish world – for example, in Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, or South Africa. Indeed, some support for this hypothesis regarding Latvia and Estonia may be found in a recent study of the predominantly Russian-speaking Jewish community of those countries (Yakimova 2020; 2023). Similarly, research conducted in South Africa’s Russian-speaking Jewish community found that most of the respondents identified themselves as “Russian Jews” (“Russian” denoting both the language and the cultural background), “Jews of Russian origin” (coming from Russia), or “Russian-speaking Jews.” When asked a direct and unambiguous question as to whether they see themselves as part of South African Jewry, Russianspeaking Jews were almost equally divided between affirmative and negative answers (Gorelyk 2010, 3, 13). In any case, in these two cases we are talking about peripheral ethnocultural models. ✶✶✶ To sum up the chapter, the identity of the mainstream “extended Jewish population” of the former USSR is complex – a synthesis or a symbiosis of elements from internal and borrowed sources. But their basic element is always Jewish. Even if the popular postmodernist sociologist’s construct of “Jews by nationality (origin), Russians by culture” is accepted, this pattern is implemented within the Jewish rather than Slavic or other ethnic or civic community. The formative moment of this model is the Jewish (in the ethnic sense) sense of self-rootedness in historical memory and social experience, which comes as a result of the continuity of the remnants of the local Jewish cultural tradition and the pressure of the sociopolitical environment.

Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity of Post-Soviet Jewry As we return to mainstream processes among the extended Jewish population of the post-Soviet Euro-Asian countries, we see that the emergence of a transnational Russian-speaking Jewish phenomenon was one of the reactions to the erosion of the community of “FSU Jews” and the strengthening of local Jewish identities. This phenomenon highlighted not the “Moscow” option of the collective identity of these groups, but the supranational “Russian-speaking” Jewish community, whose members reside today in dozens of countries on five continents. We believe it is questionable to view this community as a separate ethnic group – either Jewish, according, for example, to Nosenko-Stein (2014c) and Larissa Remennik (2013), or as a branch of the Russian (without any quotation marks) ethnic world as suggested by the “new” Israeli sociologists (Al-Haj 2019).

Transnational Identity – Meaning and Parameters Massive modern internal and international migrations have resulted in the creation of new ethnic diasporas as well as a new type of diaspora identity – transnationalist. As Faist put it, both terms “diaspora” and “transnationalism” were often used in the past to denote different cross-border processes – the religious or national groups living outside their homeland and migrants’ durable ties across countries respectively. Today diaspora and transnationalism are often used interchangeably (Faist 2010, 9–10). In recent decades, this phenomenon has provided a new meaning to language, culture, behavioral patterns, and other traditional ethnic indicators, as well as to values, social standards, and narratives whose real or imagined sources were in the immigrants’ home states (Sheffer 2007; Kivisto and Faist 2010). Transnational diaspora identity has become a basic tool of cultural self-exclusion for immigrant communities and the promotion of their social and cultural interrelations with their home countries, in parallel with different models of integration to, and/or isolation from, the host society (Ben-Raphael 2012). This differs from earlier models of immigrant integration that demanded radical socialization in the host country while abandoning, as much as possible, the cultural experience and identity of the countries of origin (Barkan 2007). This reality requires an https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-004

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

entirely different scholarly approach to the classical “diasporism” doctrine (Rebhun and Lev Ari 2010, 10–13). Many scholars have begun to use transnational doctrine categories to reassess social, cultural, and political experiences, not just of “new” but also of “classical” diasporas, including Jewish communities in different countries of the world. This focus is less on the “old” component of diaspora communities, which have been part of democratic countries in the West for more than a century, but more on the relatively new Jewish emigrant diaspora segments (see, for instance: Weingrod and Levy 2006). This phenomenon and its size, the latter due to massive Jewish migration in and from Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, became only one case of these trends. Such migrations result in the creation of a complex transnational mechanism that affects not only migrants but also non-migrant native peers within a shared ethno-religious group “through the flow that takes place among the different spaces of people, money, and social patterns of norms, values, ideas, and identities” (Rebhun and Lev Ari 2010, 26). Considering this, I believe that in some situations, the identity-culture parameters of the emigrant component of such transnational diasporas might also be applied to the diaspora segment with members never leaving their home country. In the post-Soviet space, the strengthening of local or ethno-civic Jewish identity, as opposed to the erosion of the community of “FSU Jews,” became a critical factor in their identification with the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish subethnic group as a central collective symbol of post-Soviet Jews. According to our 2019–2020 research data, almost 60% of Jews and their family members in postSoviet Euro-Asia believe in the viability of this phenomenon in the long or medium-run. There was almost no essential difference on this issue between age groups of Jews of different post-Soviet countries, except for the above-mentioned nuances in Moldova and Kazakhstan. Similarly, there was no difference between individuals of homogeneous or mixed and non-Jewish origin (except that the number of respondents who found it difficult to answer this question was proportional to the homogeneity of their Jewish origin) (Table 4.1). There were insignificant differences between the subgroups above ranked according to the homogeneity of ethnic origin in their share of supporters of the idea that the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora exists as a phenomenon with a long-term perspective. However, these differences were obviously emphasized between cultural-identification groups. Faith in the long-term prospects of this phenomenon was directly proportional – and the lack of interest in it inversely proportional – to the stability of respondents’ Jewish identities. The ethnic and religious identity of the extended Jewish population of the former USSR were among the parameters with significantly more pronounced differences between subgroups. Faith in the long-term prospects of the transnational

Transnational Identity – Meaning and Parameters

61

Table 4.1: CIS Jews’ Beliefs in the Phenomenon of Transnational Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora / Age, Ethnic Origin, and Country of Residence. Categories

Total

What do you think of this phenomenon?

Total

Invention of interested parties

Long-term phenomenon

One-generation phenomenon

Do not know / not interested

% N=

% N=

% N=

% N=

% N=

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Ethnic origin (N of Jewish grandparents) –   None Country Russia Ukraine Belarus Moldova Kazakhstan Age – – – +

community of Russian-speaking Jews was directly proportional, and lack of interest in this topic (and, in one or two cases, belief in the existence of this phenomenon) – inversely proportional to the stability of respondents’ Jewish ethnic and religious identities (Table 4.2). The following can be suggested to explain this division. For members of the first cultural-identification subgroup, the “universalist Jews,” who believe that “all the Jews of the world are one nation,” the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora is the most comprehensive way of identifying with the Jewish people. Identification with it has been an alternative in the last 15–20 years to the rapid erosion of the previous collective identification of being a “Jew of the former USSR.” For carriers of a local Jewish or dual Jewish-gentile identity, the other side of the process was more relevant: new Jewish ethno-civic groups form the infrastructure of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnos. Their belief in the existence of the phenomenon of a transnational diaspora of Russian-

62

Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

Table 4.2: Post-Soviet Jews’ Beliefs in the Phenomenon of Transnational Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora / Ethnic and Religious Identity. Categories

Invention of Long-term OneDo not know / Total interested phenomenon generation not interested % N parties phenomenon %

%

%

% % ,

Just Jewish

%

%

%

% %



Russian / other Jew

%

%

%

% %



Rus / other and Jewish

%

%

%

% %



A human being, etc.



%

%

% %



Only ethnic Russian / other



%

%

% %



Yes







 %



Hard to say







 %



No







 % ,

Total Ethnic identity

Consider themself religious

speaking Jews was approximately equal to the sample average. Finally, for respondents with a dominant non-Jewish ethnic identity, this topic was generally of rather abstract interest. A similar alignment of opinions on this issue was observed among respondents who differed in their level of religiosity. This is understandable in light of the obvious interdependence between the type of Jewish or other ethnic identity and the proportion of religious Jews in each of the five cultural identification groups we have identified (more on this in chapter 6). But in the context of our topic here, it is interesting to note one more circumstance. About three-quarters of respondents defined themselves as religious people who participate regularly or occasionally in the activities of organized Jewish communities. That was significantly more than among non-religious people and those who were unable to define their religiosity. These are professionals and activists of educational, charitable, informational, and cultural organizations with diverse ties to foreign Jewish structures, including, and sometimes primarily, their Russian-speaking Jewish component. This is typical of religious communities with formal membership for religious Jews, led by rabbis or envoys from Israel, the United States or Europe, or by local natives who received

Transnational Identity – Meaning and Parameters

63

religious education abroad. It is typical of them perhaps even to a greater extent than of secular organizations – of course, not including leaders and professional workers of regional and supra-regional “umbrella” Jewish associations. In general, the above data shows that at the time of our study in 2019–2020, Jews of the former USSR and their family members viewed the idea of a global community of Russian-speaking Jews worldwide as an established fact. The proportion of those who considered the idea of a “worldwide Russian-speaking Jewish community” nothing more than “an invention of interested people or just a common cliché” was only 13% of the sample average. And in none of the 23 subcategories of respondents ranked according to gender, age, ethnic origin, country of residence, and level of religiosity did it exceed 17% of respondents. A practical reflection of this transnational vision can be intensive, face-to-face or virtual contact with friends and relatives abroad. But again, no differences on this issue were found between age cohorts, which indicates that the diaspora has acquired characteristics of a “multi-generational dispersed family-network community” united by a system of personal ties, first-circle relatives (parents, children, grandchildren, nephews, etc.), and close friends living in different countries. In fact, more than a quarter of respondents related having such relatives and friends in one foreign country, almost 40% having such contacts in two or three countries, and one-fifth in four or more countries of the world. (This was even more visible in the cohort of the youngest representatives of the “extended Jewish population,” which is generally characterized by increased migration dynamics.) Only 14% of respondents reported that they did not have close friends or relatives (Jews and their families) abroad. In Moldova, three-quarters of respondents had friends and close relatives in more than three countries, and there was no one without such contacts abroad (Table 4.3). Respectively, 12% and around 20% of respondents see their friends and relatives abroad regularly or occasionally, while half of the total number of respondents (almost 60% of those with friends and relatives abroad) reported that they do not “see Table 4.3: Prevalence of Trans-State Social-Family Ties of FSU Jews / Age of Respondents. Close relatives and friends outside respondent’s country In one country In two or three countries In more than three countries Do not have Total

Total

Age –

–

–

+

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

each other frequently, but are constantly in touch by phone, mail, or through social networks.” Members of large Jewish communities of megacities and million-plus cities of the former Soviet Union demonstrate increased involvement in the network of transnational Russian-speaking Jewish relations (Table 4.4). It was to these large industrial, cultural, and financial centers that the Jewish population migrated from provincial cities throughout the post-Soviet era, and these Jews still have higher professional, social, and migration mobility. There is also a noticeable number of transmigrants in these communities: people who returned after several years of life in Israel, the USA or Europe, or those who divide their time between the countries. For example, 5–7% of our respondents in each of these cities had or have Israeli citizenship. Table 4.4: Close Relatives and Close Friends outside Respondent’s Country / Community Type – FSU Europe. N of countries with close relatives and friends

Total

In one country In two or three countries In more than three countries None

% % % %

Total

Ukraine Kiev

Russia

Odessa& Small Dnipro towns

Moscow & S.Pb

Belarus

Province Minsk Other

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

%













,



This is most likely true for Asian FSU countries as well. For example, in Kazakhstan, where the proportion of respondents with close friends and relatives abroad exceeded 80% (three-quarters of them in two or more countries), most respondents were living in the country’s largest city and former capital, Almaty. It had the highest proportion of respondents (65%) in virtual contact (by phone, mail, email, social networks) with their foreign friends and family members. But in the provincial Shymkent, for example, only 40% – less than in other places – practice this form of communication. This was likely the reason why the number of its respondents who regularly meet with their foreign family members “offline” was 1.5 times higher than average (Table 4.5). Survey data show that this extensive system of offline and virtual relations involves almost every segment of the FSU “extended Jewish population” in almost equal measure, regardless of age and homogeneity of Jewish origin, with slight differences among those who have no friends or relatives abroad. The proportion

Transnational Identity – Meaning and Parameters

65

Table 4.5: Transnational Ties of Jews of Kazakhstan. Total Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan City Almaty Karaganda Pavlodar Shymkent

Close relatives and close friends outside of respondent’s country In one country In two or three countries In more than three countries None

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%











Ways of communication Meet regularly In constant contact by mail, phone, or e-mail Have occasional contact Almost no communication No relatives or friends abroad Total

of “quarter-Jews” who gave this answer turned out to be twice as high as that of the “half-Jewish” and three times higher than that of the “100% Jews.” At the same time, respondents with more distant or absent Jewish roots chose this answer 1.5 times less often than “quarter-Jews” (17% and 21%, respectively). The remaining 83% in this “non-Jewish” subgroup may have meant relatives of their Jewish spouses or long-standing friends from Jewish youth camps and other community projects (Table 4.6). Table 4.6: Transnational Interaction of the Jews of the Former USSR / Age and Ethnic Origin of Respondents. Intensity of contact with close Total relatives abroad Meet regularly Not so regularly but in constant contact by mail, phone, or e-mail Have occasional contact Almost no communication No relatives or friends abroad

Age

N of Jewish grandparents

– – – +

–





None

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

Table 4.6 (continued) Intensity of contact with close Total relatives abroad

N of Jewish grandparents

– – – +

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,





No answer Total

Age

%

–

%



%

 %

None %

%

% % % % % % 











We can conclude that the Jewish element is central to the whole pattern, as evidenced by the direct relationship between the intensity of contacts and respondents’ belonging to the culture identification groups of the Jewish and nearJewish population of post-Soviet Euro-Asia and its “far abroad” (Table 4.7). There is also a direct connection between extra-local social contact and level of religiosity. Religious respondents (mostly Jews) reported having close relatives and friends in more than three foreign countries, and they regularly correspond with them much more often than their non-religious compatriots or those unsure of the level of their religiosity (Table 4.8). Table 4.7: Transnational Interaction of Jews of the Former USSR / Culture – Identity Categories. Intensity of contact with close relatives abroad

Total

Ethnic Identity Sustainable Jewish

Mixed

Non-Jewish

Just Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / etc. and Jewish

Only Rus / Other

A human being

Meet regularly

%

%

%

%

%

%

Not so regularly but in constant contact by mail, phone, or e-mail

%

%

%

%

%

%

Have occasional contact

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











Almost no communication No relatives or friends beyond my country or no answer Total

The Israeli Factor of Post-Soviet Jewish Identity

67

Table 4.8: Transnational Interaction of Jews of the Former USSR / Religious Identity. Total

Consider themselves religious Yes

Hard to say

No

Close relatives and close friends outside of respondent’s country % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

N

,





,

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

N

,





,

Yes, in one country Yes, in two or three countries Yes, in more than three countries No Total

Ways of communication with them Meet regularly In constant contact by mail, phone, or e-mail Have occasional contact Almost no communication No relatives or friends abroad Total

All of this supports the Russian-speaking Jewish element of collective identification, while simultaneously defining the material framework of the Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnos. It appears that this conclusion is true regardless of the causal nature of these connections – whether Jewish identification motivates these contacts, or, on the contrary, whether their connections produce specific identification, or whether we are dealing with two facing trends.

The Israeli Factor of Post-Soviet Jewish Identity Does this conclusion, based on the results of the 2019–2020 study, need at least partial revision in the light of the “shakeup” of the Jewish world caused by the invasion of Russian troops into Ukraine 24 February 2022? At first glance, when talking about the two key Jewish communities in the post-Soviet space – in the Russian Federation and in Ukraine – it might. Internal observations show that relationships that many Ukrainian Jews – whether they stayed home or moved to other countries – had with friends and relatives in Russia, i.e., with the people to

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

whom they were closest in spirit or blood, have experienced “not just a tectonic shift, but a chasm.”29 However, one should remember that the Russian-Ukrainian vector of relations in the post-Soviet Jewish world is neither the only nor the main one. Basic social communication networks, according to this and other studies, are focused on the State of Israel, where most respondents have close family members and friends. Israel is the undisputed center of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, which is most clearly manifested in regions with their sociocultural dynamics of local communities mainly oriented “outside.” In Kazakhstan, for example, 42% of respondents have close friends and relatives in Russia, 28% in the US, 27% in Germany, and 7% in other European countries. 14% of respondents have friends in Canada, 10% in Ukraine, 5% in other CIS countries (Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova), and 2% in Australia. But Israel was ahead of all other countries – it was mentioned by 78% of Kazakhstani Jews, who reported having friends and relatives abroad. In general, the same processes are also characteristic of the European republics of the former Soviet Union. According to our study, 52% of respondents (more than 60% of those with relatives abroad) have close relatives in Israel. In fact, this factor is directly proportional to the homogeneity of the ethnic origin of respondents. Threequarters of “100% Jews,” over a half of “50%-Jews,” and a third of “25%-Jews” and people without Jewish roots have close friends and relatives in Israel (Table 4.9). It is equally important that 55% of our respondents from European countries of the CIS have visited Israel (two-thirds of them 1–3 times and one-third many Table 4.9: Close Relatives in Israel / Ethnic Origin of Respondents. Close relatives in Israel

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –

Yes No No answer Total





None

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%

 An opinion of Mikhail Gold, editor-in-chief of one of the leading Jewish publications in the postSoviet space, the Kyiv-based Hadashot newspaper, based on his observations and more than 500 in-depth interviews with displaced Jewish persons in Ukraine. The author received this Gold’s evidence by e-mail, 26 July 2022.

The Israeli Factor of Post-Soviet Jewish Identity

69

times). Another 5% spent a certain period of their lives in Israel (lived, worked, and/or studied there). Some said they live there now and are temporarily staying in the CIS for work or personal reasons, and the number of respondents under the age of 25 who had experience of long-term residence in Israel is almost twice the sample average. Kazakhstan is an exception to the rule, because 68% of its respondents have never been to Israel, although the proportion of its citizens living and studying there (8%) was even higher than in other CIS countries. Aside from this example, the existing picture evidences a common phenomenon for the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. An example is the second largest Russian-speaking Jewish community in the diaspora – that of the United States: more than 60% of Russian-speaking immigrants living there, according to data collected in a nationwide survey of US Jews by the Pew Center in 2020, visited Israel at least once, and most of them have their near and dear there (Sheskin and Altman 2022, 53); At the same time 56% of American Jews, according to the Pew Center, and 55% according to the 2021 AJC survey, have never been to Israel (Pew 2021, 138; AJC 2021a), while three-quarter have no relatives or friends there (AJC 2018). “The fact that many have relatives and friends in Israel,” says sociologist Sam Kliger, who serves as Director of the Eurasian Department of the American Jewish Committee, “makes the majority of Russian-speaking emigrants, not even necessarily [Halakhic] Jews, view Israel as the focus of their Jewish and, paradoxically, even American identity; their attitude to it has a special emotional connotation” (Kliger 2014, 74). Close inter-dependence between self-perception as Jews and Israel among FSU Jewish immigrants in the USA was first discovered in 2010 and then again in 2022 by Ira Sheskin (Sheskin 2010; Sheskin and Altman 2022, 54). David Laitin came to the same conclusion after conducting a series of indepth interviews with Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants who came to the United States in the late 1970s and later, most of them living in Brighton Beach. According to Laitin, “With this high level of social support from Jewish organizations helping them to integrate, this diaspora community from the FSU began to imagine the “homeland” from which they dispersed as Israel rather than Russia” (Laitin 2004, 26). An almost identical trend was discovered by Robert Brym and Marina Morgestern (2023) in their analysis of the political culture and behavior of FSU immigrants in Canada. Finally, research on Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants in Germany conducted by Eliezer Ben-Rafael also revealed their high identification with Israel (62%) as part and parcel of their Jewishness (Ben-Rafael 2015). Nelly Elias, who conducted a qualitative sample of elderly Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants in Berlin a few years prior, also realized that many of her interviewees had their interest in Israel and in their Jewish roots significantly increased after their arrival in

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

Germany. Elias linked this phenomenon to the status of Russian-speaking Jews in Germany as a distinctive religious and cultural minority, which encourages an intensive search for self-identification and belonging. Some of her respondents explained that they “left a piece of our heart [in Russia] . . ., but a broken one, and today our hearts belong to Israel” (Elias 2005, 176–177). This conclusion contradicts the opinion of Nosenko-Stein (2017, 239), who specifically emphasizes the absence of significant Israel-oriented factors in the selfawareness and behavior of members of these communities in the USA, as well as among the Russian-speaking Jewish communities in Germany and Canada, who at best are ready to see themselves as part of the “post-Soviet diaspora” (or a group of such diasporas). However, judging by the data above, this factor is not only present, but is quite stable. Moreover, it is also true of the small immigrant communities of the Russianspeaking Jewish diaspora. For instance, Suzanne Rutland compared recent South African and FSU Jewish immigrants to Australia in the mid-2000s and noted that Jewish identity among the latter had a predominant focus on active public support of Israel. Meanwhile, the identity of South African Jewish immigrants in Australia is more a result of their involvement with synagogues and Jewish schools and less of their Zionist aspirations (Rutland 2007, 4; 2011). About half of respondents in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova named Israel’s Jewish character (46%) and the fact that it is an “economically developed state that gives good opportunities in life” (56%) among Israel’s most attractive features. The first option was chosen more often by people of homogeneous Jewish origin and of older age; the second by respondents of mixed and non-Jewish origin and younger people under 40. It is no surprise that the relevance of Israel primarily as a Jewish state is clearly correlated with the mentality of cultureidentification groups. This view was supported by 75% of those claiming “universal” Jewish identity, 50% of the “ethno-civic” Jews, 40% of “postmodernists,” 25% of “cosmopolitans,” and 16% of “ethnic non-Jews.” The “economic” approach was inversely proportional to the significance of Jewish identification in members of these groups (43%, 55%, 62%, 63%, and 66%, respectively). This question was formulated in such a way that its answer options were not mutually exclusive, and that is how respondents perceived it. Indeed, an unusually high proportion (about 10%) of respondents used the open-answer option to specify that Israel is close to them as both a Jewish state and a state that ensures the welfare of its citizens. Only 4% of respondents believed “this country has nothing attractive about it” or found it hard to answer the question. (A poll in Kazakhstan provided a somewhat different picture. There, the share of respondents for whom Israel’s economic opportunities turned out to be more attractive was twice as high as the share of those who preferred its Jewish character: 66% and 34%. Another 5%

71

The Israeli Factor of Post-Soviet Jewish Identity

named other features of the Jewish state that were attractive to them, and 8% could not answer this question. But even among the latter, only 6% said that the country has nothing attractive). Israel indeed was and remains the most important factor in the personal, cultural, and ethno-national identification of Jews of the former USSR. For instance, the hypothetical possibility of Israel abandoning its Jewish character won the support of a mere 9% of respondents, with 7% saying they were not interested in this issue. Two-thirds of carriers of the “universal” Jewish identity, two-fifths of ethno-civic Jews, one-third of those with Jewish-Gentile identity, and one-fifth of non-Jews strongly rejected this idea. “Ethno-civic” Jews and “postmodernists” (often with non-Jewish family members) expressed the strongest desire to preserve Israel as a Jewish state while simultaneously expressing understanding of motives behind demands to change its status. Members of the non-Jewish cultureidentification category were twice as likely as the sample average to have Israel as a “state for all citizens since the time of national ethnic states has allegedly passed” and three times more often said they were not interested in the topic (Tables 4.10–4.11). Table 4.10: Opinions on Preservation or Measurement of the Jewish Character of Israel / Culture Identification Categories of FSU Jews. Should Israel abandon its Jewish character?

Total

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Rus / Only A human Other Jewish other other Rus / being Jew and Other Jewish

I firmly reject the idea

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

It should remain Jewish, but understand those who want to change the status

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

I don’t care

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

I favor a state for all its citizens

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

–

–

%

–

% %

%

%

%

%









Can’t answer Other All

% ,





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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

Still, the critical role played by the State of Israel is significant to the identification and worldview of persons of non-Jewish and mixed origins within the peripheral segments of the extended Jewish population. The reason for this is quite clear. The Israeli Law of Return (LOR) demarcates formal boundaries of this population and serves as the criterion for participation in the activities of local and foreign Jewish organizations, including access to their educational, welfare, and cultural services. In addition, the option of moving to the Jewish State and general inclusion into the society, provided in the Law, is in the eyes of these people an important indicator of their belonging to the Jewish community. This perspective is considered an established reality by virtually all those interviewed in the course of the research, regardless of origin. The view that the Law of Return should not be changed was the most popular choice among all ethnic, sociodemographic, and culture-identity subcategories of respondents, whose positive responses ranged between 40–50% in each category, with no significant differences between them (Table 4.12). Table 4.11: Opinions on Preservation or Measurement of Israel’s Jewish Character / Age and Ethnic Origin. Attitude towards the idea of Israel’s rejection of its Jewish character Totally disagree

Disagree, but understand those who think otherwise

Don’t care

Agree

Other/no answer

Total

Ethnic origin (N of Jewish grandparents) –   None

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N













Age – – – + Total

Even among subgroups of respondents with sustainable (universal or ethno-civic) Jewish identity, the idea of withdrawing the right to aliya to Israel and Israeli citizenship from certain categories of mixed families was supported by a mere 4–9%. Most of these respondents saw the solution to the growing share of “partly-” or

The Israeli Factor of Post-Soviet Jewish Identity

73

“non-Jewish” individuals in the community and among immigrants to Israel in convincing these people to undergo conversion to Judaism, which, as we said, also means becoming Jewish in ethnic terms. It is not surprising that a large number of individuals of mixed Jewish-gentile identity supported an even more radical approach – to permit entrance and settlement in Israel to anyone who considers himself a Jew and supports the idea of a Jewish state – undoubtedly also meaning not just Israel, but a Jewish collective in general. Nevertheless, half of the respondents in this category preferred the status-quo regarding this question. The only participant category that stood out from the general trend was that of bearers of non-Jewish ethnic identity, only 35% of whom (still a relative majority) called upon the preservation of the Law of Return in its current wording. Less than 10% of respondents in this subgroup would expect Israel to open borders to “all that the country needs, regardless of their origin.” This was almost the same as of those who expected non-Jews according to Halakhic criteria to convert to Judaism, and 2.5% less than those in this subgroup who supported the idea of an “all-citizens state.” It is also indicative that the share of those who hesitated to determine their approach to the LOR issue among “non-Jewish” culture-identity subgroups – “ethnic gentiles” and “cosmopolites” – were 2 and 1.5 times less than the average. On the one hand, this may be understood as a reflection of the situational ambivalence of members of the two “non-Jewish” sub-groups: ethnically mixed and non-Jewish origin, and, on the other hand, understanding that reform of the Israeli Law of Return would potentially harm this group. Whether it were to be abolished in favor of an “all-citizens state” or its criteria tightened, they could lose their right to resettle in Israel should they wish to and might find themselves cut off from the organized Jewish community of the diaspora. A practical indicator of the Israeli component of respondents’ ethnonational identities can be their participation or willingness to participate in pro-Israeli events (rallies, information campaigns, fundraising, etc.) (Table 4.13). In light of the data presented in this chapter, it is not surprising that the more stable the Jewish identity of respondents, the higher their share in declared participation, with varying degrees of frequency, from 44% and 36% among “universalist Jews” (or “integrists,” according to another classification) and “ethno-civic Jews” to 18% among “cosmopolites”, and only 6% among ethnic “non-Jews”. The latter turned out to be the only cultural-identifying subgroup in which the answer option of “I don’t participate, because such activities are not for me” gathered an absolute majority of votes. In the remaining five categories, including persons without a definite identity, the absolute majority were supporters of pro-active action in Israel’s favor. This is in addition to those who stated that they did not participate in such events at the

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

Table 4.12: Members of Culture Identity Groups of FSU “Extended Jewish Population” on Changes to Israel’s Law of Return. Attitude towards changing the Law of Return

✶

Total

Ethnic Identity Just Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / Ukr and Jewish

Only Rus / Other

A human being

The Law of Return should not be changed

%

%

%

%

%

%

Don’t change but encourage Halakhic conversion for non-Jew

%

%

%

%

%

%

Restrict entry only to Jews and children of Jews with their families

%

%

%

%

%

%

Limit entry to Halakhic Jews with their spouses and children under 

%

%

%

%

%

%

Permit anyone who considers himself a Jew and supports the idea of a Jewish state

%

%

%

%

%

%

Entry to all needed by the country, regardless of origin

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











Can’t answer Other Total

✶

Includes 47 respondents in the “other” category.

time of the survey, but “if invited, will probably go”. Interestingly enough, the highest proportion of those who chose the last, “passive-positive” answer option (43%) was among respondents with a mixed Jewish-gentile identity. This can probably be explained by the similar (and the highest compared to other cultural-identifying subgroups) proportion of people who confessed their deliberate refusal to participate in any events of Jewish organizations (42%). All the more important for members of this most “non-affiliated” group are external factors that feed their sense of belonging to “Jewry”, which is important for them to one degree or another. And, as can be seen, the Israeli factor plays a significant role here.

Jews of Euro-Asia and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

75

Table 4.13: Willingness to Participate in Public pro-Israeli Events / Cultural-Identification Categories of FSU Jewish Community. Participation in proIsraeli solidarity events

Ethnic Identity Total

Just Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / Ukr and Jewish

A human being

Only Rus / Other

Other

Yes, always

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Yes, seldom

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

No, but if invited, will probably go

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

No, this is not for me

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













Hard to say Total

Jews of Euro-Asia and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Another traditional factor in the attitude of FSU Jews and their families to the Jewish state lies in their ideas about current political events in Israel and around it, including the Arab-Israeli conflict. Our studies of 2004–2005 and 2019–2020 show that the shares of supporters of the two opposite ideas have decreased by half and four times respectively over these 15 years (Table 4.14). These ideas were the radical right (“annexation of all controlled territories west of Jordan river, without granting citizenship to local Arabs, and promoting their emigration to Arab countries”) and the left (“creation of an Arab state in all or most of the territories that were taken by Israel in 1967”). Other options collected approximately the same number of votes. Supporters of another right-wing idea, that of “attaching all or part of the territory of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza to Israel, giving official status to those Arabs who recognize its Jewish character”, in both cases collected a little less than 40%. The post-Zionist version, “Israel should renounce its Jewish character and open its borders to everyone, including those who call themselves Arab refugees from Palestine”, won marginal support at about 3%, while the anti-Zionist version of “return all Jews from Israel to the countries they or their ancestors came from and transfer its territory to the Arab countries” gained practically no support, just as in the past. Young Jewish people who left the USSR and post-Soviet countries with their families are more inclined than the older generation to adhere to left-wing liberal

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(as, for example, in the United States) or moderate-centrist (as in Israel) points of view on the Arab-Israeli conflict (Khanin 2019b). This division does not happen in the CIS; at least, no noticeable differences in the position of various age groups of respondents were noted in our latest study. Young Jewish people in the FSU countries are as committed to the moderate right-wing and right-wing conservative concept of interpreting the conflict between the Jews of Israel and the Arab world and the ways to resolve it as is the older generation. Just as subtle were differences between respondents of fully Jewish, partially Jewish, and fully non-Jewish origin: each of them had a marginal share of supporters of anti-Zionist (liquidation of Israel), post-Zionist (Israel’s rejection of the Jewish character), and ultra-left (Palestinian state in all territories of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza) options of the conflict resolution. There was a slightly higher proportion of those among persons of homogeneously Jewish and “half-Jewish” who supported the right-wing idea of “one-state solution” with the provision of Israeli citizenship to loyal Palestinian Arabs living in Judea and Samaria (“the West bank”). Among “quarter-Jews” and persons of completely non-Jewish origin, the share of those who did not want to reply to this question was marginal. This was the only difference in these groups’ positions on the issue. Table 4.14: Ways to Resolve the Arab-Israeli Conflict / Ethnic Origin. What is the best way to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict?

Total, Total, – 

Number of Jewish grandparents –





None

Annexation of the West Bank by Israel, no citizenship to local Arabs

.

%

%

%

%

%

Annexation of the West Bank by Israel, granting citizenship to local Arabs

.

%

%

%

%

%

Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza

.

%

%

%

%

%

Non-Jewish state, open gates for all, including Arab refugees

.

%

%

%

%

%

Liquidation of Israel

.

%

%

%

%

%

Other

–

%

%

%

%

%

Do not know

–

%

%

%

%

%

Total

% % % % % % 

,









Jews of Euro-Asia and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

77

Significantly more prominent were differences in approaches to this issue among members of the cultural-identification categories we have identified. The choice of the right-wing/nationalist and left-wing/liberal models to resolve the Arab-Israeli confrontation turned out to be directly proportional to the stability of Jewish and non-Jewish identity, respectively. However, the absolute share of postand anti-Zionist patterns in this scenario was extremely marginal (Table 4.15). Table 4.15: Ways to Resolve the Arab-Israeli Conflict / Models of Ethnic Identity. What is the best way to resolve the Arab–Israeli conflict?

Research 

Research – Total

Total

Ethnic identity Just Rus / Both Rus / Ukr Only Rus / A human Jewish other Jew and Jewish Other being

Annexation of the West Bank by Israel, no citizenship to local Arabs

.

%

%

%

%

%

%

Annexation of the West Bank by Israel, granting citizenship to local Arabs

.

%

%

%

%

%

%

Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza

.

%

%

%

%

%

%

Non-Jewish state, open gates for all, including Arab refugees

.

%

%

%

%

%

%

Liquidation of Israel

.

%

%

%

–

%

%

Other

%

%

%

%

%

%

Do not know or care

%

%

%

%

%

%

Total

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N



,











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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

This point seemed to reflect the “far echo” of the Soviet legacy. It includes the negative reaction of Jews to the pro-Arab and anti-Israeli Middle East strategies of the Soviet leadership, which was a direct conversion of bestial antisemitism and discrimination against the Jews in domestic policies (Gitelman 1995, passim). It also includes Jews’ impressions on the waves of Palestinian-Arab terror against the country in which more than half of respondents (including three-quarters of “100% Jews,” 50% of “half-Jewish”, and a third of “quarter-Jews” and non-Jews) have close relatives and friends. As a result, their position on the Middle East conflict is an essential element of the “Israeli” component of the personal and collective identity of members of the extended Jewish population of the former USSR. And this phenomenon was already evident in the late 1990s (Khanin 2005). This is also true of the Russian-speaking Jewish community of the United States. A quantitative study of this group conducted in 2004 by Sam Kliger showed an alignment of opinions very similar to the position of the Jews of the former USSR. Among his respondents, 83% believed that the goal of the Arabs was the destruction of Israel and not just the return of the “occupied” territories, 52% opposed the establishment of a Palestinian state, and 80% strongly opposed any compromise on the status of Jerusalem (Kliger 2019). David Laitin concludes that Jewish immigrants from the former USSR to the United States have a much greater interest in Middle Eastern politics than in Russian politics, and it is “not just interest. It reflects a deep concern – for their people, and by these people I mean the Jews” (Laitin 2004, 26). In the post-Soviet space, there are some regional differences (Table 4.16). The most “right-wing” sentiments were demonstrated by members of the Jewish (in the broadest sense) community of Ukraine (70% of respondents were in favor of preservation of all the controlled territories by Israel). The most moderate approach to the conflict was demonstrated by Kazakhstan, where a little more than a quarter supported the right-wing idea, and more than half had no opinion on the issue at all. In the case of Ukraine, it probably comes not so much from the remnants of reaction to the anti-Semitism of Soviet authorities, which was more accentuated here than in some other regions of the USSR. Rather, it most likely comes from allusions to the Arab-Israeli conflict and its transfer to Ukrainian soil, to the five-year (at the time of the survey) war with pro-Russian separatists, and the powerful fueling from the non-Jewish environment. Take, for instance, the anti-terrorist operation by the IDF against radical Islamists in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014. It coincided with the active phase of hostilities in the Donbass region, which almost instantly led many Ukrainians, along with a considerable number of Israelis, to convenient comparisons. These comparisons included Crimea with Gaza, Donbass with Judea and Samaria on the West Bank of the Jordan river, 90% of whose Arab population is directly controlled by the Palestinian National Authority, the “Russian

Jews of Euro-Asia and the Arab-Israeli Conflict

79

world” with the Islamic world behind the Arab opponents of Israel, and the sluggish “Minsk process” with the Oslo process (Zarembo 2017). Such comparisons began to circulate even more actively in the public space of Ukraine after the start of an open and full-scale invasion by the Russian army in February 2022. For example, local and international media widely quoted the statement of a thought leader of Ukraine, Presidential Administration Adviser Oleksiy Arestovych, who said back in 2014: “We [Ukraine] fell asleep in 2014 in Europe and woke up in Israel. Therefore, we must behave accordingly if we are to survive as a nation” (quoted in Tarasov 2022. See also Ukraine-24 2022). If this is so, then in the case of Kazakhstan, a country with a majority-secular population and relatively tolerant-minded “ethnic Muslims,” Jews can demonstrate a more positive view on the national claims of their co-citizens’ Arab co-religionists. The same should be expected from Jews and members of their families living in other regions with a similar population structure, such as, for example, in the capital of the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan. But nothing like this was recorded during our study there. While the local Jewish public was four times more aware of the realities of the Arab-Israeli conflict than the Russian average, the percentage of those who shared the right-wing (in the Israeli sense) version of the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was 1.5 times higher than the Russian average. And it was as high (or even slightly more) than in Ukraine. Are these differences between the two post-Soviet Muslim regions related to the political and civil Islamization of Tatarstan’s public space, which is greater there than in Kazakhstan? Or with the number of people who have close relatives in Israel, also significantly greater than in Kazakhstan (almost 1.5 times)? And in the case of Kazakhstan itself, is it due to the cultural, and, at least until recently, largely geopolitical orientation of this country towards Russia, with simultaneous close partnership with Turkey, which impacts the willingness of their societies to accept the narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict from the leaders of these countries? Or does it come from other factors inside and outside their community? All of this requires additional analysis.

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Chapter 4 The Phenomenon and Israeli Focus of the Transnational Identity

Table 4.16: Desirable Arab-Israeli Conflict Settlements / Jews of FSU Regions. Positions

Ukraine Moldova Belarus

Russia

Kazakhstan

Total Kazan Annexation of the West Bank by Israel, no citizenship to local Arabs

%

%

%

%

%

%

Extension of Israeli sovereignty on the West Bank, granting citizenship to Palestinin Arabs

%

%

%

%

%

%

Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza

%

%

%

%

%

%

Non-Jewish state that opens gates for all, including Arab refugees

%

–

%

%

–

%

Liquidation of Israel

%

–

–

%

–

%

Other

%

%

%

%

%

%

Do not care

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% %

%

N





Total









Chapter 5 The Civic Identity of Russian-Speaking Jews 30 Years After the USSR Our survey in five FSU countries makes it clear that the more stable the Jewish identity, the stronger the connection with Israel, and vice versa. Solidarity with the Jewish state and willingness to support it, if necessary, are characteristic of over 90% of carriers of the “universal” Jewish identity, 75% of carriers of the ethno-civic Jewish identity, and the sample average (69%) share of dual JewishGentile identity carriers. About 50% and 20% of respondents in two subgroups of the non-Jewish category – “cosmopolitans” and “ethnic non-Jews” – showed unconditional solidarity with the Jewish state (Table 5.1). Table 5.1: Solidarity with Israel among Representatives of Culture Identification Categories of FSU Jews. Ethnic Identity

Solidarity with Israel

Total

Yes

no

hard to say

Jewish Russian, Ukrainian, etc. Jew Both Jewish and another ethnicity A human being Non-Jewish ethnicity

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

Total

%

%

%

%

Civic Identity Patterns Unconditional solidarity with Israel is not a new phenomenon. Since the establishment of the Jewish state in 1948, solidarity with Israel has been a basic element of the Soviet Jewish identity, increasing even more after the IDF’s victory over the armies of five Arab states in the Six-Day War in 1967. Based on documents from that period, it appears that the Soviet version of “Zionism of the diaspora” among even the most nationally oriented Soviet Jews was not so much acquired as it was an inner, emotional tie to Israel (Khanin 2003b, 29–34; Cantorovich I. and Cantorovich N. 2012, 124–134). This form of “popular Zionism,” in many ways fostered by popular and state anti-Semitism, was integral to the value system that nurtured Jewish national and ethnic consciousness. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-005

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Chapter 5 The Civic Identity of Russian-Speaking Jews 30 Years After the USSR

Suspicions and accusations were made against Soviet Jews of “dual loyalty” or outright disloyalty to the Soviet nation in the light of “Zionist sentiments prevailing among some Soviet citizens of the Jewish origin” (in the language of the Communist Party and KGB officials). They became the background of societal and official anti-Semitism. This led to discrimination in getting jobs, higher education, travel abroad, and so forth, until almost the very end of the Soviet era. While some reasonable Soviet leaders recognized the counterproductive impact of this sort of cliché, it remained official propaganda until Perestroika (Morozov 1998, 200–202). The collapse of the Soviet Union also appeared to mean parting with its ideological legacy. With the abolition of state-sanctioned antisemitism (which in Soviet times included official anti-Zionism) and the establishment of diplomatic relations between the former Soviet Union and the State of Israel, this dilemma of Soviet Jewry – solidarity with Israel (which meant disloyalty to the Soviet Union and its official policy) or declaring support to anti-Zionism or non-Zionism – has lost its relevance. Our current research reaffirmed the phenomenon that we noted two decades ago (Khanin 2011a): identification with Israel correlates with respondents’ patriotism to their countries of residence. The problem of choosing between local national patriotism and pro-Israeli sentiments, which existed fifteen to twenty years ago, is just as irrelevant. Today, these elements of post-Soviet Jewish identity no longer contradict each other. In the survey conducted during our 2019–2020 study, which became the basis of the empirical material for this book, we had asked respondents to answer two questions related to the civil identification of local Jews and their family members. First: which country (country of residence, Israel, another state, or a combination of those) do they consider “theirs most of all?” Second: of which country should a Jewish person be a patriot: the country of residence first and foremost, the country of residence and Israel, or should the interests of Israel prevail? Due to the circumstances, some people in our Ukraine and Russia sample (a total of 1,247) were asked not to choose one option, but to determine the degree of their agreement and disagreement with each of the statements. Despite some technical difficulties with processing, this pattern gave us a lot of material for additional comparisons. In this survey, 20% of respondents named Israel or both Israel and the country of residence as the “country closest to them.” Three-quarters of respondents in four European countries and 85% in Kazakhstan named their country of residence only. In the country breakdown, Jews of the Russian Federation and the Jewish communities of Belarus and Kazakhstan that are culturally and politically gravitating towards it were in the lead in identification with country of residence at the time of the study (81%, 82%, and 85% respectively). And identification with Israel or country of residence-and-Israel was more often seen among the Jews of

83

Civic Identity Patterns

countries that are more quickly than other post-Soviet non-EU member states embracing the European model of diversified civil loyalty. These include Ukraine and especially Moldova, which is almost completely integrated into the European labor market (25% and 56%) (Table 5.2). Table 5.2: Civil Identity of Extended Jewish Population in FSU Countries / Country of Residence. Which country do you consider to be yours, first and foremost?

FSU Europe

FSU Asia

Total Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus Kazakhstan %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Another

%

%

%

%

%

%

The country I live in now / another country and Israel

%

%

%

%

%

%

Hard to say

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











The country I live in now Another FSU state Israel

Total

Such sentiments were obviously somewhat more widespread among younger respondents, that is, generations born and/or raised after the collapse of the USSR – and, accordingly, people who are more open to new (mostly western) ideological trends. The “westernized” respondents of the older age cohorts (41–60 and 61+ years old) made up a somewhat smaller number (Table 5.3). These were for the most part people who faced the dilemma of emigration normal to all (post) Soviet Jews of the 1990s and who decided to stay, often reaching a prosperous (by local standards) economic situation in their country of residence. (Among the respondents that were interviewed during our 2019–2020 research, on average 51% described their economic situation as “generally satisfactory,” while 17% described it as “quite prosperous”).30

 It was people of this type, apparently, who made up the majority of the “war aliya” that arrived in Israel after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and were interviewed by the Ministry of Aliya and Integration. Almost 55% reported that before the war, they had no problems with economic expenses and could afford “some expensive things”, while 11.4% replied that they were able to afford almost “everything they needed” (MOIA-Tel Dor 2022).

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Chapter 5 The Civic Identity of Russian-Speaking Jews 30 Years After the USSR

Presumably, this is also why they demonstrated a more accentuated identification with country of residence than in the sample average. Similar data were obtained by the Levada Center survey of the Russian Jewish population. In assessing the degree of attachment to Russia, 61% of respondents defined it as “strong,” 23% felt a not very strong and significant connection with it, while 15% did not feel any connection or inner affinity with Russia at all. Researchers did not find any special factors (education, income, or city) that helped determine feeling of kinship with one’s country or with one’s “little homeland” (place of residence). The only exception was the age of respondents: just as in our survey, the older they were, the stronger their emotional connection with their host country– young Jewish people scored 3.1–3.2 points on average, while older Jewish people scored 4.2–4.3 points out of 5 (Levada 2018, 42). However, although respondents’ willingness to view the country of residence as “their own” was indeed directly proportional to their age, and their willingness to view Israel or their country of residence-and-Israel as primary was inversely proportional to the latter, no fundamental intergenerational disagreements on this issue were found in our study. Somewhat clearer were inter-generational differences in answering the question of the second component of civil identity, “Jewish patriotism.” As was the case with territorial-civil identification, the level of national patriotism towards the country of residence increased moderately in direct proportion to the age of respondents for the same reasons. Patriotism towards Israel increased in inverse proportion to the age of respondents, as did the share of those who found it hard to answer this question. However, a combined model of Jewish patriotism was declared by the relative or absolute majority of respondents in each age cohort (Table 5.3). Table 5.3: Civic Identity of Interviewed Representatives of FSU Extended Jewish Population / Age. Which country do you consider to be yours first and foremost?

Total

Age up to  – – +

Which country do you consider to be yours, first of all? % % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

N

,





The country I live in now Another FSU state Israel, or the country of residence and Israel Another Hard to say Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % 



Dilemmas of Patriotism and the “Dual Loyalty” Mythology

85

Table 5.3 (continued) Which country do you consider to be yours first and foremost?

Total

Age up to  – – +

What country should a Jew be a patriot of? % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

N







Above all, of the country they live in Of their country and of Israel Interests of Israel should be a priority Hard to say/other Total

% % % %

% % % %

% % 



There was no significant difference in answers to these questions in terms of gender, besides the fact that men were somewhat more likely to identify as patriots of Israel than women, and the latter found it difficult to answer this question more often.

Dilemmas of Patriotism and the “Dual Loyalty” Mythology In the sample general, 25% of the single-answer respondents believed at the end of the 21st century’s second decade that a Jew should be first and foremost a patriot of his or her country of residence, 50% believe that a Jew should be loyal to their country of residence and Israel, and 16% believe prioritized Israel. Approximately the same alignment seems to have persisted throughout the post-Soviet era. For example, in one of the very first measurements of the sentiments of the Jews of Ukraine carried out three years after the country gained independence, the proportion of supporters of such approaches was, respectively, 21%, 57%, and 11%. A quarter of a century later, this picture has changed insignificantly: the proportion of respondents surveyed in Ukraine in 2019, who believed that a Jew should be a patriot first and foremost of the state they reside in, of their country of residence and Israel, or only of Israel equaled 19%, 60%, and 9% respectively. However, the spread in positions on the question of the orientation of “Jewish patriotism” between respondents from different countries turned out to be quite significant (see Table 5.4. below). Extreme positions in this spectrum once again belonged to the Jewish communities of Moldova and Kazakhstan. In the Moldovan sample, due to the weak faith of citizens (and not only Jews) in the favorable political and economic prospects of their country, the share of supporters of local patriotism did not exceed 3%.

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In Kazakhstan, on the contrary, respondents’ support for the position that “a Jew should be first and foremost a patriot of the country he lives in” reached 54%, which was higher than among respondents in any other post-Soviet country and twice as high as the sample average in four European states of the former USSR. This, in a sense, confirms what Leonid Gurevich described and what affected mass local Jewish assimilation to the category of “Kazakhstani”, which has no analogy in any other post-Soviet states in terms of its content and breadth of perception (Gurevich and Kartashov 2020). This also fits the explanation of why the share of those interviewed in Kazakhstan who supported Israel’s rejection of its Jewish status in favor of formally declaring it a “state for all citizens” was more than 2.5 times higher than in the sample average in four FSU European states, 24% compared to 9%. On the other hand, the opinion that for a Jewish person, Israel’s interests should hold greater priority, was supported by more than twice the sample average of our respondents in Moldova (39%) and only by 5% in Kazakhstan. Finally, members of the extended Jewish population interviewed in two other key countries of the Eurasian Partnership – Belarus and Russia – took an intermediate position on this spectrum. Belarussian Jews turned out to be more comparable to culturally close Ashkenazi Jews of the geopolitically close Kazakhstan in their two opposite versions of Jewish patriotism. And Jewish respondents in Russia had the largest among the four states’ proportions of those who found it hard to answer this question, but even these constituted a minority. In all other respects, the distribution of answers of Russian Jews turned out to be closest to the sample average. Table 5.4: Models of National Patriotism in the Extended Jewish Population of FSU Countries / Country of Residence. Of what country should a Jew be a patriot?

FSU Europe Total

FSU Asia

Countries

Total

Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus Kazakhstan Above all, of the country they live in

%

%

%

%

%

%

Of their country and of Israel

%

%

%

%

%

%

Israel should be a priority

%

%

%

%

%

%

Hard to say / other

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%













Total

Dilemmas of Patriotism and the “Dual Loyalty” Mythology

87

And yet, according to Table 5.4, the main choice of respondents in all countries of the former USSR with the exception of Kazakhstan was the “combined patriotism” option (the country of residence and Israel at the same time). This was chosen by the relative majority of members of the extended Jewish population. In Ukraine, it was chosen by the absolute majority. This option seems to be the common denominator for expressing the “pairing” of national-civil patriotism in relation to the host country and the pro-Israeli component of ethnic and communal identity by the Jews of the former USSR 30 years after its collapse. With an integrated pattern of positions on this issue among members of the two largest Jewish communities of the former USSR – Russia and Ukraine – the differences between them look statistically significant. (In Russia, there were noticeably more supporters of both local and Israeli patriotism, while in Ukraine, Jews supported “combined patriotism” 1.5 times more often than in Russia). But if instead we assess the degree of agreement with each of the proposed statements, the interregional differences in Table 5.5 are largely leveled out. Even more significant is the fact that from 60% to 85% of respondents in Russia and from 55% to 75% in Ukraine were in full or partial solidarity with each of the three statements, and the option of both local and Israeli patriotism dominated in both cases. Table 5.5: Degree of Agreement of Jews and Members of Their Families in Russia and Ukraine with Variants of National-Civil Patriotism. To what degree do you agree or disagree, Fully agree Partially agree Fully disagree Total that Jews must be patriots of: Russia (N=) The country they live in Their country and Israel Israeli interests should be a priority

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

Ukraine (N=) The country they live in Their country and Israel Israeli interests should be a priority

The distribution of opinions on these topics in accordance with the homogeneity of Jewish or another origin, as well as the type of ethnic identity of respondents, is interesting in its own way. The share of supporters of one version of civil selfidentification in each of the subgroups, ranked by homogeneity of ethnic origin, differed very little from the sample average (Table 5.6). Only among persons of almost

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completely Jewish origin, the proportion of those who named Israel “their country,” or Israel and country of residence, was somewhat higher than in other subgroups (probably due to a wider representation of holders of Israeli citizenship in this subgroup). And the “half-Jewish” had slightly more supporters of “extreme” opinions on the issue of Jewish patriotism, i.e., those who believed that Jews should be patriots of the country of residence and those who believed that Israel’s interests should be placed above all else.31 Table 5.6: Ethnic Origin and Civil Patriotism in the Discourse of the Jews of the Former USSR. Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –





None

Which country do you consider to be yours, first and foremost? % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,









% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % –

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

N











The country I live in now Israel, or the country I live in now and Israel Another state/answer Hard to say Total

Of what country should a Jew be a patriot? Of the country they live in Both of their country and Israel Interests of Israel should be of a priority Hard to say/another opinion Another opinion Total

 We do not have an unambiguous explanation for this phenomenon. One of the most convincing hypotheses is that one proposed by Israeli ethnographer and expert on Russian Jewish literature Velvl Chernin, who after many years of observation concluded that the problem of choosing identification was most acutely experienced by persons who had only one Jewish parent. These people were not formally subjected to ethnic discrimination by the authorities in Soviet times, but at the same time they often felt uncomfortable in an anti-Semitic environment. And therefore, at some stage, they were forced to consciously decide whether they accepted their Jewishness or rejected it. And the symbol of this was “the presence or absence of their own Jewish country and involvement in it” (Author’s interview with Velvl Chernin, Jerusalem, 06/22/2022.) Apparently, a distant echo, with new content, of the same phenomenon occurs today.

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89

In general, according to these data, the homogeneity of ethnic origin is not a significant factor in answering the two questions of civil identity. In each of the subgroups, the relative or absolute majority of respondents chose the same answer option to these two questions. In the first case, this was identification with the country of residence (chosen by 70–76% in each subgroup). In the second case, the opinion at first glance differs significantly from an unambiguous position that a Jew must be both a patriot of Israel and of the country of residence, according to 44–54% in each subgroup (Table 5.7). Table 5.7: Models of National Patriotism of Jews and Members of Their Families in Russia and Ukraine / Country of Residence and Ethnic Origin. To what degree do you agree or disagree that Jews must be patriots of:

Total

Totally agree

N of Jewish Grandparents –





None

Russia The country they live in Their country and Israel Israeli interests should be a priority

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

Ukraine The country they live in Their country and Israel Israeli interests should be a priority

An explanation for this seeming contradiction lies in the fact that feelings of a particular country as “one’s own, first and foremost” and patriotism towards a particular country reflect two closely related but different (we’ll call them state-civil and national-civil) aspects of civil self-identification. The territorial-state aspect is more related to the self-awareness of an individual citizen with Jewish roots, in the first case. In the second case, the same citizen acts as a member of an ethnic nation, with all the symbols inherent to this group, the main or one of the main symbols being the Jewish state. If this is so, then, regardless of the homogeneity of Jewish or another origin, the choice of the country of residence when answering the first question, and Israel or the country of residence and Israel when answering the second question, looks quite natural in the current post-Soviet reality. Since a fairly close relationship between level of homogeneity of Jewish origin and ethnic identity is obvious and statistically proven, as is shown in our study, and since in many situations it manifests itself quite definitely, the same result was probably to be expected in this case. However, the difference between the cultural-

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identification groups of the Jewish population of the countries of the former USSR, and the subgroups ranked by the homogeneity of ethnic origin, was quite convex. The generalized results of our survey in five post-Soviet states showed a directly proportional relationship between the stability of Jewish ethnic identity and the choice of country of residence as the focus of state-civil identity, and an inversely proportional relationship when choosing Israel or country of residence together with Israel as such a focus. A similar direct and inverse relationship was seen when comparing Jewish, mixed, or non-Jewish ethnic identity with declarations of Israeli or local patriotism (Table 5.8). Table 5.8: Opinions on Civil Patriotism from Representatives of Cultural and Identification Categories of Jews of the Former USSR. Positions

Total

Ethnic Identity Sustainable Jewish

Mixed

Just Jewish

Both Rus / etc. and Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Non-Jewish A human being

Only Rus / Other

Which country do you consider to be yours, first and foremost? The country I live in now

%

%

%

%

%

%

Israel

%

%

%

%

%

%

The country I live in now and Israel

%

%

%

%

%

–

Other state or answer

%

%

%

%

%

%

hard to say

%

%

%

%

%

%

Of what country should a Jew be a patriot? The country they live in

%

%

%

%

%

%

Their country and of Israel

%

%

%

%

%

%

Interests of Israel should be a priority

%

%

%

%

%

%

Hard to say or other opinion

%

%

%

%

%

%

Total%%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,











Dilemmas of Patriotism and the “Dual Loyalty” Mythology

91

At first glance, we have a certain paradox here. It is removed if we are talking about non-mutually exclusive notions, where self-awareness rather than ethnic origin plays a decisive role, as is the case here. This phenomenon arose immediately after the collapse of the USSR and gave impetus not only to external but also to “internal emigration” of the Jews of this country from the supranational Soviet empire to the post-Soviet states of local titular nations. This went on for the subsequent 30 years. Its direction can be deducted from a comparison of opinions on Jewish national patriotism between respondents of different types of Jewish and other identities interviewed in our research in 2004–2005 and in 2019–2020. Based on the data presented in Table 5.9, the percentage of those who strongly agree with the statement that “a Jew should be a patriot of the country that he or she was born and lives in” among holders of the “universal” Jewish identity has doubled in the 15 years between the two polls. And, accordingly, over the same period, the share of those who fully agree with the idea that “interests of Israel for a Jew should be above all” has decreased 1.5 times. Meanwhile, the proportion of members of the “ethno-civic” subgroup and holders of a dual (Jewish-gentile) identity who fully agree with the first statement steadily grew to one-third and one-half of respondents over the same period of time, with a two-fold reduction in these cultural-identification categories among those who demonstrated dominant Israeli patriotism. On the other hand, the share of accentuated supporters of local state-civil patriotism among holders of a Table 5.9: Comparison of Opinions on Civil Patriotism among Culture-Identification Categories of FSU Jews, 2004–2005 and 2019. Culture-identification categories:

Totally agree that a Jew should be a patriot of: The country he or she was born and lives in

Interests of Israel for a Jew are above all

–

–





Feel Jewish

.%

%

.%

%

Feel like a Russian/Ukrainian Jew

.%

%

.%

%

Feel as Jew and as a member of another nation

.%

%

.%

%

Feel like a member of another national community

.%

%

.%

%

Total

.%

%

.%

%

N=

N=

N=

N=

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Chapter 5 The Civic Identity of Russian-Speaking Jews 30 Years After the USSR

non-Jewish ethnic identity decreased by a quarter since our previous study, but in 2019, about a tenth of this cultural-identification subgroup fully agreed that interests of Israel for a Jew should be above all, while for the previous 15 years none of them supported this point of view.

Intermediate Results and New Challenges At first glance, a “poly-loyal” model has been established in the countries of the former Soviet Union, similar to the model adopted in democratic countries of the West. Commenting on this situation back in 2004, then President of the Russian Jewish Congress, Eugene Satanovsky, noted the way Jews who had become part of the higher echelons of the Russian political establishment expressed the proIsrael component of their identity. According to him, the topic of “dual loyalty” of Jews is not a major issue in contemporary Russian Federation public discourse, while the structure of today’s organized Jewish community in Russia is very similar to what is found in America. Satanovsky concluded that the post-Soviet Russia’s approach to this phenomenon (at least in official circles) is close to that of the United States (quoted in Ben-Yakov 2019a). A similar idea was once expressed by the well-known Soviet dissident, now an authoritative Ukrainian thought leader and Vice Principal of the Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv), Myroslav Marynovich. Speaking at a conference on the 30th anniversary of the Ukrainian Jewish Vaad (the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine), he described the Jews of this country as a “solid ethnic community” loyal to both their homes: Ukraine and their “second home,” Israel. According to this prominent ideologist of the liberal current of Ukrainian nationalism, such double-loyalty is “absolutely legitimate” and puts Ukraine on par with all civilized democratic countries (Marinovich 2021). According to some FSU Jewish public figures, these changes widen the legitimate sphere of local Jewish communities’ advocacy in favor of the Jewish state. For example, according to the President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FJCR), Alexander Boroda, who commented on these forms of activity in the Jewish communities of Russia and Ukraine, “demonstration [of support of Jerusalem] in Kyiv is certainly wonderful, but I think what you need first of all is not rallies, but a change of Russia’s and Ukraine’s policy towards Israel. It is more essential, and we are working in this direction. It is no secret that the attitude of the Russian leadership towards the Jewish state is ambiguous. On the one hand, there is sympathy for a country that has more than a million Russian speakers, that fights terror, etc. On the other hand, Israel, being an ally of the United States, is perceived as a player on the other side [sic]. Therefore, we are striving in every

Intermediate Results and New Challenges

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possible way to help Russia and Israel draw closer, and we have already managed a lot on this path” (quoted in Lukhimson 2014). In the quoted interview, FJCR President, one of the most active leaders of the modern Jewish community in Russia, does not hide his sympathy for the State of Israel and is sure that it is quite acceptable to influence Russia’s policy in order to promote further closeness with Israel in every possible way. Moreover, he emphasizes the need to influence government leaders and calls for the tactics of active influence on such real-world power-brokers. He also called on Jewish organizations to adopt a strategy of active influence in the political sphere. A contrary opinion was expressed by a noted Russian Jewish public figure, former CEO of the Euroset retail company, Alexander Malis, who, as he admitted in one of his interviews, can hardly imagine such a situation. “One should understand how a Jewish person can behave in Israel and how he can behave in any other country. We should have special attitude to the country [of residence], according to Talmud – “full and unquestionable loyalty!” I can publicly express my opinions in Israel, but not in Russia. Because I have none! I should have no political opinion in Russia. It’s not a matter of keeping it to myself, it is a matter of not having one at all . . . Because in Russia, a Jew must be loyal to the powers that be. If you don’t like it – just take the next flight out. Thanks to the Almighty, nowadays this is possible. Israel is the only state whose internal politics a Jew is allowed to influence” (quoted in Gor 2016). Finally, many prominent Jewish FSU leaders agree with the opinion of the Russian Jewish Congress President, Yury Kanner, who suggests separating “Jewish” and “nationwide” spheres of public activities. According to supporters of this idea, doing so would almost totally remove the question of “dual identity” from discussion. As Kanner noted, concerning the participation of Jews in Russian politics, “Our people are found on both sides of political barricades. For example, Iosif Kobzon and Vladimir Resin, members of the Board of Trustees of the RJC, are part of the “One Russia” [pro-Presidential party]. There are also many Jewish names among the opposition. And so it has always been. When rabbis warn that Jews should not rock the boat but rather be grateful to the authorities, the question arises: who are they talking to? Yes, the authorities will hear them. But if they appeal to the opposition, they are not going to find Jewish public figures there. These people are deeply integrated into the Russian political system and consider themselves Russian. They are more interested in Russian problems than Jewish. They absolutely do not care about the position of current or future government policies towards synagogues and Jewish communities . . . For them, this problem is far removed. The same was happening in the past.

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“As far as the RJC is concerned, it keeps its distance from national politics. Any political activity of Jews is and should be their personal initiative, in their capacity as public and political figures of their host country, separate from any ‘Jewish’ considerations” (Briman 2012). The President of the Russian Jewish Congress emphasizes that in the modern world, there is no dual loyalty and all Jewish activity carried out by them they had undertaken as public and political figures of their countries of residence, based on “non-Jewish” considerations. It appears that this new reality is understood and, in general terms, accepted, by most post-Communist authorities and public leaders. This was our conclusion at the end of our case study in 2020. Shall we re-consider whether the invasion of the Russian army (with the support of Belarus) into Ukraine in late February 2022 and the beginning of the largest military conflict in the post-Soviet space and Europe since the end of World War II can overturn this already seemingly well-established pattern? During a poll of Jewish thought leaders, initiated by the Genesis Philanthropy Group and carried out under this author’s direction in 2015, only two of the most serious possible challenges to the existing cultural and mental unity of the “Russian-speaking Jewish world” were named. These were the breakup of physical and virtual communications and the rapid weakening of collective solidarity in conflicts where Russian-speaking Jews might find themselves on the opposite sides. As former President of the Russian Jewish Congress, Eugene Satanovsky put it: “The main thing is to prevent the possibility when, for instance, because of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the situation goes back to what happened in World War I, when Jews fought against each other in different armies” (GPG 2015, 34). But what once used to look very unlikely, now seems to be taking place in front of our own eyes. Leaders of all the warring sides (in whose territories, let us remember, reside almost 90% of the Jews of the former USSR and members of their families) have obviously demanded unambiguous support for their country in this confrontation in one form or another not only from Jews as citizens, but also, and perhaps most of all, from the organized Jewry (see, for instance Detaly 2022b). They are also making considerable efforts to enlist active or at least declarative support from Israel in general, and its Russian-speaking Jewish community, in particular. All this has already led to considerable disagreements between national and regional Jewish federations of post-Soviet countries in transcontinental umbrella Jewish organizations. This requires us to weigh the correctness of the conclusion that the political discourse among Jewish elites in the Ukraine, Russia, and Jewish Russian-speaking diasporas was such that even after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in 2014, the elites’ common ethnocultural Jewish identity would easily

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coexist with distinct political affiliations (Bagno-Moldavski 2017). The Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt, expressed the essence of this new dilemma: Until February 24th, you could keep your head down and away from politics. After the war began, the government made it clear that whoever does not come out clearly in favor would have to go. Without going into details, I received this message very clearly . . . The tradition has always been to do what the poritz or Caesar says, but today, things are different . . . Eighty years after the Holocaust, we Jews are good at accusing Germans and Poles of not speaking out when they could have . . . So, we can’t keep quiet (quoted in Guttentag 2022).

At the moment, Jewish leaders of the countries that are directly involved in the military clash in and over Ukraine demonstrate three political behavioral models. An overwhelming majority of Jewish federations and religious communities in Ukraine (as well as the majority of Ukrainian Jews in general) almost totally mobilized themselves in favor of their country of residence and its authorities. Chief Rabbi of Ukraine (according to Chabad) and the head of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Jewish Hasidic Religious Communities, Moshe Reuven Asman, became a prominent symbol of this position. Since the moment the war broke out, he became a leading of Ukrainian public diplomacy and an organizer of the volunteer movement in support of the Ukrainian army and civilian refugees, both Jewish and non-Jewish (see, for instance, Savitsky 2022). A similar role was played by CoChairman of the Ukrainian Jewish Vaad Jozef Zissels (Zissels 2022; Sales 2022). In Russia, such phenomena are less pronounced. Among very rare examples was Rabbi Shlomo Zlotsky, who in fact was the only representative of the Moscow Jewish community that openly supported Russian military invasion in an interview with the Russian media (see, for example, 360 TV 2022). Russian Federal authorities in their turn saw him as the ideal replacement for Pinchas Goldschmid, who had resigned, and they put significant pressure on the community to agree with this appointment (Detaly 2022b). Those who followed the example of Rabbi Goldschmid, who in a series of interviews explicitly condemned the Russian invasion, called Jews de facto to emigrate from Russia, and launched active efforts as the President of the Council of European Rabbis aimed at helping refugees from Ukraine into European countries (NPR 2022; Roth 2022), were very few. (Among these few were, for example, the Rabbi of Voronezh, Avigdor Nosikov, who resigned from his position after the beginning of the war and who has apparently left for Israel, as well as Russian Jewish Congress’ President Yuri Kanner and RJC CEO Anna Bokshitskaya, who also left Moscow for Israel shortly after Russia’s army attacked Ukraine, however, without making any political statements). More often Russian Jewish leaders, regardless of their opinion on the war, preferred, in line with the above-mentioned

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Alexander Millis’ doctrine, to keep distance from the public debate and not to make political statements. This was the example of Chief Rabbi of Russia (according to Chabad) and Chairman of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FJCR) Berel Lazar, who announced that “our role is not to involve ourselves in domestic or [international] geopolitics”. He was supported by 75 FJCR-affiliated leading Russian Chabad rabbis, who at an emergency conference of their organization in Moscow on September 5, 2022, expressed commitment “not to abandon their communities and continue to provide spiritual, psychological, and emotional support,” while indirectly criticizing former chief Rabbi Goldschmidt for leaving Russia and criticizing it internationally (Klein 2022). Although things have not yet come to a direct confrontation among the Russian-speaking Jewish elites and their followers, and, at the time of this writing, there has been no indication that this would happen in the near future, the question remains of how these processes will affect the collective identity of the transnational “Russian-speaking Jewish” diaspora and members of local ethno-civic groups of the Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnos. We will try to give a very first approximation of an answer to this question in the epilogue to this volume.

Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition The process of the “ethnic nationalization” of Eastern European Jewish identity started at the end of the 19th century and ended in the days of the USSR, whose communist authorities actively attacked all religious cults and kept the activities of religious institutions under strict control. Instead of religion, the society was offered a so-called “civil religion” in the form of communist ideology, “new Soviet identity,” and “socialist internationalism” (albeit in parallel with the development of “Soviet socialist nations”). Almost to a greater extent than other religious cults, this was true of Judaism, which the authorities considered “a stronghold of Jewish bourgeois nationalism.” This caused synagogues and other Jewish religious and cultural institutions periodically to become the targets of repressive campaigns.

Religious Patterns This process, however, resulted in a clear contradiction to the traditional understanding of the situation. According to the latter, the observance or non-observance of Jewish religious traditions, a departure from religion as such, and/or adherence to other cults is the most important external indicator of ethnocultural continuity, acculturation, or assimilation (Charmé 2000; Ibry 1999; Liebman 1973; Sarna 1991). Almost complete suppression of “institutionalized Judaism,” among other external manifestations of traditional Jewish identification, did not mean the elimination of the Jewish identity of FSU Jews, but the formation of a unique type of it, whose transformation and contemporary models were presented in previous chapters. Our 2019–2020 study showed that even today, the role of Judaism in the ethnic identification complex of post-Soviet Jews and members of their families remains limited. Differences in the stability of Jewish identity between the categories of “confidently religious,” “confidently non-religious,” and those who doubt their religiosity, are noticeable, sometimes statistically significant, but not so much as to add level of religiosity to the main factors shaping respondents’ Jewish or other ethnic consciousness (Table 6.1). An opposite process is most likely taking place here: the stability of a Jewish or other identity in an atmosphere of post-Soviet ideology and values search prompted many Jews and their family members to fill this niche, sometimes via https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-006

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Table 6.1: Stability of Jewish Feeling according to Religious Identity of Respondents. Do you feel Jewish?

Total

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

Yes, thoroughly Depends on the situation Not at all Never thought about it No answer Total

No

Do not know

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

,



.



religious practice. This is especially so since we cannot speak of the complete disappearance of the Jewish religion from the sociocultural landscape of Soviet Jewry. According to a number of opinions, even during the years of the communist regime, Judaism was a positive ethnic symbol of Soviet Jewry, but de-actualized in everyday life and almost divorced from the roots of its religious and cultural tradition. According to researchers, it was an element of the cultural background with the nature not so much of a public as of a family tradition. It did not imply an obligatory fulfillment of specific commandments or rituals (Gitelman et al 1994). Jewish intelligentsia shared the position popular in large cosmopolitan urban centers: while showing respect to religious people, they did not join any religious teachings, keeping such a person, as Chlenov assesses this phenomenon, “a materialistic atheist” (Chlenov 2001, 44–47, 53–56). In other words, religion as a value is, in principle, present in the worldview of Russian-speaking Jews. But in light of the above circumstances, it manifests itself as an auxiliary or “background” component of their ethnic identity. Our surveys of the Jewish population of Eastern Ukraine in 1991, 1992, 1993, and 1994 revealed an almost similar assessment of the cultural and religious motives that prompted Jewish people to leave. This allows us to conclude that our respondents did not separate these symbols from each other within the framework of the system of national and ethnic values. It is also indicative that the proportion of respondents who in 1994 indicated the religious factor as an important motive for Jewish emigration was three times higher than the number of respondents who considered themselves religious people (35% and 12%, respectively) (Khanin 1998). We may add that within the secular ethnic awareness framework, Jewish and another (Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, etc.) identity were perceived as mutually exclusive. However, the “Judaism-vs-Christianity” (or other religions) opposition was not as clear. Although residual elements of Jewish tradition exist among

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the majority of the fully secularized and those assimilated into Russian (or, to a lesser extent, any other) culture, Soviet Jewish families had formed a negative attitude toward Jewish converts; yet neither Jewish nor non-Jewish public opinion would exclude them from Jewish entities. Christianity, considered an oppositional ideology, sometimes became “the first available option” for a number of Jewish intellectuals critical of the communist regime and its ideology who were in “search of spirituality and roots.” For their individual representatives, especially for Jewish young people living in major cultural and industrial centers, according to some researchers, Christian texts became the source of their first acquaintance with the Jewish tradition (among extensive literature on this topic, see for example Kornblatt 2004; Ruzer 2009). In late Soviet and post-Soviet times, this picture became much more complicated for several reasons. First of all, it was the revival of dozens of informal Jewish religious organizations of various directions (from Chabad and Misnagedim to religious Zionists) in the wake of the national upsurge caused by Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. Secondly, it was the borrowing of models of Jewish religious identity that were not previously typical of local society at the end of the Soviet and post-Soviet era. Furthermore, hundreds of thousands of people of mixed and non-Jewish origin started to join organized Jewish or semi-Jewish communal work en masse (including repatriation to Israel), even when no one demanded the renunciation of their former national, cultural, or religious identification. And finally, it was the spread of postmodernist views that legitimized multiple ethnocultural and religious identities in post-Soviet society. Due to these trends, today religion is a considerable (and, according to some observations, even increasing) component of Russian-speaking Jewish identity. However, religion is still of only marginal significance in its influence on the ethno-national component (Nosenko-Stein 2013; 2014c; Khanin 1998). Moreover, even with the maximum openness to people of non-Jewish origin, offered, for example, by Reform Judaism, the ethnic factor remains a fundamental element of identity. In fact, according to Maria Shishigina, who studied the community of progressive Judaism, its Russian-speaking Jewish version is even greater than in other countries of the world (Shishigina 2019). All of this is not even to mention the fact that the very moderate “Jewish religious revival” in the post-Soviet space often means, according to some researchers, not so much a return to the pre-Soviet way of life and family traditions as a new personal choice. Those who embody the latter do not always follow religious commandments in their traditional Orthodox (or other) form, but rather a “religious commitment” in the broadest sense of the word (Sapritskaya 2015; NosenkoStein 2020, 55–59).

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This trend, after a noticeable revival of interest in Judaism and religion in general during the Perestroika years, later continued as a relatively moderate phenomenon. This conclusion is true both for the ethnic core and for the periphery of the “extended post-Soviet Jewish population” in the diaspora and in Israel (Khanin 2015). Only 23% of our 2004–2005 study respondents in Russia and Ukraine said they are religious, 46.5% answered this question in the negative, and just over 30% were undecided. Fifteen years later, the situation is practically the same: 27% declared themselves religious, 48% “secular,” and a quarter felt unable to answer the question (Table 6.2). Accordingly, only about a quarter of participants in the survey 18 years ago felt that being Jewish meant “to observe religious commandments and attend the synagogue” and placed this factor 10th out of 14 positions on the scale of priorities. This is very close to the data of other researchers (Osovtsov and Yakovenko 2011, 44–46; Ryvkina 2005; Gitelman 2003). In our 2019–2020 survey, this parameter moved from the tenth to the seventh place, but the percentage of those for whom keeping religious commandments was one of the main criteria of being Jewish was significantly lower than a decade and a half ago (16% and 27% respectively). This is consistent with the lack of noticeable age differences among respondents on this issue. And such a difference should have been seen had the (neo)traditional or borrowed religious models noted above (believed to be assimilated differently by different generations of post-Soviet Jews and their families) become part of the mainstream ethnic consciousness This is why a hypothesis that seemed fair ten to fifteen years ago (or perhaps it described the situation then – the revival of “dormant” Jewish traditions among part of the older generation and the result of the “missionary activity” of foreign Jewish religious organizations among young and middle-aged people, [Khanin et al 2013, 64–65]) did not find unequivocal confirmation in our current study. Table 6.2: Religious Identity of Different Age Groups. Do you consider yourself religious?

Yes No Hard to say Total

Number of Jewish grandparents Total

Up to 

–

–

+

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









101

Religion: Faith or Culture

Religion: Faith or Culture However, both in the previous and in the current study, we were interested not so much in the level of religiosity of the organized Jewish community as in its identification with Judaism or another religion as an indicator of the religious dynamics of that “symbolic ethnicity,” i.e., preservation, transformation, and loss of ethnic identity. For this reason, the question was formulated in a somewhat different way: what religion (regardless of level of personal religiosity) do respondents consider theirs? In 2004–2005, about 60% named Judaism; in 2019, the same answer was given by 43% of respondents. That does not necessarily signify the shift from Judaism to another system of religious and cultural values: the share of those who identified with Christianity (or another religion) or simultaneously with Judaism and Christianity changed little – such respondents made up, respectively, over a quarter and just under a third of those polled. Growth was noticeable in the category of consistent atheists: in 2004–2005, they made up 14.5%, and fifteen years later, 22%, which, let us stress, makes just a third and a half of our “non-religious” respondents (Table 6.3). Also note that the comprehensive study of 2019–2020 enabled us to examine these trends in regional context as well. And so, in areas of Russia’s dominant cultural influence (in Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan), the proportion of those who named Judaism their religion (from one third to 40%) was lower than the sample average, while in Ukraine, it was 1.5 times higher and in Moldova more than twice as high as in Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Most of those identifying as “Christians” were again found in Russia and Kazakhstan, consistent atheists in Russia and Belarus, while Jews of Ukraine and Moldova along with their family members more often chose the “both Judaism and Christianity” option. Table 6.3: Comparison of Identification with FSU Respondents’ Religious and Cultural Traditions. Russia & Ukraine Total – Judaism Christianity Both the same way Another (Islam, Buddhism, etc.) None No answer

FSU European regions, 

FSU Asia

Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus Kazakhstan 

.% .% .% .%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % –

% % % %

% % % %

.% –

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

%

,









Total 



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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

A difference in cultural and value motives, rather than just demarcation between “Russian Christians” and “Jewish followers of Judaism,” is seen in the absence of a noticeable correlation between ethnic origin and level of religiosity (except that the percentage of the non-religious is slightly higher in the “quarterJewish” group, where the proportion of youth under 25 is 1.5 times higher than in the sample average). However, talking not so much about faith or religiosity but about identification with a system of religious and cultural values dictated by origin, upbringing, communication environment, and personal and family experience, the factor of ethnic origin was manifested quite clearly (Table 6.4). Table 6.4: Religious Identity and Identification with Religious and Cultural Tradition / Ethnic Origin. Number of Jewish Grandparents Total

–





None

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes No Hard to say Total

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









Which religion do you feel is “yours”? Judaism Christianity Both the same way Another None No answer Total

The common ground for both was a significant differences between culture identification groups (Table 6.5). With a difference in percentages, the participants in our 2004–2005 and 2019 surveys demonstrated similar interdependencies between type of ethnic identity and religious choice. In both cases, more than 80% of Jewish universalists and more than half of “ethno-civic” Jews considered Judaism their religion. In the next three groups, the number of supporters of this choice declined in proportion to the decrease in the weight of Jewish identification of their members (respectively, a quarter, 15%, and 3% of respondents).

103

Religion: Faith or Culture

The percentage of those who considered Christianity or Judaism and Christianity together “their religion” was small (about 8% and 6%, respectively) among carriers of stable Jewish identity, about one third in the “ethno-civic” subgroup in 2004–2005, and about a quarter in 2019. Over the fifteen passed years, the percentage of “Christians” in this subgroup has slightly grown, but the share of supporters of mixed religious-cultural identities has almost halved. Apparently, for the “ethno-civic” Jews who have been acculturated and integrated into the local society, the choice between Jewish and [Russian or Christian] Orthodox civilizations every year becomes more and more symbolic rather than substantial. But the proportion of those who see both Judaism and Christianity as “their religion” (and their cultures) among those who described themselves as “Jews and representatives of another ethnicity” was expectedly greater than in other categories in 2019 and in previous years. This proportion was 1.5 times more than among “ethno-civic” Jews and “citizens of the world” and, correspondingly, four to six times more than on the extreme ends of the identification scale – “universalist” Jews and ethnic non-Jews. We may especially recall that representatives of the second and third generations of mixed marriages, who made up respectively over 30% and over 40% of our youth sample, dominate the category of carriers of dual Jewish-Gentile ethnic identity. (Apparently, it remains the same in the general population that meets the Law of Return criteria.) For comparison, we present data collected by Alek Epstein during a survey of participants in nine Jewish summer camps (children and adolescents aged 12–16 and young adults aged 17–18) organized by the Jewish Agency and the Genesis Foundation in the CIS countries in 2011–2012. Two-thirds of respondents brought up in families with both Jewish and “Christian” traditions were carriers of Jewish and Russian, Ukrainian, or other non-Jewish identity. In fact, carriers of such mixed ethnic identities made up about half of all respondents in the whole sample. Table 6.5: Comparison of Religious, Cultural, and Culture-Identifying Belonging of Participants in 2004–2005 and 2019 Surveys. Which religion do you feel is “yours”?

Total

Ethnic Identity Sustainable Jewish Just Jewish

Mixed

Non-Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / Ukr and Jewish

. . .%

. . .

Only Rus / Other

Research in Russia & Ukraine, – Judaism Christianity Both the same way

.% .% .%

. . .

. . .

A human being

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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

Table 6.5 (continued) Which religion do you feel is “yours”?

Another None Total

Total

Ethnic Identity Sustainable Jewish

Mixed

Non-Jewish

Just Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / Ukr and Jewish

Only Rus / Other

.% .%

. .

 .

 .

– .











A human being

Research in four European FSU States,  Judaism Christianity Both the same way Another None Pantheist Pagan No answer Total

% % % % % % % %

% % % – % % – %

% % % % % % – %

% % % % % % % %

% % % % % – – %

% % % % % – % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

Finally, as follows from Table 6.5, a group of “non-Jews,” some of whom are involved in the activities of Jewish communities, unequivocally demonstrated an absence of any dilemma in choosing between national and cultural loyalty. For them, it is exclusively a matter of faith, which in 2004–2005 divided these respondents equally between followers of Christianity and atheists. Fifteen years later, this situation is characteristic of “cosmopolites,” while in the category of “ethnic non-Jews” this ratio comprised 62% to 26%. In other categories in both surveys, the share of “Christians” and “atheists” was inversely proportional to the level of stability of Jewish identity. It is logical to assume that it was the religious Jews who made sure that “universalist Jews” got the largest share of confidently religious respondents out of all the cultural-identification groups we identified (Table 6.6.). They were 1.5 times higher than the sample average, twice the number of ethno-civic Jews, three times more than carriers of both Jewish and non-Jewish ethnic identity and “cosmopolitans.” They also made up 1.5 times more than members of the non-Jewish ethnic cultural-identification category, of which two thirds named Christianity “their” religion. But the reverse is also true: the relative majority of religious respondents were “universalist Jews.” Among those who were not sure of their religiosity, the relative

Religion: Faith or Culture

105

Table 6.6: Religiosity Level of Culture-Identification Group Member, 2019. Whether religious?

Total

Yes Not sure No

% % % % ,

Identity Just Jewish

Rus / Ukr / other Jew

Both Rus / Ukr and Jewish

A human being

Only Rus / Other

Other

% % % % 

% % % % 

% % % % 

% % % % 

% % % % 

% % % % 

Table 6.7: Religiosity and Ethnic Cultural Identity, 2019. Which ethnicity do you consider yourself belonging to first of all? Just Jewish A Russian Jew A Ukrainian, Belarus, etc. Jew Both Russian / Ukrainian and Jewish Only ethnic Russian / Ukr / Russian / Ukr / other A human being, regardless of nationality or ethnicity Hard to say / other / did not answer Total

Total

Are you a religious person? Yes

not sure

no

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

,







majority were “ethno-civic” Jews. Finally, among non-religious respondents, “cosmopolitans” and persons of mixed Jewish-gentile identity stood out (Table 6.7). This once again confirms the conclusion made at the beginning of this chapter: we are talking about two counter and somewhat intertwined processes of structuring the ethnocultural model of post-Soviet Jewish identity, but the ethnic component in it is apparently still primary in relation to the religious component. To sum up all that has been said, the level of religiosity can be compared to the cultural-religious affiliation of respondents (Table 6.8). Two-thirds of religious respondents named Judaism their religion and a quarter named Christianity (another 1% chose “another religion”). Among those who found it difficult to determine their attitude to religion, the share of “Jews” and “Christians” was 1.5 (44%) and two (12%) times smaller. But in the same category, the relative majority (24% compared to 10% among religious and 12% among secular respondents) named both religions as theirs. Among the non-religious, almost a third named Judaism

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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

Table 6.8: Religiosity and Religious-Cultural Choice. Which religion do you feel is “yours”?

Do you consider yourself religious? Total (%) Yes (%) Hard to say (%) No (%)

Judaism Christianity Both the same way None Another No Answer Total

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % – %

% % % % % %

%

%

%

%

as their religion, 14% named Christianity, but the largest in this category was the share of “consistent atheists” (38%). We believe we can conclude that for religious respondents, the choice of “their” religion is identical to the choice of religious belief; for the secular, it is a marker of cultural and symbolic value, and for those who find it difficult to answer this question, it is a symbiosis of both. The structure of opinions on this matter was approximately the same in two other large communities of Russian-speaking Jews. Ira Sheskin and Daniel Altman analyzed the database collected during the 2020 Pew Center study of American Jews. They found that almost half (49%) of Russian-speaking Jewish emigrants to the United States understand “Jewishness” primarily as ethnic-national cultural heritage, 58% as ethnic origin, and only 21% mentioned religion (among nonRussian-speaking Jews in the United States, this ratio was 62%, 58%, and 42% respectively; Sheskin and Altman 2022). Russian-speaking Israelis polled by the Pew Center from October 2014 to May 2015 turned out to be even more radical. Only 5% viewed “Jewishness” as a matter of religion, 78% considered it to be a matter of origin and culture, and 16% viewed it as both (compared to 23%, 54%, and 23% respectively among non-Russian-speaking non-ultra-religious Israelis [Pew 2016, 77]).

Religious and Communal Function of a Synagogue How does this religious-cultural identity manifest itself practically? It is generally accepted that the standard criterion for such a manifestation is the observance of religious precepts and participation in religious and cultural ceremonies, including the frequency of attending the synagogue and related events. The proportion of more or less regular synagogue-attending respondents (i.e., regularly or on Shabbat) was small – 15% (Table 6.9). (This is one of the few questions, the answers to

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Religious and Communal Function of a Synagogue

which showed a noticeable gender difference: the share of men among regular attendees is much higher than that of women – 11% vs. 7% Table 6.10.) In any case, the percentage of active synagogue attendees is four times lower than the percentage of those who declared their “certain” Jewish identification, and this once again confirms that the core of post-Soviet Jewish identity lies in sociocultural factors other than religion or behavior. Approximately the same proportion of respondents attend the synagogue on Jewish holidays, more than a quarter attend “from time to time” (i.e., several times a year, with or without relation to specific holiday services), and more than 40% do not attend it at all or (erroneously) claim that there is no synagogue in their city. It is not surprising that among respondents who describe themselves as religious, the frequency of regular synagogue attendance is 2.5 times higher than the sample average and the frequency of Shabbat attendance is twice as high. The percentage of those who do not attend the synagogue or minyans (less formal religious congregations) at all (21%) was comparable to the share of religious respondents who named their religion as Christianity rather than Judaism (23%). And another interesting thing: there were significantly more “religious” respondents who participated in Jewish prayers and ceremonies (75%) with varying frequency than those who named Judaism their religion (64%). This, apparently, means that respondents who declared their dual, Jewish and Christian, religious and cultural identity still visit the synagogue sometimes. No less interesting is that there were 65% of synagogue attendees among those who found it difficult to answer the question of their religion (12% of them attended the synagogue relatively regularly and 17% on holidays). And finally, almost a third of confidently non-religious respondents take part in religious synagogue events from time to time. Table 6.9: Correlation between Respondents’ Level of Religiosity and Synagogue Attendance. How often do you attend the synagogue?

Total

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

Regularly On Saturdays On holidays From time to time Do not attend No synagogue in our city No answer Total

No

Hard to say

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

,







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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

The conclusion we made fifteen years ago remains relevant today: public religious worship, including synagogue attendance, is first of all a communal socializing factor rather than a religious criterion. In this context, “family” format is important: the share of people with no Jewish roots, for the most part spouses of Jews, who regularly attend the synagogue (17%), is lower than the share of respondents of full Jewish origin (21%), but 1.5 times higher than the “half-Jewish” (10%) and 2.5 times higher than the “quarter-Jews” (7%). And none of the age cohorts had the share of those attending such events to some extent below around 60% (with the exception of persons aged 41–60 years – about half of such cases). Table 6.10: Synagogue Attendance according to Gender and Age. How often do you attend a synagogue?

Total

Gender Male

Regularly On Saturdays On holidays From time to time Do not attend No synagogue in our city No answer Total

Fem

Age –

–

–

+

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % –

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













It is indicative that Sam Kliger came to a similar conclusion while studying one of the largest communities of Jewish immigrants from the former USSR to the United States, those who settled in the city of Philadelphia two decades ago. He said, “Diligent attending religious service far outweighs the importance of religion in the attendees’ lives . . . People attend synagogue regardless of how important a role religion plays in their lives . . . Those for whom religion is important go to synagogue to fulfill their religious obligations for communal prayer, and those for whom religion is not important attend for social and cultural reasons.” In fact, according to his own data, even fifteen years later, the situation has not changed much (Kliger 2014, 84–87).

Holidays, Rituals and Memorial Days of the Jewish Calendar Judging by the data we collected in 2004–2005 and 2019–2020, something similar can be said about the place that Jewish holidays, memorial days, and customs of

Holidays, Rituals and Memorial Days of the Jewish Calendar

109

Jewish religious and cultural life occupy in the public consciousness and behavior of Jews of the post-Soviet countries and their families. 70% of respondents celebrate them always or often; the same percentage buys Passover matzah (one of the few elements of tradition that was preserved in many Jewish families in Soviet times), 54% of the polled always or occasionally participate in the ceremony of lighting Hanukkah candles, and 52% take part in the Passover Seder. Meanwhile, 37% always or sometimes build or visit tabernacles (sukkahs) on Sukkot, 42% light Shabbat candles, 38% fully or partially observe Shabbat, 35% fast on Yom Kippur, and 29% observe kashrut. In other words, respondents are much more active in public ceremonies than in observing Jewish traditions personally (Table 6.11). Table 6.11: Participation in Religious Ceremonies and Observance of Jewish Holidays and Memorial Days. Jewish ceremonies

Celebrate Jewish holidays

Completely / always Partially / sometimes Never Hard to say Jewish ceremonies

Completely / always Partially / sometimes Never Hard to say Total

Fast in Yom Kippur

Matza for Passover

Light Shabbat candles

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Keep Shabbat

Keep Kosher

light Chanukah candles

Participate in Passover Seder

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%



%

This is a transnational phenomenon, and consequently it shows the stability of this aspect of Jewish culture in the identity of the Russian-speaking Jewish subethnos (Table 6.12). Table 6.12: Jewish Religious Ceremonies and Holidays in the Lives of FSU Jews and Russian-Speaking Repatriates in Israel. To what degree do you observe the following customs and ceremonies? Celebrate Jewish holidays

Definitely, always Occasionally Never

Russian-speaking Jewish community FSU

“Russian” Jews in Israel

% % %

% % %

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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

Table 6.12 (continued) To what degree do you observe the following customs and ceremonies?

Russian-speaking Jewish community FSU

“Russian” Jews in Israel

Buy matzah for Pesach

Definitely, always Occasionally Never

% % %

% % %

Light Hanukkah candles

Definitely, always Partially, occasionally Never

% % %

% % %

Participate in Passover Seder

Definitely, always Occasionally Never

% % %

% % %

Let me try to illustrate this observation by analyzing the participation of various ethno-demographic and cultural-identification categories of respondents in Jewish calendar events, including such strictly personal phenomena as fasting on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement). Our study shows that participation in Jewish holidays (which is an important, and sometimes almost the only area of activities of numerous Jewish organizations in the CIS, and which usually takes place in community centers and other public places), just like fifteen years ago, remains attractive enough to local Jews and their families. The share of those who do it on a regular basis or from time to time was 23% and 47% of respondents, respectively (Table 6.13). Table 6.13: Celebration of Public and Private Jewish Ceremonies – Comparison of the 2004–2005 and 2019 Surveys. Degree of practicing Jewish customs

Celebrate Jewish holidays –



Fully / always Partly / occasionally Never Hard to say

.% .% .%

% % % %

Total

%

%

Fast on Yom Kippur – .% .% %

 % % % % %

It is especially popular among young people under 25 and among older people. These two categories are much more active than middle-aged people in community activities in general. There was also a direct relationship between ethnic origin and patterns of ethnic and cultural affiliation of respondents and their participation in

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Holidays, Rituals and Memorial Days of the Jewish Calendar

Jewish holidays. Here, the category of ethnic non-Jews was especially distinguished. Three-quarters of them (which is three times the sample average) said they never participate in such events (Table 6.14). Table 6.14: Participation in Public and Private Jewish Ceremonies Depending on Age and Ethnic Origin. Degree of practicing Jewish Total customs

Number of Jewish grandparents

Age – – – +

–





None

Celebrate Jewish holidays Fully / always Partly / occasionally Never Hard to say Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

% % % % % % % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% %

%

%

%

%

Fast on Yom Kippur Fully / always Partly / occasionally Never Hard to say Total

% % % %

Quite predictably, the proportion of religious respondents who always celebrate Jewish holidays was double of the sample average (41% and 23%). But if one adds respondents participating in ceremonies from time to time (which clearly has value for them), then the activity of members of the other two categories – the secular and those who found it difficult to define their level of religiosity – was quite high (respectively 61% and 75%, in comparison with 88% of the “religious”). However, demarcation becomes clearer when it comes to non-public observance of religious commandments, such as fasting on Yom Kippur: 60% of the religious observe it regularly or periodically (approximately the same number of respondents in this subcategory mention Judaism as their religion), along with only 19% of the secular and 35% of those who are unsure of their religious feelings (Table 6.15). No less obvious is the place of religious traditions in different cultureidentification categories (Table 6.16). The share of those who fast (always or occasionally) on Yom Kippur among respondents who feel “just Jewish” is very high – over 62% in 2004–2005 and 60% in the 2019–2020 studies. And neither the former nor the latter had any “non-Jews” who would fast on Yom Kippur – this

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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

Table 6.15: Participation in Public and Private Jewish Ceremonies / Religiosity. Degree of practicing Jewish customs

Total

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

No

DK

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

,







Celebrate Jewish holidays Fully / always Partly / occasionally Never Hard to say Total Fast on Yom Kippur Fully / always Partly / occasionally Never Hard to say Total

absence of the Jewish religious component in their “community identification” is quite stable. The rest of the categories lagged behind the “Jewish universalists” on this issue both in the 2004–2005 study and fifteen years later, but in 2019 this gap was significantly smaller. Our last study on Yom Kippur showed that about a quarter of “ethno-social Jews” and about a fifth of the carriers of dual identity fasted; in 2019, these groups were already 1.5 times larger, respectively 26% and 40%. In 2019, such people could be found even in the “cosmopolitan” segment, and not so few of them – a whole 14%, while another 10% found it difficult to answer the question of whether they ever observed, and to what degree, the customs and requirements of Yom Kippur. Table 6.16: Participating in Public and Private Jewish Ceremonies / Culture-Identification Belonging. Degree of practicing Jewish customs

Ethnic Identity Total

Just Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / other and Jewish

Only Rus / Other

A human being

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

Celebrate Jewish holidays Fully / always Partly / occasionally

% %

Holidays, Rituals and Memorial Days of the Jewish Calendar

113

Table 6.16 (continued) Degree of practicing Jewish customs

Never Hard to say Total

Ethnic Identity Total

Just Jewish

Rus / other Jew

Both Rus / other and Jewish

Only Rus / Other

A human being

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

– – % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

Fast on Yom Kippur Fully / always Partly / occasionally Never Hard to say Total

Both times the share of respondents who fast on Yom Kippur turned out 1.5 times higher than the share of those who define themselves as “religious people.” Obviously, any degree of observance, even as a symbol if not the full practice of this commandment of Judaism, is also relevant to people who find themselves in mutually intersecting planes: those not sure of their religiosity and those with a dual or “transitional” identity. This largely contradicts the conclusion of researchers like Ryvkina, who studied the beliefs of Moscow Jews in 2004. She insists that persons with such an identity (“bi-nationals” by her definition) are “a reserve not for Judaism, but for Orthodox Christianity” (Ryvkina 2005, 117–121). Analyzing the results of a survey of Jewish youth and adolescents in three post-Soviet countries eight years later, Epstein came to a similar conclusion. He stipulated that a confessional choice should not directly affect ethnic identification. But he also believed that in reality, not only the confession but also the ethnic identity of the generation that was young at the time but growing up and partially entering early middle age today largely depended on the religious beliefs of their (now 45- to 57-year-old) parents (Khanin et al 2013, 70, 73–74). Remember, however, that in our 2019 study, the proportion of those who confidently, or depending on the situation, felt Jewish in the subgroup with a mixed, Jewish-gentile identity was 44% and 47% respectively. Our previous study of the Jews of Russia and Ukraine, carried out in parallel with the work of Ryvkina, made it possible even then to assert that the picture painted by her, and seven to eight years later by Epstein, may not be the only option for the development of

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Chapter 6 Religious Identity and Religious-Cultural Tradition

the situation (Khanin and Chenin 2007, 92–93). Our current study, as far as we can judge, confirms the correctness of our earlier assumption. We see at least three competing and partially interacting attitudes toward religion in the Jewish community of the FSU today. The first is a “classical” (neotraditionalist) view of Jewry as an ethnic- or communal-confessional entity. Logically, Judaism as a religion becomes the core of its Jewish identity, and religious institutions become the foundation of this community. Neither “atheists” nor, especially, followers of other religions can be part of it. The second model is based on the Soviet-shaped secular notion of Jews as a “natsional’nost’” (ethnic-national group). Jewish religion here plays the role of a positive ethnic symbol that is however deactivated in everyday life. The third, “postmodern” model, on the contrary, considers multiculturalism, mixed ethnicity, and diversified religiosity an acceptable and, in a sense, desirable element of Jewish (including community) life. All these models and their corresponding trends at least sometimes contribute to the processes of ethnic consolidation and assimilation among post-Soviet Jewry.

Chapter 7 “Secular” Culture and the Identity of Post-Soviet Jews The Russian-speaking Jewish cultural space is by no means limited to a reincarnation of, or even the emergence of, a new religious Jewish culture. Over the past thirty to forty years, its secular version has developed in the territory of the former USSR, and its content is under a lot of discussion. Some researchers view it as a lightweight version of religious culture adapted to the needs of various community organizations, primarily youth groups. For example, Nosenko-Stein (2018, 557–559) believes that in the process of creating their own model of “secular Judaism” over the past fifteen to twenty years, former Soviet Jews (unlike the Jews of the United States and other Western countries) constructed a set of beliefs and practices that include problematics in terms of the Halakha rituals of celebrating Shabbat and Jewish holidays (most often Hanukkah and Purim). The same description fits joint quasi-kosher meals and pro-Israel events, including “pilgrimages” to Israel by means of various tours and educational programs. Such practices include the relatively new phenomenon of choosing a Jewish name and a search for marriage partners preferably within the “extended Jewish population”, which have already been mentioned above. Such things take place among the clients of the above-mentioned community centers and other structures (“youth get-togethers”). The popularity of all these practices is higher among the younger generation, who sometimes manage to bring these newly invented traditions into their families and draw the older generation into them (Viner 2002). Researchers also mention another, less successful, in their opinion, attempt to build a cultural model of secular diaspora Judaism by transferring American secular and pro-Israeli Humanistic and Reconstructionist Judaism to post-Soviet soil, with their network of “secular synagogues” and priorities within secular Jewish cultural activities (Avgustevich 2010).

The Infrastructure of Secular Culture Speaking of “secular Jewish culture,” one should consider the layer of original cultural phenomena that have developed in the past thirty to thirty-five years, with its roots often in the past. One of the most striking manifestations of the cultural https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-007

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self-expression of Russian-speaking Jews over the past two centuries has been Russian-speaking Jewish literature, or Jewish literature in Russian. With its birth in the first half of the 19th century, its peak of creativity was declining by the end of the 1930s, and in the late 1940s, this literature, like all Jewish culture in the USSR, was already banned, according to one researcher of this topic, the Israeli poet, literary critic, and ethnographer Velvl Chernin. Jewish-themed literature in Russia was revived on a limited scale in the late 1950s. Since the 1980s, a largescale revival of Russian-speaking Jewish literature took place in the former USSR and the countries of Russian-speaking Jewish emigration, including the structuring of its Russian-Israeli segment. Moreover, according to Chernin, it was turning into the predominant form of Russian-language literature of the Jews, even if the border between Russian-speaking Jewish literature as part of the national Jewish literature and the participation of Jews in Russian literature proper was very arbitrary (Chernin 2020a). This layer is comprised of multiple mass media, Jewish publications and literature about Jews theater, music, cinema, and museums – and, of course, educational, and scientific institutions (to be discussed separately). Let us try to briefly describe the institutional infrastructure of this aspect of Jewish culture. The five most significant Jewish periodicals in today’s post-Soviet space are,32 first of all, Narod knigi v mire knig (The People of the Book in the World of Books) magazine (http://narodknigi.ru/) published in St. Petersburg since 1995 with a frequency of six issues per year (editor Alexander Frenkel).33 Its goal is to critically review the most significant Jewish publications in Russian as well as new books on Jewish topics. This way, the magazine influences the entire Russian-speaking Jewish community, including the part of it that lives in their historical homeland. At the same time, the People of the Book has a distinct cultural and ideological orientation towards Yiddish, which is obvious from its special attention to the cultural heritage of Eastern European Jewry that was created in Yiddish or translated from Yiddish. Moscow-published Lechaim (editor Borukh Gorin https://lechaim.ru/) is probably the most widely known Jewish publication of the Russian (and post-Soviet in general) press today (30,000 copies according to 2016 data).34 It has been out since 1991. This journal relies on generous financial support from the Federation of Jewish Religious Communities of Russia, headed by Rabbi Berl Lazar. This most likely explains the significant place it devotes to materials directly related to  The author is grateful to Dr. Velvl Chernin for helping update this subchapter with relevant information. See also Chernin 2020b.  Accessed 27.02.2023.  Accessed 27.02.2023.

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Judaism in general and to Lubavitcher Hasidism in particular. However, it also publishes and even gives most of its pages to materials relating to secular Jewish literature, Jewish culture, and history, including works of fiction translated from Yiddish, and articles about figures of secular culture in Yiddish. Purely secular in nature is Yehupets (the euphemistic name of Kyiv in the works of Sholom Aleichem), an almanac published in Kyiv since 1993 (publisher Leonid Finberg). It traditionally publishes materials both in Russian and Ukrainian under one cover (with the predominance of the former). It has a distinct Ukrainian-Jewish ideological orientation and can be viewed as a printed organ of the emerging community of Ukrainian Jews as a special ethno-civic group. Indicative in this sense are the words of the almanac’s late editor-in-chief Miron Petrovsky: “My colleagues and I see Yehupets as a Kyiv almanac with a certain Jewish accent (in every sense of the word). This accent is expressed in the predominant attention to Jewish topics and problems in all the genres we have declared. At the same time, we would like to avoid turning the magazine into a kind of a “cultural ghetto” (Gold 2008). Meanwhile, Yehupets devotes a certain place to the cultural heritage of Ukrainian Jews created in Yiddish, which is at the same time part of the general cultural heritage of Eastern European Jews as a whole. A Belarus-based publication that is close in spirit, themes, and team of authors is the Mishpokha (“The Family” in Yiddish) magazine published in Vitebsk twice a year since 1995 (editor Arkady Shulman, http://mishpoha.org/).35 Formally, it declares itself an “international” publication, but in reality, it is an organ of the secular Jewish communities of Belarus. Among Jewish newspapers of the post-Soviet space, the weekly Hadashot published in Kyiv since 1991 (editor Mikhail Gold, http://www.hadashot.Kyiv.ua/)36 definitely deserves attention. This newspaper is published in Russian (with certain materials written and printed in Ukrainian). Despite its undoubted Ukrainian-Jewish ethno-civic identity, Hadashot has a clearly expressed pro-Israeli orientation. Actual news from the historical homeland and comments by Israeli Russian-speaking authors appear in almost every issue. From 1989–2013, Estonia published its Ha-Shahar monthly, which became the first non-underground Jewish periodical in the USSR. At the initial stage, the influence of this newspaper went far beyond the borders of then-Soviet Estonia. According to its last editor-inchief, Iosif Katz, at the very end of the Soviet era, the newspaper “was almost wildly popular. Although, one must admit, it was not due to its journalistic level

 Accessed 27.02.2023.  Accessed 27.02.2023.

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but because it served as the “pre-Internet Internet” as it introduced the public to the basics of what Israel is, who the Jews are, and chronicled the [reviving] community life.” In the next 20 years, however, the publication became de facto a regional community paper.37 A special place among Jewish periodicals belongs to those published in the regions of the Russian Federation where Jewish people make the titular nationality. Such publications are financed by local authorities, which is generally a unique phenomenon for the Jewish media in post-Soviet space. These include the Jewish Autonomous Region and the Republic of Dagestan. In the former, Russian is the only official language, but Yiddish is traditionally regarded as the local “national” language and is still supported to a certain degree by local authorities. Legally, this approach is based on the 1997 Charter of the Jewish Autonomous Region, according to which “conditions shall be created in the region for the preservation, study and development of the languages of the Jewish people and other nations living in the region” (JAO 1997, Art 6, par. 2). In Dagestan, the Mountain Jewish language (Dzhuuri) has retained the status of one of the official languages of the republic since Soviet times, along with Russian and 13 other local languages (Dagestan 2003, Ch. 1, Art. 11) Birobidzhaner Stern (“Birobidzhanian Star”) weekly, edited by Elena Sarashevskaya (http://www.gazetaeao.ru/birobidzhaner-shtern),38 used to go out five times a week. It is still published by the local government. In 1930–1991, this newspaper was published in Yiddish only. Now, most of its materials are published in Russian (among them many translations from Yiddish), but from one to three pages in each issue are still published in Yiddish. Birobidzhaner Stern is the last secular newspaper, printed on paper, that publishes content in Yiddish, not only in the former USSR, but in the whole world. We should also mention the “scientific and literary” almanac Birobidzhan, most of which is published in Russian, with a few materials in Yiddish (JAO 2022). Translations from Yiddish to Russian take a prominent place in this periodicals content creation. Its publishers view the year 2004, when the first Russian-language volume was printed, as the year of its revival rather than its birth, because this carried on from the Birobidzhan almanac published only in Yiddish (closed at the height of the “fight against cosmopolitans” in 1949). Indirect evidence of the symbolic role that Yiddish continues to play in the Jewish Autonomous Region is the name of the independent, private, and entirely Russian-language Birobidzhanbased Di Woh weekly (editor Elena Merzhievskaya), a title which means “The

 This author received Iosif Katz’s opinion via FB Messenger on April 23, 2020.  Accessed 27.02.2023.

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Week” in Yiddish. It occasionally prints materials in one way or another relating to Yiddish culture (City Upon Bira 2022). In Derbent, where most of the remaining Jews of Dagestan are concentrated, Vatan (“Motherland” in the Djuuri language) has been going out weekly since 1990 (editor Viktor Mikhailov, http://gazetavatan.ru/).39 It has the status of a newspaper for the whole of Dagestan. From the very beginning of its existence, this newspaper has been bilingual. Today, more than half of its materials are published in Russian, which reflects the process of gradual linguistic Russification (primarily the loss of the reading skills in their own language) of the Mountain Jews remaining in the Russian Federation.40 However, the fact that some of the Vatan’s content is regularly published in their language makes it the only periodical in the world to print in the language of the Mountain Jews. Electronic versions of all these publications are even more popular. Some Russian-language Jewish media exist only online and are quite popular among the Jews of the post-Soviet space. First of all, these are news websites. They are usually not local but Israeli-based, giving the Jews of the post-Soviet space the opportunity to receive up-to-date information about what is happening in their historical homeland. In the context of discussing the role of Russian-language Israeli media in Jewish life in the post-Soviet space, one should note that modern Russian-speaking Jewish literary periodicals are published mainly in Israel. Their online versions make these publications available to readers outside of Israel, including to those living in the former USSR. The most famous in the post-Soviet space is the Jerusalem Journal published every three months since 1999 (https://new.antho.net/wp/).41 The recently deceased Igor Byalsky had been its editor from the start. Many authors of the journal live in the post-Soviet states, primarily in Russia. Among them are such wellknown Russian writers of Jewish origin as Alexander Gorodnitsky, Dmitry Sukharev, and Viktor Korkia. As far as publishing houses are concerned, it is safe to say that Russian-language Jewish book production in the post-Soviet space is quite significant and transcends the limits of their respective countries, sometimes even outside the former Soviet Union (Chernin 2020b).

 Accessed 27.02.2023.  The sample of our 2019 study randomly included a small group of Bukhara (11 people) and Mountain (about 20 people) Jews (almost all of them living in Moscow and St. Petersburg). Only three of the Mountain Jews reported that they speak their ethnic language fluently or were able to communicate and understand the language, the rest “knew only a few words and expressions.”  Accessed 27.02.2023.

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In fact, it is there that most of the serious publications of this kind are published. And it is from there that books and magazines are shipped to Russianlanguage bookstores in Israel and Western countries with a large Russian-speaking Jewish population. There are two contributing factors: relatively low prices and cooperation with Israeli experts. The leading Jewish publishing house in the post-Soviet space is the Moscowbased Knizhniki (https://knizhniki.ru/),42 founded in 2007. Its director, Boruch Gorin, is also the editor of the Lechaim magazine. Throughout its existence, Knizhniki has published about 500 Jewish books, including multi-volume editions, on a wide range of topics, from religious and scientific literature to children’s books. The total circulation of their publications exceeded 1.5 million copies (Charny 2016). An important advantage of the Knizhniki publishing house is a well-established system of distribution and advertising of its products, including, among other things, its own bookstore and the Booknik. ru website dedicated to Jewish literature. The house publishes a lot of translations from Yiddish by authors who were never published in Soviet times. In 2012, a special series was created for this under the general title of Wandering Stars, the name derived from the famous novel by Sholom Aleichem (for more on this book series see Polian 2020). The Bridges of Culture/Gesharim publishing house was founded in 1990 by Israeli Mikhail Grinberg. Nominally, it is an Israeli-Russian publishing house, but until recently its production has been mainly concentrated in Moscow. Over the three decades of its operation, Bridges of Culture has published over 500 Jewish books in various genres with a total circulation of about 2 million copies. Having no bookstore of its own, Bridges of Culture has set up its sales online. The Duh i Litera publishing house (editor-in-chief Leonid Finberg, https://duhi-litera.com/)43 was founded in Kyiv in 1992. It cannot be called purely Jewish in terms of its topics. However, more than 30 books have been published in its special Judaica series. In addition, several books on Jewish topics (in particular, on Jewish-Ukrainian relations) and translations from Yiddish have been published outside the series. Most of these books were published in Ukrainian. This circumstance actually restricts the distribution of their books outside of Ukraine. Duh i Litera has also produced some bilingual books. For example, it has published Taras Shevchenko’s Kobzar, where the Ukrainian original is accompanied with David Gofshtein’s Yiddish translation. Dukh i Litera does not have a bookstore of

 Accessed 27.02.2023.  Accessed 27.02.2023.

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its own, but it has a well-established distribution system through a number of bookstore chains. Books on Jewish topics are periodically published by the Birobidzhan Publishing House, with distribution mainly in the Russian Far East. Many of their books are one way or another connected with the Yiddish culture (for example, Sarashevsky 2016; Gordon et al 2019; Borodulin 2019; Sandler 2020). In addition to specialized Jewish publishing houses, many other publishing houses publish fiction, memoirs, scientific works, and popular science books on Jewish subjects, some translated from Hebrew, Yiddish, and European languages, while others are printed in their original Russian language. The total range of Jewish literature published by them is no less than the books produced by the Jewish publishing houses listed above. The last professional Jewish theater in the post-Soviet space is Moscow-based Shalom, headed by acclaimed actor Alexander Levenbuk. This theater claims to be a successor to the famous Moscow State Jewish Theater (GOSET) directed by Solomon Mikhoels. In reality, Shalom stopped performing in Yiddish quite a while ago; all of their shows are performed in Russian, and much of Shalom’s repertoire has nothing to do with Jewish culture. Even its artistic level is often criticized. If we look for parallels in the history of the Jewish theater, in terms of artistic level, Shalom can only be compared to what used to be called the “shund (“trash”) theater” at the beginning of the 20th century (Kazovsky 2017). That was a theater designed for unpretentious, poorly educated spectators, and always included musical and humorous numbers. A theater of this kind cannot in any way compete with the numerous highly professional Russian theaters. At the same time, a lot of post-Soviet Jewish communities have amateur theaters and pop groups which, without pretending to be professional, introduce Jewish people (in the broadest sense of the word) to the elements of their ethnic heritage: that of traditional Eastern Europe Ashkenazi and modern Israeli culture. In addition, theaters of the former USSR often stage works by Jewish playwrights. For example, a significant part of the Russian repertoire was made of plays by the Israelis Hanoch Levin and Yosef Bar-Yosef, as well as plays based on the works of Bashevis-Zinger. Jewish plays written in Russian, such as Friedrich Gorenstein’s Berdichev, were quite successful. Purim-spiels are a unique form of amateur theater and pop art that have found a special place in the Jewish culture of post-Soviet space (Beregovsky 2001). This tradition was lost in the 20th century within the overwhelming majority of Ashkenazi communities of the diaspora and Israel but was revived in the USSR by activists of the informal Zionist movement of the 1970s. The current tradition of Purim-spiels is in fact a continuation of illegal Purim-spiels of the last fifteen years of the Soviet regime (for more details on Purim-spiels, see Genzeleva 2009).

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Russian was their main language of communication, and their plays experienced significant influence from the Soviet humor clubs and skits. Today’s Purim-spiel tradition continues at international festivals. Among these is the Purim-Spiel in Vitebsk, which for a quarter of a century now has regularly invited groups to perform from all over Belarus and other post-Soviet states, as well as from “far abroad.” There is also the International Festival of Jewish Culture in Birobidzhan, which has enjoyed the active support of the authorities of the Jewish Autonomous Region once every two years, starting from the mid-1990s. The Klezfest tradition of klezmer music that came to the post-Soviet space from the USA in the late 1990s has also greatly influenced modern Jewish culture there (Korolenko and Gidon 2007). This artistic direction, called to rethink and actualize Ashkenazi folk art, found a fairly wide response among the Jews (including those young and heavily assimilated) of the post-Soviet space. Since the late 1990s, Klezfests have been regularly organized in St. Petersburg. Then this initiative was picked up by Moscow and Kyiv. Klezmer concerts and small festivals were organized in the regional cities of Russia and Ukraine. On the one hand, these festivals attracted the biggest klezmer music luminaries, primarily from the USA and Europe. These stars worked with local musicians and were able to pass to them both their repertoire and their specific musicmaking techniques. On the other hand, klezfest concerts gathered hundreds of listeners, thus becoming the most massive Jewish events in the post-Soviet space. The most striking example of the widespread use of traditional Ashkenazi melos and Yiddish texts on the modern stage is the work of the popular author and performer of songs from Moscow, Psoy Korolenko (the pseudonym of Pavel Lion, born in 1967), who performs with great success not only in Russia, but also in the USA and Israel. Korolenko learned Yiddish and recorded several discs in this language, often in combination with Russian and English. (More of Psoy Korolenko’s view of Jewish identity and culture in may be found in Chernin 2019b). Films on Jewish topics have a special place in the post-Soviet space. Unlike in most of the Soviet period, the Jewish topic is no longer a taboo. Despite challenges in defining Jewish film criteria, this phenomenon cannot be ignored as a factor of Jewish cultural life in the post-Soviet space. The Moscow Jewish Film Festival has been taking place annually since 2015, mostly showing films made in Israel, in the USA, and in Western Europe, but each time presenting a few Russian-made films, and sometimes films made in other post-Soviet states (Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia). One of the central themes of Russian Jewish cinematography is the Holocaust. Of the most famous recent examples we can mention Sobibor by Konstantin Khabensky, released in 2018. This famous Russian actor (a Jew by his father), who often created in films memorable Jewish images of Gershuni, Bogrov, Trotsky,

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Green, Simanovich, Levitan, etc., himself tried out as director and starred as the main character, the leader of the uprising, Alexander Pechersky. (A famous French American actor, Christopher Lambert, who played an SS officer in Khabensky’s film, is also the son of a Jewish father). The Holocaust was also the main theme of the film Kaddish, released in 2019 by one of the producers of the Moscow Jewish Film Festival, the director Konstantin Pham (Vietnamese on his father’s side and a Jew on his mother’s, to whose memory he dedicated his film). A number of Jewish museums operate in the post-Soviet space, touching upon the issues of representation of collective memory and national identity in the multicultural post-Soviet community (Kaspina 2019), most important and relevant for any projects of this kind. One of the most significant collections is the private Moscow Museum of Jewish History in Russia, opened in 2011 by businessman Sergei Ustinov, member of the Presidium of the Russian Jewish Congress. The museum has a unique collection of artifacts and documents reflecting various aspects of the life of the Jews of Russia since the late 18th century. The Museum of Jewish History in Russia owes its unique collection mostly to the work of Russian-speaking art experts from Israel. Another important project is the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow founded on the initiative of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia in 2012. It shows largely virtual and interactive exhibits rather than original artifacts. But it is one of the largest exhibition venues in the Russian capital, which naturally turns the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center into a permanent venue for exhibitions, lectures, and other cultural events. Next, we should mention the Vilensky Gaon State Jewish Museum opened in 1989 in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, where two of its three buildings host permanent and temporary exhibitions on the history, traditional life, and art of the Jews of Lithuania, while the third one hosts a permanent exposition on the Holocaust of the Jews of Lithuania. It also has a branch in Druskininkai and a memorial museum of artist Jacques Lipchitz. Finally, there is the David Baazov State Museum of History and Ethnography of Georgian Jews, which was opened in Tbilisi by the decision of the Georgian government in 1992 and which is considered to be the successor and heir to the collections of the Jewish Historical and Ethnographic Museum of Georgia (1932–1951). We should also mention the Jewish funds of the Russian Ethnographic Museum and the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg, which are of unique importance for the study of the ethnography, history, and culture of the Jewish people far beyond the boundaries of the post-Soviet space. In combination with a significant number of small Jewish museums and Jewish departments in general museums in such cities as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, Dnipro, Chernivtsi, Shargorod,

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Krivoy Rog, Kherson, Simferopol, Minsk, Riga, Birobidzhan, etc., they present very good opportunities for general acquaintance with the history, art, and traditions of the Jewish people, as well as for in-depth academic research into various aspects of Jewish studies.

Cultural Needs as Identity Indicator A review of the institutional infrastructure of Jewish culture in the former USSR can undoubtedly tell a lot about the creative quest of post-Soviet Jewry and their attempts to fill large gaps in their self-consciousness, which were under the destructive influence of the communist authorities for decades. This review can also say a lot about the specific identity of this community in the final stages of its self-construction and on the new Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnos, with its substratum of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewry. How crucial is the demand for these cultural projects among post-Soviet Jews in their attempts to fill the gaps in their cultural heritage? At first glance, our data shows that the situation looks fine: 17% of respondents regularly read books by Jewish authors on Jewish subjects, and another 48% do so “from time to time.” About 60% attend Jewish theaters and concerts regularly or from time to time. And only one third and 40% of respondents, respectively, either admitted that they were not at all interested in Jewish books and performances “with a Jewish accent” or found it hard to answer this question, perhaps because they did not quite understand which publications or shows fall into the definition of “Jewish.” (Table 7.1) It is interesting that in Ukraine, Jewish literature is read slightly more by residents of the capital and large cities, while in Belarus and Moldova, on the contrary, by residents of the provincial communities. And in Russia, the share of readers in the capital cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg) is approximately equal to their share in the provinces. But Jewish performances, according to our data, make up mostly “provincial” Jewish entertainment almost everywhere. This is logical, since competition in this area is high in large metropolitan and cultural centers in contrast to provincial cities, where the arrival of a Jewish theatre or pop group is almost always a noticeable event in local cultural life (and not only for the Jews). However, this picture looks less optimistic if analyzed in the context of respondents’ identifications. Interest in Jewish literature among those with stable Jewish identity was 1.5 times higher than the sample average; among respondents with “blurred” Jewish identity this interest stayed approximately the same, and among those with a non-Jewish identity it was 1.5 times lower than the average. Directly proportional to the ethnic identity of respondents was also their attendance of Jewish theaters and concerts, as well as their familiarity with Jewish periodicals.

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Table 7.1: The Interest of Members of Cultural-Identity Groups in Jewish Media, Publications, and Performing Arts. Practice the Ethnic Identity following Total Just Rus / Both Rus / Ukr Only Rus / A human Other cultural activities: Jewish other Jew and Jewish Other being Reading books of Jewish authors Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Attending Jewish theater or shows % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Total

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,













Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total Reading Jewish press Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say

Is Jewish identity a trigger for interest in Jewish cultural genres, or, vice versa, do people acquire or strengthen their self-identity by reading texts and watching performances on Jewish topics? The direct connection between the ethnic origin of respondents and the stability of their Jewish identity, once again confirmed by our study, speaks in favor of the former option. Equally direct was the relationship between the level of homogeneity of Jewish origin and respondents’ interests in the indicated cultural phenomena (Table 7.2). For this reason, the future of Jewish civil culture in the CIS looks vague, because the younger the members of the local “extended Jewish population,” the higher the proportion of descendants of mixed marriages in the second, third, and in some places fourth generation among them. In this case, the person and their non-Jewish spouse constitute a growing segment of Jewish communities today.

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Table 7.2: Popularity of Jewish Publications and Performing Arts / Ethnic Origin. Number of Jewish grandparents Total

–





None

Read books by Jewish authors Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









Read Jewish press Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

Attend Jewish theater or shows Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

However, there was no significant difference between age groups in the context of interest in books by Jewish writers and/or on Jewish subjects, except for the 61+ category, whose representatives reported that they regularly read such literature slightly more often than the sample average. This is probably due to the fact that older people have a marked preference for books over the internet and shows. The same category attends Jewish performances noticeably more often (twice as often as young people). However, in other age groups, respondents who constantly or sometimes attend Jewish performances or concerts make up over 50% to 60%. We can conclude that identity and interest in Jewish texts are a two-way road. (No wonder almost 13% of our respondents reported that they gained their feeling of Jewishness through acquaintance with Jewish works of art.) This gives book publishers, theater workers, and community leaders who view culture as a tool for strengthening Jewish identity the right for cautious optimism.

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The situation with the Jewish press looks somewhat different: only one-fifth of respondents read it regularly. Almost a third of respondents do so “from time to time”. But while readers of books and attendees of theater performances and concerts can be listed among permanent consumers, the real audience of periodicals are always regular readers. However, even this is not the main problem: while maintaining the same ratio as in relation to books, the difference in various age categories’ interests in the Jewish media is much more pronounced. The older generation reads them twice as actively as young and young middle-aged people under 40, and 1.5 times more actively than 41- to 60-year-olds. So, newspapers and magazines are of interest to the older generation, while younger Jews and their family members, just like their non-Jewish peers, go to social networks and media. However, increasing demand for Jewish periodicals is not expected, at least in the near future (Table 7.3). Table 7.3: Popularity of Jewish Publications and Performing Arts / Gender and Age. Gender Total

Male

Age

Fem

Up to 

–

–

+

Read books by Jewish authors Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













Read Jewish press Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

Attend Jewish theater or shows Regularly Seldom Almost never Hard to say Total

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Chapter 7 “Secular” Culture and the Identity of Post-Soviet Jews

Dilemmas of Our Days It remains to be seen how this whole layer of secular Jewish culture, created mainly in the Russian language, and the market for its consumption in the countries of the new Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, will be affected by the war between Russia and Ukraine, which, among other things, has gained a pronounced cultural and political aspect. Its common description, according to observers, is a growing psychological feeling, including among the Jews, of the “toxicity” of any phenomenon connected with Russia and “Russianness” one way or another. It seems, however, that inflation or disappearance of this Russian-speaking Jewish cultural complex is not the only possible scenario. An alternative, and a much more positive option for the entire transnational diaspora of the Jews of the former USSR, can again be offered by “Russian Israel.” There, unlike, for example, in Europe, the Russian-speaking culture has a pronounced “Jewish accent” and, according to observers, does not present a “geopolitical threat.”44 The Israeli example could also likely set the tone for the transnational diaspora of the Jews of the former USSR as a whole. Such an important form of cultural self-expression of Russian-speaking Jewry as literature, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, can also play a role in this. Ethnographer, literature critic, and noted Yiddish poet Velvl Chernin expressed an interesting opinion in this regard, which seems appropriate to quote almost in its entirety. “With great interest I am following the debates over the decision of Ukrainian authorities to stop teaching the works of Russian, de facto Russian-speaking writers in Ukrainian schools . . . Personally, I feel this decision, in general, is justified. Ukraine and Ukrainians must completely dissociate themselves from Russia and Russians, and, accordingly, from their literature. However, since the decision was made in a hurry, during the war, by people who are unlikely to be deeply versed in the history of literature (suffice it to mention that for some reason Vasyl Bykov, an ethnic Belarusian who wrote in Belarusian, was included in the list of Russian writers removed from the program), miscalculations were simply inevitable . . . In addition to Gogol, who remained in the program, other Ukrainian writers who created their works in Russian should have been left on the curriculum or even included in it just to strengthen the Ukrainian national identity. But let the Ukrainians judge this. “Meanwhile, in our Israeli context, the following thought came to me: we have an elective course of “Russian literature” in our schools. Well, since Russian-

 The opinion of Mikhail Gurevich, member of the Expert Council of the Russian Jewish Congress, a prominent Israeli-Russian media manager (personal interview, Tel Aviv June 2022).

Dilemmas of Our Days

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speakers want to learn Russian language at school, then there should be [Russian] literature, too. However, it seems to me that Russian literature in our country could be replaced with ‘Russian-speaking Jewish literature’ . . . We had many national Jewish writers who used Russian language for their writing. It is part of our culture, our Jewish culture in general and especially our culture as Eastern European Jews. It seems to me that it would be better if Russian-speaking Israeli children spent their time at school studying Osip Rabinovich, Semyon Frug, Vladimir Zhabotinsky, Samuil Marshak, Lev Lunts, Osip Mandelstam, Dovid Knut . . . and the list goes on.”45 If the process goes on this way, the Russian-speaking Jewish cultural discourse will remain a common denominator of sociocultural interaction within and between communities of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora for a long time. But it may also become a platform for the socio-psychological “normalization” of Russian-speaking culture as a whole.

 Velvl Chernin’s post on Facebook, 06/20/2022, https://www.facebook.com/velvl.chernin. Accessed 27.02.2023.

Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity Data presented in the previous chapters support the conclusion that the Russianspeaking Jewish sub-ethnos has several specific cultural attributes. These attributes are filled with Jewish content from various sources, from the remnants of EastEuropean Ashkenazi traditions and modernist Soviet Jewish culture to the trends borrowed first of all from Israel and to a lesser extent from Western cultures.

Communication Models and Ethnopolitical Symbols The functioning of this Jewish social complex has until very recently not interfered with the fact that its culture is developing primarily in Russian. Some researchers even believe that the Russian language in this case is the same kind of ethnolect for the Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnos as Bukhari (the Jewish version of the Samarkand-Bukhara dialect of the Tajik language) is the ethnolect for Bukhara Jews. For example, Anna Vershik, a Yiddish specialist from Estonia, considers the “Jewish Russian ethnolect” (Jewish Russian) to be a cluster of variations of the Russian language used by Ashkenazi Jews of the former USSR. Each variation within this cluster is defined by various borrowings from Yiddish: vocabulary, syntax, stylistic tropes (Verschik 2007). Gennady Estraikh argues that “Jewish Russian” in fact never existed as a uniform ethnolect due to “territorial, generational, and social peculiarities determining the nature of Jewishness (or its absence).” He agrees, however, that many Jews, especially emigrants, consider their Russian, or “Jewish Russian” (e.g., Russian intermixed with Yiddish) a “linguistic label” of their Jewishness (Estraik 2008, 69–71). Even though Jewish languages proper, Yiddish and Hebrew, were gradually replaced by Russian, they nevertheless constituted a considerable layer of the East-European Jewish cultural complex for decades. Hebrew has always been an important ethnic and even ethnopolitical symbol, and Yiddish, while losing its communicative function, was constantly increasing its symbolic capital. The symbolic weight of Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian relative to each other changed significantly at different stages in the history of the Jews of the USSR under the influence of both intra-communal processes and the external environment.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-008

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Soviet authorities, in accordance with the principles of the Bolshevik national ethnic policy, initially constructed a “Jewish Soviet socialist nation” with the main attributes of its “national life:” language, national autonomies and their administrative bodies, education, literature, science, and culture. Meanwhile, Yiddish as the language of “folk culture” was actively opposed to Hebrew as “the language of the Jewish bourgeoisie.” The institutional provision of Hebrew had been ruined by the end of the 1920s, while the Jewish version of korenizatsiya (“indigenization”) based on Yiddish was curtailed in 1938. (For a short time, it was resumed in 1939–1940 in the territories annexed by the USSR at the beginning of World War II: in some of the Baltic countries and in those regions torn away from Poland and Romania, which became part of the Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Moldavian USSR.) “Indigenization” gave way to an increasingly tangible Russification, viewed as the “modernization” of the Jewish population of the former Pale of Settlement. The remaining few cultural institutions in Yiddish were destroyed in 1948–1949 by the authorities. In the post-Stalin years, the authorities allowed some cultural institutions to operate in Yiddish (a literary magazine, a newspaper, several theater groups, book publishing, etc.) and, accordingly, Yiddish as such to exist. There were no opportunities for legal operation of non-state Jewish organizations in the USSR. As far as informal Jewish movement is concerned, the idea of Yiddish culture was peripheral to Hebrew-Zionist or even religious initiatives (Chernin 1995). The situation seemed to change significantly during Perestroika (1986–1991), when several regions of the USSR saw a sharp aggravation of ethnopolitical contradictions that had been dormant there for decades. The process of restoring organized Jewish life, which began in the late 1980s, proceeded against the backdrop of disengagement in the Jewish environment. Yiddish and Hebrew once again became the symbols of this delimitation. In contrast to the “epoch of the underground,” they found themselves on opposite sides of the political divide within the Jewish structures. Some of these structures arose on the initiative of the perestroika communist authorities, while others were Jewish cultural, human rights, memorial, and Zionist organizations that emerged from the underground. “Official Yiddishism” was the banner of the Societies of Jewish Culture that emerged in many places in 1988–1991, whose leaders perceived Jewry as a purely cultural phenomenon and were very cautious about any form of Jewish nationalism. Organizations created by representatives of different generations of the Zionist underground, such as, for example, the all-Union and the republican Vaads (Associations of Jewish Organizations and Communities) considered local Jewry not just a cultural, but primarily an ethnic national community. Therefore, along with paying tribute to the traditional cultural heritage, they nevertheless considered the study and promotion of Hebrew and Israeli culture a priority (Khanin 2002c).

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

The fact that Yiddish was perceived as the core of the Ashkenazi culture46 spoke in favor of those communal elites who insisted on prioritizing Yiddish. For example, although the 1989 census recorded only 13% of Jews who called Yiddish their native or second language (32.8% in Moldova, 14.3% in Belarus, 11.1% in Ukraine, and 10.8% in Russia [Tolts 1999]), this language was an element of “family folklore” at the level of individual words, phrases, jokes, etc., an ethnocultural background and, accordingly, a significant part of the identity of the majority of post-Soviet Jews. This explains the explosion of “popular Yiddishism” in the early years of the Jewish national-cultural revival in the late 1980s. Yiddish then was still heard in the streets of a number of cities of the former “Pale of Jewish Settlement,” numerous Yiddish courses were taught among the Jews, prompted by a national self-consciousness, and their teachers were natural native speakers. On the other hand, the extensive system of structures that provided instruction in Hebrew and Jewish tradition was in great demand due to the mass emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel that began in 1990. This movement was created by the “Hebrew” faction of community elites, with material and organizational assistance from Israeli and international organizations. Interest in Yiddish was at the same time gradually fading, in part due to the departure of the bulk of the native speakers of this language (Khanin 2000b). The situation changed again by the beginning of 1992. The wave of emigration not only severely weakened Yiddish-oriented cultural organizations, but also carried away most of the figures of “practical Zionism.” Any attempts by activists of the former Jewish underground movement and the first generation of legal Jewish educators to combine the teaching of Hebrew with the basics of Judaism in the clubs and classes they founded in 1988–1991 did not develop much further, since both the activists and most of their students emigrated in the early 1990s. Hebrew found its place in the system of Jewish Sunday and later daytime schools (from which Yiddish practically disappeared by the end of the first post-Soviet decade), but by no means did it fill the “vacuum” in local Jewish cultural construction. The only place for its “mass” use was in Hebrew courses (ulpanim), which in 1993–1994  In FSU non-Ashkenazi communities (of Georgian, Bukhara, Mountain Jews), processes of community building were different and less related to language challenges. Georgian Jews never had an ethnolect of their own. Bukhara and Mountain Jews were much more conservative than the Ashkenazi. They continued to exist in a traditional two-language Jewish environment. Most of them spoke the ethnolect (Bukhari and Djuuri, respectively), therefore there was never a question of its “revival.” On the other hand, non-Ashkenazi Jews did not view their ethnolects as a special cultural value or a significant ethnic symbol. Some initiatives to create a new education and culture system in ethnolects did not get any support. Interest in the preservation of Bukhari and Djuuri is emerging only now in the “secondary diaspora” – migrant communities formed in major, mostly capital cities of Russia, Israel, the USA, and Europe (for details see Dymshits 1998).

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finally came under the control of the Jewish Agency and Israeli Liaison Bureau Nativ. These courses almost exclusively focused on serving the rapidly changing audience interested in mastering the basics of Hebrew and minimal background preparation before leaving for Israel. Ulpans have largely become “foreign language courses” even apart from the community system of Jewish education. In the course of constructing Jewish community institutions in the countries of the former USSR, both Jewish languages were left outside of any significant everyday use due to the extremely small number of Jews who would have demanded it. In fact, their proportion dropped sharply. The share of those who called Yiddish their native language in post-Soviet censuses has been constantly declining. In Russia, for example, it declined from 8.9% in 1989 to 5.1% in 2010, and in Ukraine, from 7% in 1989 to 3.1% in 2001. Approximately the same picture was seen in our 2019 research (Table 8.1). Only 5% of respondents said they speak Yiddish fluently or conversationally, and another 11% said they understand this language a little. In Ukraine, the share of such people totaled 20%, and in Russia it was 11% (the Moscow Levada Center’s 2018 poll found 16% Yiddish speakers [Levada 2018, 78]); in Moldova 22% of such respondents were found, and in Belarus the share was 14%. The lowest proportion of such respondents (5%) was in Kazakhstan, the vast majority of whose Jewish population, as has been noted more than once, are Ashkenazi evacuees of the Second World War. Table 8.1: Parameters of Yiddish Fluency in European Countries of the FSU. Knowledge of Yiddish

Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total

FSU Europe

FSU Asia

Total

Ukraine

Russia

Moldova

Belarus

Kazakhstan

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











As is seen in this chart, there was practically no difference between respondents in the five countries in terms of their fluency in Yiddish. As for the knowledge (at one level or another) of the language in general, no difference was observed in countries whose Jewish communities are mostly migrants (Russia and Kazakhstan), when comparing residents of the capitals (Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Almaty) with those provincial cities, just as expected. In the republics where Jews had lived for a long

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

time (Moldova and Belarus), active or passive possession, or at least acquaintance with Yiddish, was more common in provincial towns (often former Jewish shtetls) than among capital residents. Ukraine falls out of this pattern. Judging by the data we received, its situation turned out to be the opposite: the larger the city, the more people who knew, spoke, or understood Yiddish at some level. This is probably due to the far-reaching depopulation of the provincial Jewish communities, and the move of the Jewish population to the capital (Kyiv) and large industrial and cultural centers (such as Dnipro and Odessa) (Table 8.2). Table 8.2: Parameters of Yiddish Fluency in European Countries of the FSU. Knowledge of Yiddish or other Jewish languages of the Diaspora

European FSU Countries (beyond EU) Total

Ukraine, communities Capital Big

Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total Knowledge of Yiddish or other Jewish languages of the Diaspora

% % % % % % Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

Russia, communities

Small Capital Provincial – % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % %

%

%

Moldova, communities

Belarus, communities

Capital Provincial Capital Provincial Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total Knowledge of Yiddish or other Jewish languages of the Diaspora Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

– % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

FSU Asia-Kazakhstan Total Almaty Karaganda Pavlodar Shymkent % % % % %

% – % % %

– – – % %

% % % % %

% – % % %

%

%

%

%

%

Communication Models and Ethnopolitical Symbols

135

Hebrew, at least at the conversational level, is spoken by 11% of respondents who meet the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return, and another 15% were able to understand this language (in general, almost the same third made up the share of Jewish respondents familiar with Hebrew to some extent in the Levada Center survey). So, the situation with Hebrew looks better when compared with Yiddish, but not good enough to portend any competition with the Russian language or even with the languages of the titular nations of the post-Soviet republics among Jewish communities. The reason for this lies not in the inefficiency of the Hebrew teaching system into which Israeli and local Jewish organizations invested significant resources in the last three decades, but in the orientation of this system to potential emigrants and the lack of motivation for remaining students to use the language seriously in the professional and public sphere. The presence of both Jewish languages in three areas was, and in part remains, more noticeable. One such area is the sphere of value orientations; over time, this question correlates more and more with intracommunal political disagreements at the “top” of society. The controversy between supporters of two models of cultural revival – “Yiddish-centric,” focusing on the revival of local cultural traditions, and “Israelcentric”, focusing on Hebrew – continued almost until the end of the first post-Soviet decade. Observations showed that the “non-Zionist” position was shared by the older generation more than the younger, by residents of capital cities more than of provincial towns, and by the Jewish population in the regions annexed to the USSR during World War II more than by the Jews in regions within the borders of the USSR prior to 1939 (Khanin 2000a). Today, these contradictions have practically lost their relevance. A more relevant story is the presence of Yiddish and, more broadly, the culture formed on its foundation, in the professional work of a small group of figures in the Jewish movement: teachers, researchers, writers, translators, actors, some journalists, and community workers (Polian 2019). Yiddish more and more becomes a discipline in colleges and other non-Jewish research organizations interested in studying the nations of the post-Soviet countries in all their cultural and linguistic diversity. Activities in and around Yiddish reflect the dramatic moment of the “posthumous” existence of the language that until recently had been the main spoken language of the Jews of Eastern Europe (Sikorskaya and Moskalets 2019). On the other hand, all those years both Hebrew and Yiddish remained symbols of ethnocultural and national-political identity at the level of mass consciousness. This, for example, was seen from the survey of the Jewish population in several cities of Eastern Ukraine conducted in the fall of 1993, i.e., at the end of the first wave of mass emigration from the former USSR (Khanin 1998). In choosing the language Jewish people should speak (respondents could select any number of options), 54% chose Hebrew, 19% Yiddish, and 69% considered it enough to “speak the language of the country of residence.” At the same time, only 10% of respondents

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

believed that belonging to a nation is determined by the ability to “think and speak its language,” while 39% believed that a deep knowledge of national language is absolutely unnecessary for high national self-awareness (44% agreed with both judgments). In other words, it was clear even back then that “Yiddish vs. Hebrew” discussions were moving into an abstract and symbolic plane. This conclusion was confirmed in subsequent years. Remember that both in our 2004–2005 survey in Russia and Ukraine and in the 2019 study of the extended Jewish population of four countries of the European part of the former USSR, Hebrew fluency was ranked 9th and 11th in level of importance, while Yiddish or any other Jewish diaspora language fluency in both cases was ranked 14th – the last place in the ranking. At the same time, the share of “Jewish universalists” among those aware of the importance of preserving Yiddish was from 1.5 to three times higher than in other categories of culture identifying categories. This does not come as a surprise, since most “Jewish universalists” are people of homogeneous Jewish origin, whose Jewish identity includes a more solid layer of residual or “newfound” components of traditional Ashkenazi culture than in other groups. But for members of the two “non-Jewish” categories, Israel is just such a component, along with attributes of its culture, including Hebrew (Table 8.3). Table 8.3: Value of Hebrew and Yiddish Fluency / Culture Identification and Ethnic Origin (%).

Total sample

Know and speak Yiddish / another diaspora language

Know and speak Hebrew





    

    

   

   

Culture-identification categories Just Jewish Russian or other / Jewish Both Russian and Jewish Russian / other nationality Other / human being, nationality not important Ethnic origin (N of Jewish grandparents) –   Nobody

Language proficiency in itself is not the ultimate factor in one’s choice. The level of Yiddish fluency among carriers of the universal Jewish identity in the latest study has radically decreased compared to the previous survey (the percentage of those who speak the language fluently or conversationally has halved; the percentage of people

137

Communication Models and Ethnopolitical Symbols

who can understand it has remained the same; but those who know individual words and phrases or do not speak the language at all in 2019 was 1.5–2 times higher than in 2004–2005) (Table 8.4). This leads to the conclusion that today, just like fifteen and twenty-five years ago, what respondents found important was not so much the practical use of a particular language but its value as a symbol of their belonging to the “core” or the “periphery” of the Jewish community. The very same culture of the Russian-speaking Jewish Ashkenazi sub-ethnos developed mostly in the Russian language, while the communicative role of Jewish languages occupies a marginal place in it. Table 8.4: Yiddish Proficiency in Russia and Ukraine – Comparison of 2004–2005 and 2019 Surveys. Yiddish

Total

Ethnic Identity Sustainable Jewish Just Jewish

Fluent

Able to communicate

Able to understand

 R+U

.%

 Rus

Not at all

Total

Non-Jewish

Rus / Rus / Ukr other Jew and Jewish

Only Rus / Other

A Other human being

.%

.%

.%

 xxx

x

%

%

%

%

– %

–

Ukraine %

%

%

%

– %

–

.%

.%

.%

 xxx

x

 R+U

.

 Rus

%

%

%

%

– –

–

Ukraine %

%

%

%

– %

%

.%

.%

.

 xxx

x

%

%

%

– %

%

%

%

%

– %

%

.%

%



. xxx

 R+U

.%

 Rus

%

Ukraine % Know a few words and phrases

Dual

 R+U

.%

 Rus

%

%

%

%

% %

%

Ukraine %

%

%

%

% %

%

.%

.%

.

. xxx

x

x

 R+U

.%

 Rus

%

%

%

%

% %

%

Ukraine %

%

%

%

% %

%

%

%

%

% %

%

%

R+U Research in Russia & Ukraine, –; Rus Research in Russia, ; Ukraine Research in Ukraine, 

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

Language Markers of Jewish Identity The topic of two Jewish languages, one of which has almost lost and another of which has not acquired real communicative function outside of Israel, could be closed if not for two circumstances. First is the further development of a relatively new tendency of religious and secular “neo-Yiddishism”47 as a unique model of Jewish identity. This tendency can be compared to the Yugnd-Ruf (lit. “youth call” in Yiddish) – secular patriotism of the Diaspora, whose symbol is Yiddish culture (Soldat-Jaffe 2012, 67–70). It originally emerged in the United States in 1964 and then in some other countries of the West.48 Although the organizational influence of YugndRuf in the post-Soviet environment was felt only marginally, a trend ideologically close to the American movement appeared in the post-Soviet space as early as the early 2000s (Chernin 2008). This model is mainly found in CIS capital cities among representatives of the European intelligentsia of the middle-age and especially younger generations, including those of mixed origin. These people consciously decided on a systematic study of Yiddish in adulthood, ascribing an important identification role to this language and its culture. Russian Jewish ethnographer Valery Dymshits notes that the emergence of this phenomenon has become a form of protest against the officialdom of institutional Jewish infrastructure: Yiddish has become a banner and center of crystallization of Jewish identity for too few, mostly younger, groups. “Yiddish,” prof. Dymshits believes, “has not (and is unlikely to) become their language of daily communication, but it has sure become a major symbolic value, like a cultural code. The new “Yiddish community,” not to count small groups that study this language, is taking shape around two centers: Klezmer music and the Internet” (Dymshits 2012). An increased interest in Yiddish among the Jewish youth of Moscow in search of their ethnic and cultural roots within subsequent years was also observed during the 2010–2011 survey by social anthropologist Dina Pisarevskaya (Khanin and Pisarevskaya 2013). Obviously, the number of activists who do not speak Yiddish fluently but who view it as a symbol of their identity or their cultural heritage (the “heritage language” in the American sense of the term) cannot be large enough to turn this model of linguistic identity into a sustainable trend.

 The term “new-Yiddishism” was introduced by Chernin in his preface to Michael Felzenbaum’s Shabesdikeh shvebelech novel (“Saturday Matches”) 2004; 2006.  Researcher at the Jewish Studies Center of Michigan University, Eli Rosenblatt, defines this movement as “an apolitical organization, but it is steeped in Yiddishism, an ideology formed in the 19th century that sought to identify Jews not exclusively by land or religion but by the Yiddish language, as well. The organization is not associated with the left” (Rosenblatt 2008).

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Language Markers of Jewish Identity

Another factor is a fairly wide familiarization of the extended Jewish population of the former Soviet Union with basic Hebrew; it covered 55% of our 2019 respondents. Of these, less than one fifth (10% of the total number of respondents) studied Hebrew “on their own” (i.e., outside of the above-mentioned Hebrew-teaching systems), almost 25% mastered this language at a Sochnut or an Israeli Embassy Ulpan class, a little more than 10% in a Jewish day school, about 6% in the Jewish Sunday school, another 12% in Joint-sponsored Hesed community centers, a Jewish religious community or within community programs. 9% of respondents (or 17% of those who studied Hebrew) are familiar with Hebrew because they spent some time in Israel (Table 8.5). Table 8.5: Comparison of Hebrew Learning Experiences of Respondents from Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova, 2019. Have you ever studied Hebrew, and if yes, where did you do that? Yes, by myself Yes, in Ulpan of the Jewish Agency or of the Israeli Embassy Yes, at a Jewish day school Yes, at a Jewish Sunday school Yes, at a Hesed center, in a Jewish religious community or other Jewish community programs I lived and/or studied for some time in Israel Other Never studied this language University Total

Total

Country Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % % %

% % % –

% % % %

% % % –

% % % –

%

%

%

%

%

,









In the European republics, the smallest proportion of respondents who never studied Hebrew was in Moldova (28%), the largest in Russia (58%). Even fewer people who studied Hebrew in one way or another were registered in Kazakhstan: the average for the country was only 28%, which is 1.5 times less than the average among Jews and members of their families in the European part of the post-Soviet space. However, in Almaty, where the majority of the Jews of this Asian republic live and where the bulk of Jewish educational institutions are based, the proportion of members of the extended Jewish population involved in this activity in various forms and at different stages of life reached almost half – 43%, which was even more than in the capital cities of Russia and Belarus. In Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Minsk, the proportion of those who studied Hebrew

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

one way or another was 1.5 times lower than in the provinces. This can be explained at least in part by the fact that the main flow of repatriates (which sharply decreased in 2002–2014) came from the provinces and by emigration sentiments, which at the time of the survey were twice more spread among the Jews of the province in Belarus (more than three times higher in Russia) than among the capital’s Jewish population. This naturally increased the demand of the local Jewish population for the services of Ulpans, Jewish schools, and community Hebrew courses. Presumably, following the general trend, they were also attended by many of those who did not intend to emigrate at all. In Kazakhstan, the situation was exactly the opposite. 36% of the polled residents of Almaty told us of their intentions to emigrate from the country, primarily to Israel, which is 2–3 times more than those polled in the provincial towns of Karaganda, Pavlodar, and Shymkent (respectively, 11%, 18%, and 12%). Almost no special differences were found between the metropolitan and provincial communities in Ukraine and Moldova, either in emigration sentiments or in their interest in learning Hebrew (Table 8.6). Table 8.6: Experience of Learning Hebrew / Place of Residence. Did you ever study Hebrew?

Russia region

Kazakhstan region

Capital

Province

Capital

Province

Capital

Province

% % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % %

% % % % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N













Yes, by myself Yes, in Ulpan Yes, at a Jewish day school Yes, at a Jewish Sunday school Yes, at the Jewish community Lived and/or studied in Israel Other Studied in some way, total Never studied this language Total

Belarus region

Did you ever study Hebrew?

Ukraine, communities Capital

Yes, by myself Yes, in Ulpan Yes, at a Jewish day school Yes, at a Jewish Sunday school Yes, in Jewish community programs

% % % % %

Big % % % % %

Moldova, region

small

Capital

Province

% % % % %

– % % – %

% % % % %

Language Markers of Jewish Identity

141

Table 8.6 (continued) Did you ever study Hebrew?

Ukraine, communities Capital

small

Capital

Province

% %  %

% %  %

% %  %

% %  %

% %  %

%

%

%

%

%

%

N











Lived and/or studied in Israel Other Studied in some way, total Never studied this language Total

Big

Moldova, region

None of the above was enough for the practical assimilation of Hebrew at the level of at least a third language. One of the reasons is the lack of practice outside of Jewish educational structures that is necessary for command of the language. But involvement in the “near-Hebrew circles” (among the mini-communities of socializing groups) that inevitably emerged around these educational structures influenced the role of Hebrew in Jewish identity formation. The proportion of those who studied the language in formal or informal Jewish educational structures was directly proportional to the stability of Jewish identity, while the share of those who never studied it was inversely proportional to it. Only a quarter of Jewish “universalists” never studied Hebrew, neither did slightly over 40% of “ethno-civic Jews,” half of those with mixed or “universal” identification, and three quarters of “non-Jews” (Table 8.7). Table 8.7: Experience of Learning Hebrew According to Cultural Identity. Did you ever study Hebrew, and Total if yes, where did you do that?

Yes, by myself Yes, in Ulpan of the Jewish Agency or of the Israeli Embassy Yes, at a Jewish day school Yes, at a Jewish Sunday school Yes, in Hesed, religious or other Jewish community programs Lived in Israel for some time Other Never studied this language University Total

Identity Just Rus / Rus / etc. Only Rus / Jewish other Jew and Jewish Other

A human being

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % –

% % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % –

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

142

Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

This pattern seems to work by age as well. In our study back in 2008, Hebrew was studied to some degree by over 90% of young Jews living in Russia with a “universal Jewish” identity, by more than 65% of “ethnic” (“Russian”) Jews, and by 36% of those with dual self-identification (simultaneously Jewish and Russian) (Khanin and Pisarevskaya 2013). More than 60% of the youth cohort of the “extended Jewish population” who told us of their predominantly or exclusively Russian identity also studied Hebrew. This fact was easily explained by the quantitative dominance in this group of non-Jewish spouses who studied Hebrew both in the context of their “resocialization” into their new environment and in the context of their families’ migration plans. Our 2019 study helped add the above-mentioned educational platforms to this pattern. The proportion of young people aged 16–25 studying Hebrew in Jewish day schools (21%) turned out to be three times higher, the percentage of fluent Hebrew speakers or those with conversational Hebrew turned out twice as high, and the number of those who never studied Hebrew was 1.5 times lower than the sample average. For the first time in our studies, we randomly found people in this and the next age subgroups who studied Hebrew within the system of Jewish school and university education. Meanwhile, representatives of the 61+ age cohort chose the “other” option (i.e., various opportunities outside the standard language-learning systems), twice as often as the sample average. In the same subgroup (where people of full Jewish origin make up the absolute majority and double the share of the sample average), a relatively larger number have never studied Hebrew. Otherwise, the differences between age groups were minimal. Table 8.8: Experience in Hebrew Learning / Age. Did you ever study Hebrew, and if yes, where did you do that? Yes, by myself Yes, in Ulpan of the Jewish Agency or of the Israeli Embassy Yes, at a Jewish day school Yes, at a Jewish Sunday school Yes, in Hesed, religious or other Jewish community programs Lived in Israel for some time Other Never studied this language University Total

Age Total Up to  – – + % % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

,





% % 



Language Markers of Jewish Identity

143

At first glance, if we assume that age plays a leading role in learning Hebrew, the situation is simple: Yiddish is a priority in identification and behavioral patterns of the older generation, while Hebrew is a priority among young people. But this issue looks more complicated if we remember that despite the weakening of the communicative role of the Jewish languages in the late Soviet period, “folklore” words and expressions in Yiddish, known to almost all Soviet and post-Soviet generations of Russian-speaking Jews, continue to play the role of ethnic markers. It would seem that in the new era, borrowings from Yiddish should have been gradually replaced by language markers of Hebrew origin, primarily in young people’s lexicon. At the beginning of the postSoviet era, things sure seemed that way.49 However, our study does not support this assumption. The table below shows that those who know individual words and phrases in Yiddish make up about one fifth of respondents under the age of 60, and a quarter of respondents in the oldest age group. Approximately the same was the share of those who knew individual words and phrases in Hebrew in the same age categories (from one fifth to a little less than one third). This means that, unlike in the first decade of the 21st century (if the then observations really reflected an objective process), Hebrew today does not so much fill the gap left by Yiddish in the language system of symbols but rather joins it in some sort of language symbiosis (Table 8.9). Table 8.9: Self-Assessment of Level of Knowledge of Yiddish and Hebrew / Age. Age Total

up to 

–

–

+

Self-assessment of knowledge of Yiddish or another Jewish language of the diaspora Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

Self-assessment of knowledge of Hebrew Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand

 The author repeatedly heard this opinion from numerous envoys of the department of education of the Jewish Agency who worked in FSU countries in the 1990s and early 2000s.

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

Table 8.9 (continued) Age

Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total

Total

up to 

–

–

+

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

This conclusion is to some extent consistent with the ethnographic observations of Dymshits: “Hebrew has lost the charm of the forbidden fruit but has become associated with the routine of public Israeli programs. Yiddish has acquired all the charm of exclusivity, privacy, something that is not connected either with the state or with ideology, but only with a romantic past, art and literature.” And even more: “Young people who study Yiddish and are fond of the shtetl culture . . . sing Jewish songs and go on Jewish expeditions, often have no Jewish grandparents. Jewish culture, especially Jewish music and songs are beginning to attract nonJewish youth as well” (Dymshits 2020). Yiddish fluency at different levels was proportional to the ethnicity of respondents, but a significant number of “non-Jews” who reported in 2019–2020 the knowledge of individual words and phrases in Yiddish is truly interesting (Table 8.10). Obviously, respondents without Jewish roots borrowed this knowledge from their Jewish spouses and parents-in-law, while descendants of the fourth generation of mixed marriages borrowed it from their more distant ancestors (great-grandparents), from family folklore, or from youth groups. It is due to them that this originally nonTable 8.10: Self-Assessment of Yiddish Language Proficiency / Ethnic Origin. Yiddish

Number of Jewish grandparents Total

Fluent in this language Able to communicate Able to understand Know a few words and phrases Not at all Total

–





None

% % % % %

% % % % %

– % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









New Dilemmas of Our Days

145

Jewish part of the “extended Jewish population” became part of Jewish communities. This phenomenon may have medium-term, but perhaps also long-term significance.

New Dilemmas of Our Days The invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine and the global upheaval it caused did not bypass the Jewish world, including its Russian-speaking part. It poses new difficult questions for researchers and practitioners. For example, can we assert that the terms “new Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnicity” and “Russian-speaking Jewry” will remain equivalent concepts, i.e., will the Russian language remain to a visible extent a linguistic marker of each of the ethno-civic groups of the Russianspeaking Jewish sub-ethnos or at least a generally understandable and acceptable language of intercommunal communication? Will Russian-speaking Jews and members of their families begin to abandon Russian completely and en masse in favor of the languages of their host countries in the very near future: Ukrainian, Romanian (in Moldova), Latvian German, English, Hebrew, etc.? And will the area of the Russian language be limited to one of the largest segments of the transnational diaspora of the Jews of the former USSR, the Russian Federation (and possibly Belarus and Kazakhstan)? It is still difficult to predict how events will develop in the long term, but it seems that at least in the current generation, the former will be more likely. Let’s look at the illustrative example of the “war aliya” in Israel. As can be seen from the results of a survey of repatriates who arrived in January-May 2022 (MOIA-Tel Dor 2022), the Russian language, with the exception of isolated cases, is the main means of communication not only for almost all repatriates from Russia (which is understandable), but also of 2/3 immigrants from Belarus and of the same number of repatriates from Ukraine (65%). Plus, the use of both Russian and Ukrainian languages in everyday life was declared by almost 17% of repatriates from Ukraine. This was a little less than almost one fifth of Ukrainian Jews who declared Ukrainian language as the one used in their everyday life. There was also no particular difference in the language issue between the age cohorts. This is especially significant in the light of the unacceptance of everything Russian, often including Russian language and culture, by Ukraine, the country currently at war with Russia (Tables 8.11–13). Judging by the same data, Russian is slightly more actively used in everyday communication by carriers of universal Jewish identity, just as this was the subgroup with the highest proportion of those who recognized the existence of a transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora in our main study of 2019–2020. The study showed that among the “war aliya 2022,” persons who declared their

146

Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

Table 8.11: Language of Communication with Family and Close Friends / Country of Origin, “War Aliya,” 2022. What language do you use in your family and with close friends?

Total

Country of origin Ukraine

Russia and others

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Russian Ukrainian, Belarussian, etc. Both Russian and Ukrainian, etc. Another language

Table 8.12: Language of Communication with Family and Close Friends / Age, “War Aliya,” 2022. Language used with with family and friends

Russia Total

Ukraine Age at aliya

Total

Up to  – Russian Ukrainian Both Russian and Ukrainian, etc. Another language No answer

.%   .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

Total, %%

.% .%

N





.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

– .% .% .% .% .%

– .% .% .% .% .%

+ .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% 









non-Jewish ethnic identity noticeably more often chose national languages of the host countries. And bearers of local Jewish identity more often stated that they use both languages equally (which is natural): Russian and another. Nevertheless, the Russian language as a language of communication so far clearly dominates in all cultural identification groups. To what extent is this also true for the Jews and members of their families who remained in their countries of origin or who intend to return there some time in the future? It seems that at least at this stage, they do not have too many alternatives to the Russian language as a means of communication or a platform for the development of local Jewish culture, although, of course, activists of the Jewish segment of the movement for cultural separation from the “Russian world” will do their best to expand the process of community building in the direction of languages of the titular nations as soon as possible.

New Dilemmas of Our Days

147

Table 8.13: Language of Communication with Family and Close Friends / Ethnic Identity, “War Aliya,” 2022. Language of communication with family and friends

Russian Ukrainian, etc. Both Russian and Ukrainian, etc. Another language Total

% N=

Total

Ethnic Identity Non-Jewish Russian, Ukrainian, Just Jewish etc. Jew

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.%

.%

.%

.%









“Despite the fact that many of my 100% Jewish acquaintances demonstratively switched to Ukrainian in the public sphere,” noted Mikhail Gold, chief editor of the Kyiv Jewish newspaper Hadashot, in correspondence with the present author, “we are still talking about Ukraine. In Israel, the situation is different; nothing threatens the status of the Russian language there. Although many repatriates from Ukraine in March-May of this year, as far as I can tell from my long conversations, are not ready to identify themselves as “Russian-speaking Jews.” “Official” identification with Russia, Russian language, etc. is now problematic, which does not prevent these people from speaking Russian. Perhaps they would easily fit into the category of “Ukrainian Jews that speak Russian.”” In fact, if we take Ukraine as the most indicative case study, something similar is happening in Ukrainian society as a whole. According to the all-Ukrainian survey conducted by the Rating Sociological Group in March 2022, there is a noticeable increase in the share of those who consider Ukrainian their mother tongue: from 57% in 2012 to as high as 76% at the time of the survey. And a corresponding reduction by more than half (from 42% to 20%) of those who call Russian their native language. At the same time, the number of those who constantly use only Ukrainian in their everyday life has slightly increased – from 44% to 48% – while the reduction in the number of “declared Russian speakers” according to the same data is mainly due to their transfer into the category of “bilinguals” – from 15% to 32% (Rating 2022). It is hard to doubt that the sociological conclusion that “linguistic selfidentification and the language of everyday communication are two different [social] platforms” is quite applicable both to the evolution of the cultural and linguistic identity of Jews in Ukraine and to the process of new repatriates’ integration in Israel. A very significant, if not the main channel of it is in the community

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Chapter 8 Language as a Tool and Symbol of Ethnocultural Identity

of immigrants from the former USSR that has developed in the country, whose language marker, regardless of country of origin, is Russian and/or Russian-Hebrew bilingualism. A similar situation should take place in the largest Russian-speaking Jewish community in Europe, Germany, a country that has received the largest (apart from Israel) group of recent Jewish immigrants from the former USSR. We do not have data on quantitative trends in their environment. However, some conclusions we can glean from a series of in-depth interviews, conducted by this author in September 2022, with a group of persons that were deeply involved in the process of revising and adaptation of recent Jewish immigrants from the FSU in Germany. Judging their observations, these people at this stage almost unanimously (albeit with some reservations) believed that Russian remains the main and, in many cases, even ultimate language of communication both among the “war time immigrants” (regardless the FSU country of origin) and with veteran Jewish immigrants from that region. Thus, one can cautiously conclude that they are more likely to accept the rules of the game already established in this community than promote any other cultural language standards. A cultural and linguistic situation close to or identical with the Israeli model has developed in recent decades in other communities of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, including those that received a relatively modest influx of the last wave of Jewish immigrants from the former USSR. These include both large (USA, Canada, Australia) and relatively small (Austria, Czech Republic, France, Britain, and Benelux) communities of immigrants from the former USSR. In other words, it is unlikely that the status of the Russian language in this diaspora is going to be significantly undermined in the coming decades either in its communicative or in its ethno-symbolic functions.

Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR – State-of-Affairs and Prospects Considering the results of large-scale sociocultural and ideological transformations within the Jewish population of various successor countries of the USSR in the three post-Soviet decades, whose analysis we have presented in previous chapters, it is important to understand where and how these processes take place. What is the “Jewish space” of this gigantic region today in the geographical, institutional, group, personal, and other relevant meanings of this word? In its more “material” framework, this space is often understood as “a frame within which all and everyone are “those who belong,” and where the rules and order should be observed or considered even by those who violate them” (Levinson 2020, 47). Nosenko-Stein (2011; 2014b) presented an interesting example of such a phenomenon of “those who belong” and “aliens” in the context of a combination of “holy” and “everyday” material elements of Jewish urban life. No less important, and in our case even more important, are the so called “strong social ties” whose role in stimulating cultural and other forms of assimilation in a “foreign” environment has been documented (Dietz 2000; Rutland 2011), and whose role in the formation and strengthening of Jewish diaspora-based ethnic identity, including in historical perspective, has also become the object of attention of academics (for instance: Collar 2013, 224–225). The key factors here include the influence of socio-cultural environment – family, friends, and the circle of everyday communication with people and groups that an individual shares many aspects of life with. Also pertinent is degree of involvement in the spheres of structures, systems, and institutions that often become the center of gravity or even the structure-forming factor for these “strong ties” and are capable of ensuring the assimilation and strengthening of Jewish practices and identity models. The main question of interest in this regard is the probability of one of the two scenarios. One of them is the gradual assimilation by the periphery of the “extended” Jewish population of the actual Jewish components of stable Jewish identity models that have developed over the past decades, the modes of their cultural and behavioral expression, and one’s personal interest in the assimilation and transmission of these models and practices to the next generations. Another option includes, on the contrary, situations where the instability, ambivalence, and the situational nature of Jewish and quasi-Jewish identification typical of the periphery eventually captures or has already captured its “ethnic core.”

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-009

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Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

Personal Space and Social Environment The closest communication environment, including friendship networks, of the vast majority of our respondents, is extremely ethnically mixed, and in the 15 years since our last survey, this trend has only intensified. For instance, the share of respondents with all or predominantly Jewish close friends in 2019 was just over a quarter for people of fully Jewish origin, 13% for “half-Jewish,” and a tenth for “quarter-Jews” and people with more distant Jewish roots or with none at all. The highest share of non-Jews was among close friends of the “quarter-Jews” (27%), while the lowest (13%) was among “full” Jews. The share of those who stated they were not interested or never asked about friends’ ethnicity was directly proportional to the level of homogeneity of Jewish origin. But the largest (48%) was the proportion of those who said they had an approximately equal number of Jews and non-Jews in their immediate environment. Approximately the same trend was seen in all groups of respondents, ranked here according to their ethnic origin (Table 9.1). Table 9.1: Friendships and Social Circles / Ethnic Origin. What is the ethnicity of your closest friends? Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say Total





All

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –





None

% % % − %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%



,









There were no significant differences in these parameters between age cohorts either. The only exception was the 61+ age cohort in its disproportionate representation in the subcategory of persons of homogeneous Jewish origin. In this age cohort, the proportion of those who mainly communicated with other Jewish people was 1.5 times higher than the sample average, and that of those who communicated predominantly with non-Jews almost two times lower than the sample average (Table 9.2). The situation in Kazakhstan, as seen from an additional survey conducted at the beginning of 2020, turned out to be somewhat different. About half of its respondents under the age of 55 and only 35% of those over the age of 55 were predominantly

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Personal Space and Social Environment

Table 9.2: Friendships and Social Circles / Gender and Age. What is the ethnicity of your closest friends? Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say Total

Gender

Age –

–

–

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%













Total

Male

% % % % %

% % % % %

% ,

Fem

+

friends with non-Jews. The decisive factor here, apparently, was involvement in the activities of the Jewish community and Jewish organizations: in general, almost half (more precisely, 49%) of non-affiliated respondents had non-Jewish friends, while among affiliated respondents this figure was slightly more than a third (34%). Therefore, ethnic origin of members of the Jewish communities (adjusted to the local social and cultural context) in most cases determined the differences in the social circles of our respondents in various countries of the former USSR (Table 9.2). In Ukraine, where the relative majority of respondents were people of homogeneous Jewish origin, the proportion of respondents who reported that (almost) all their close friends were Jews was 1.5 times higher than the average for four European countries of the former USSR and 5.5 times (!) more than in Kazakhstan. In Kazakhstan, the most popular answer (43%, twice the average for four European countries) was “most of my friends are non-Jews,” which is quite consistent with the fact that almost half (46%) of the local community are representatives of the third generation of mixed families. Plus, Jewish people here have “massively embraced” the local civic-national identity of “Kazakhstanis,” as was noted by experts in those relatively calm and stable years “before COVID −19” when our survey was conducted (Table 9.3). In Russia, where the proportion of people of mixed ancestry in the third generation (34%) was higher than in any other country of the former USSR except Kazakhstan, there were also more respondents with predominantly non-Jewish friendship environment (27%) than in the other three European states. But unlike Ukraine and Moldova, Russian “imperial” socio-political discourse devotes a relatively modest place to the theme of ethnicity (while maintaining latent or open xenophobia, of course) (Among others, this trend in a course of recent years was shown by the ongoing monitoring surveys of the Moscow Levada Center (Levada

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Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

Table 9.3: Friendships and Social Circles / Country of Residence. FSU Europe

FSU Asia

Total

Ukraine

Russia

Moldova

Belarus

Kazakhstan

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,











Ethnicity of close friends Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say

Ethnic origin (N of Jewish grandparents) –   None Total

2015; 2022). This, in turn, could reduce the importance of the ethnic criterion in respondents’ choice of friends.) Moldova stood out with the highest proportion of respondents involved in the most heterogeneous friendships (more than 2/3 – 68% of respondents – reported that Jews and Gentiles were almost equally represented among their close friends). In this case, apparently, the tone was set by the more numerous nonJewish members of Jewish families than in the survey sample in other countries of the former USSR, and at the same time by the relatively high proportion of descendants of mixed marriages in the first generation. Belarus clearly fell out of this general logical series. With almost 40% of this country’ residents of homogeneous Jewish origin in the extended Jewish population, just like in Ukraine, and similar to the Moldovan share of descendants of the first generation of mixed marriages (31%), the share of surveyed Belarusian Jews who closely communicate mainly with non-Jews was noticeably higher (by 6–7%) than in the Jewish communities of Moldova and Ukraine. And on the contrary, the proportion of those who belonged to social circles with Jews only or with the equal number of Jews and non-Jews was relatively low, just like in Russia. The general context of the existence of a relatively small community (six times smaller than in Ukraine) in a country with a clearly defined ethnic Belarussian, predominantly Russian-speaking majority seems to have played a significant role here. And as this book shows later, Belarus had the lowest level of anti-Semitism

Personal Space and Social Environment

153

among the five countries at the time of our study. It is no coincidence that the proportion of Belarusian Jews and members of their families who said they were never interested in their friends’ ethnicities was second only to Kazakhstan, amounting to 17% (compared to 11% in Ukraine and only 1% in Moldova, the two countries where, unlike in Belarus and Russia, the national-ethnic theme is very relevant and often an acute part of national discourse). These inter-regional differences in the composition of personal and collective space of the extended Jewish population exist in conjunction with intra-regional differences, primarily between Jews in the capital and members of large and small Jewish communities in the provinces. One would expect that in the capital cities, with their most significant concentration of the Jewish population, as was found in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, and Minsk (Tolts 2018, 216, 218), the “Jewish accent” of networks of personal and group interactions between its members must be especially strong. In reality, everything is much more complex. This hypothesis proved itself in the course of our study in Ukraine (Table 9.4a), where the proportion of respondents with mostly “declared Jews” as close associates was directly proportional – and those claiming mostly non-Jews as close associates inversely proportional – to the size of Jewish communities (25% and 11% respectively, in Kyiv, 22% and 14% in large provincial cities with the significant Jewish population, such as Odessa and Dnipro, and 15% and 26% in small provincial communities). On the contrary, there were practically no differences between the Jews we interviewed in Chisinau and in provincial towns of Moldova (Table 9.4b). The effect of a small community in a relatively small country, almost entirely involved in the systems of institutional Jewish community relations, has obviously played a role in this context. Table 9.4a: Friendships and Social Circles / Community Type: Ukraine. Ethnicity of close friends

Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say Total

Total FSU

Total Ukraine

% % % % %

Ukraine communities Capital

Big (Odesa and Dnipro)

Small

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









154

Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

Table 9.4b: Friendships and Social Circles / Community Type: Moldova. What is the ethnicity of your closest friends?

Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never interested Hard to say Total

Total FSU

Total Moldova

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

N

,



Moldova communities Capital

Province

% % % % %

% % % – %

%

%





This difference existed in Russia and Belarus but on a much smaller scale than in Ukraine (Tables 9.4с and 9.4d). In fact, while a wider (compared to the capital cities) circle of non-Jewish communication in the Russian and Belarusian provinces was due to mainly by understandable demographic reasons, the situation in Moscow stood out. The level of the “Jewish accent” in the system of personal connections in this largest city in the post-Soviet space and one of the three largest (along with New York City and Haifa) Russian-speaking Jewish communities in the world turned out to be two times weaker than in St. Petersburg, 1.5 times weaker than in Minsk, and almost three times weaker than in Kyiv (respectively, 9%, 17%, 13%, and 25%). This phenomenon can be best explained, among other reasons, by the accentuated cosmopolitan atmosphere of the global metropolis. Table 9.4c: Friendships and Social Circles / Community Type: RF. Ethnicity of close friends

Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say Total

Total FSU

Total Russia

% % % % %

Russian communities Moscow

St. Petersburg

Province

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









Personal Space and Social Environment

155

Table 9.4d: Friendships and Social Circles / Community Type: Belarus. What is the ethnicity of your closest friends?

Total FSU

Total Belarus

% % % % % %% N=

Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never interested Hard to say Total

Belarus communities Capital

Province

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

,







So, we are dealing with a confrontation between two tendencies. On the one hand, there is a significant Jewish population, often disproportionately represented in certain areas of professional activity (management, media, business, etc.), plus the availability of convenient platforms for specific socialization in the face of an extensive system of Jewish community institutions. According to the theory of social, geographical, and cultural propinquity, all of this should be a powerful factor in the ethnic consolidation of communication networks and public space in general (Cohen S. and Horenczyk 2012). On the other hand, the following phenomenon was noticed in the course of numerous studies over the past 30 years by head of the Levada Center, Lev Gudkov: “Communication and everyday interaction with the Jews prevail in Moscow and big cities, in the “middle class” (to a greater extent even in the upper-middle class), among predominantly educated, active and enterprising people and their children” (Gudkov 2021). Opportunities provided by communication systems that open up within the framework of such a mix seem to leave little room for hesitation. But a Jewish complex has no less attractive force, for, with the abolition of state anti-Semitism and the corresponding decrease in everyday anti-Semitism, its prestige has been steadily growing throughout the post-Soviet decades. Not only “pure” Jews but also people of mixed origin, including those with distant Jewish roots, spoke quite openly about it, according to observers and researchers. For example, according to Elena Nosenko-Stein’s interviewees in Moscow and some regions of Russia, “it is now fashionable to be a Jew, it’s cool to be a Jew, because it means that you are successful, you are financially secure, you are smart” (quoted in Lyalenkova 2017; cf. Lukimson 2014; Zhegulev 2018). It is no coincidence that almost 2/3 (64%) of our respondents stated that the sphere of their personal or group friendships contains some Jewish component. And 69% said they had non-Jewish friends in their personal landscape. This is one of the indicators of the phenomenon, as we may call it, of the “involved self-exclusion” of the Jews from the system of diverse and extensive ties of predominantly urban

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Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

communities within host countries, practiced while maintaining some model of Jewish identity. Our study saw a very clear relationship between the level of unconditional Jewish identity of members of culture-identifying groups and the proportion of respondents in them who reported a predominantly or even exclusively Jewish friendship environment. From 1% of those with a Russian or other non-Jewish ethnic identity (less than a fifth of whom declared that they undoubtedly feel Jewish) who indicated that their friendship ties were limited only or mainly to Jews – up to 36% of “universal Jews” who marked the same answer and whose proportion of carriers of unconditional Jewish feeling was already 96% (Table 9.5). Table 9.5: Friendships and Social Circles / Ethnic Identity. Ethnic Identity Total Just Jewish Undoubtedly Jewish

%

Rus / Ukr / etc. Jew

Rus / etc. and A human Jewish being

Only Rus / Other

Other

%

%

%

%

%

%

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













Ethnicity of close friends Mostly Jewish Mostly nonJewish Half of each No idea – never interested Hard to say Total

For unknown reasons, exactly the same share, 32% of those who indicated that all or most of their close friends were Jewish, was registered among carriers of unconditional Jewish identity interviewed in the American National Jewish Survey in 2013 by the Pew Center (Pew 2013, 62). (In the research conducted by Pew seven years later, about three-quarters of Jewish Americans said at least “some” of their close friends were Jewish, including 30% who said all or most of their close friends shared their Jewish identity [Pew 2021, 110]). And just like in our case, but in more large-scale proportions, that survey noted that “older Jews are more connected with Jewish social networks than are younger Jews.”

Jewish Family Space: Marriage Patterns and Identity Transfer

157

Another observation of the same research was that Jews by religion are far more likely than Jews of no religion to say that most or all of their close friends are Jewish (38% vs. 14%). In our study, the ratio of those who answered the same way among the religious and those not quite sure of their religiosity, on the one hand, and among confidently non-religious respondents, on the other hand, turned out to be almost identical (39% and 13%) (Table 9.6). However, the continuing difference in the understanding of the meaning of religiosity and “Jewishness” in general among the Jews of America and the former USSR does not allow us to exclude simple coincidence. Table 9.6: Friendships and Social Circles / Religiosity Level. What is the ethnicity of your closest friends?

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

No

Not sure

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

N

,







Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say Total

Total

So, to what extent does an individual’s identity influence the choice of their social circle, and to what extent does this circle influence the formation of their identity? Today’s scholarship has no simple answer to this question so critical for our topic (Sobkin and Gracheva 1998; Tartakovsky 2013; Zabrodskaja and Ehala 2014, 1–8). An intermediate conclusion that can be drawn from the data we have obtained is this: ethnic origin is a factor in the circumstances of life that affects self-awareness, choice of friends, and sphere of communication in general. A friendship environment, in turn, helps strengthen or weaken one’s ethnic identity model.

Jewish Family Space: Marriage Patterns and Identity Transfer If in terms of mutual influence of identity and social microenvironment, regardless of where the initial impulse comes from, the Jews of the former USSR and their family members are generally similar to members of other large Jewish communities in the diaspora (see Kadushin 2011; Hartman and Sheskin 2012), it is logical to ask whether they are also affected by any other general rules. And can it mean, as some researchers of the American Jewish diaspora claim, that “Jewish

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Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

friends and social networks, especially during the teen years . . . is a predictor of [school and] college friends and choice of Jewish marriage partners” (Fishman and Cohen S. 2017)? At first glance, the answer should be positive. The nature and level of stability of the Jewish ethnic, non-Jewish, and mixed Jewish-Gentile identity of members of various culture-identifying categories (Table 9.7) in our sample show a direct relationship both with the ethnic structure of friendship networks and with the ethnic origin of marital partners. Table 9.7: Ethnicity of Friends and Marriage Partners of Members of Culture Identity Categories, 2019. Total

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Both Rus / Ukr Jewish other Jew and Jewish

A human Only Rus / being Other

What is the ethnicity of your closest friends? Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea, never interested in my friends’ ethnicity Hard to say Total, %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % % % % % % 

% % % % % % % 

% % % % % % % 

% % % % % % % 

% % % % % % % 

Who is Jewish in your spouse’s family? Both parents One of the parents One of the grandparents Nobody I am not married No answer Total Total, N

% % % % % % % ,

On the other hand, the ethnic heterogeneity of members of the “extended Jewish population” makes the answer more complicated. The growing tendency of a neutral attitude toward the ethnic origin of marriage partners among Soviet and post-Soviet Jewry (Sinelnikov 1994, 95; Ryvkina 2005) – despite residual negativity towards mixed marriages of the first post-Soviet years in the Jewish family tradition (Khanin and Chernin 2007) – is considered perhaps the main challenge to the Jewish future in the countries of the former USSR. For instance, based on the

159

Jewish Family Space: Marriage Patterns and Identity Transfer

results of a survey in Russia and Ukraine back in 1997, Gittelman, Chervyakov, and Shapiro (2000) concluded that “pure” Jews, who made up 80% of their sample, were much less inclined to choose a non-Jewish or a partly Jewish spouse than “non-pure Jews.” On this basis, they talked about the “rapid ‘washing out’ of ethnically pure Jews” and “an exponential increase in the number of mixed marriages among non-pure Jews.” Our 2019 study showed a similar, albeit somewhat more complex picture. On the one hand, the proportion of opponents of mixed marriages among “pure Jews” was twice as high as the sample average, while the proportion of supporters of such marriages and of those who considered marriages with Jews a desirable but not a fundamental requirement, was inversely proportional to the homogeneity of Jewish origin (Table 9.8). Table 9.8: Ethnic Origin and Opinions on Intermarriage, 2019. Respondents’ attitudes to Jewish-Gentile marriages Positive Negative Doesn’t matter Preferred, but not so important Hard to say Total

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –





None

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









On the other hand, only half of our family respondents of fully Jewish origin are part of a mono-ethnic marriage; 16% of such respondents had “half-Jewish” spouses, 5% had “quarter-Jewish” spouses, and almost a third had fully Gentile spouses. Accordingly, less than a fifth and a tenth of the “half” and “quarter” Jews we interviewed were married to 100% Jews, while in 50% and almost 60% of cases to 100% Gentiles. In one-third of cases, ethnic non-Jews were married to persons of fully Jewish origin, and in more than 40% of cases to grandchildren of two or one Jewish grandparents (Table 9.9). In sum, less than a fifth of married participants in our survey lived in an ethnically homogeneous Jewish marriage. In fact, contrary to demographers’ conclusions that the trend of the end of the Soviet era with Jewish men entering ethnically mixed marriages more often than Jewish women continued and even intensified in post-Soviet times (Gitelman et al 2000; Tolts 2020), our sociological study found no differences between genders in this matter either in general or in each of the four

160

Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

Table 9.9: Ethnic Origin of Respondents and Ethnicity of their Marriage Partners. Who is Jewish in your spouse’s family?

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –





None

of all sample (A/S)

%

%

%

%

%

of all married

%

.%

%

%

%

Only father, of all sample Only mother, of all sample One of the father’s parents, of A/S One of the mother’s parents, of A/S

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Nobody

of all samples

%

%

%

%

%

of all married

%

.%

%

%

%

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

,









Both parents

I am not married No answer Total

subgroups ranked according to their degree of homogeneity or heterogeneity of ethnic origin. And the gender structure of each of these subgroups differed little from the sample average, which, in turn, was generally identical to the gender structure of the general population (see Table 9.10 below). Table 9.10: Ethnic Origin versus Gender (2019 Study). Total

–





None

Male N= Female N= Other/no answer

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

Total

%

%

%

%

%

%

N











In light of these data, it is not surprising that just over a tenth of our respondents are unambiguously negative about mixed Jewish-Gentile marriages, while just over a fifth (22%) prefer a homogeneous marriage but consider it not too critical

Jewish Family Space: Marriage Patterns and Identity Transfer

161

these days. A quarter of respondents consider this topic not important, while 35% (relative majority) are unequivocally in favor of mixed marriages. Even among the “Jewish universalists” the relative majority (33%) chose the “neutral-negative” version of the answer “It is desirable that Jewish men and women marry representatives of their nationality, but it is not important.” This seems to reflect an understanding of the reality of socio-demographic processes and the context of the existence of the post-Soviet Jewry, including by carriers of the most stable Jewish identity. They, however, had a proportion higher than any other cultureidentifying category (28%) of opponents to such marriages and the smallest (18%) share of their supporters. In other culture-identifying categories, supporters of mixed marriages constituted a proportionately growing relative majority, and among ethnic non-Jews (expectedly) an absolute majority (Table 9.11). Positive or indifferent attitudes were inversely proportional to the hierarchy of Jewish identity. Compared to a survey 15 years ago, the proportion of supporters of a positive or neutral attitude to mixed marriages has grown in all culture-identifying categories, with the exception of carriers of dual ethnic identity, where it has remained virtually unchanged. Table 9.11: View of Jewish-Gentile Intermarriage by Members of Culture-Identity Groups. View of intermarriage

Positive

Research year Total

Just Rus / Rus / other A human Only Rus / Jewish other Jew and Jewish being✶ other – .%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

– .%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

– .%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

– .%

%

%

%

 Negative

 Do not care

 Prefer Jewish, but not critical Hard to say Total

✶

Ethnic Identity

% %

% %

%

% %

%

% %



%

%

%

%

%

%



%

%

%

%

%

%

– %

%

%

%

 %

%

%

%

This option was not offered in the 2004–2005 research.

% %

%

162

Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

All these data, which at first glance testify to the inflation of Jewish consciousness, contradict the conclusion about the predominantly Jewish nature of the ethnic identity of the majority of the Jewish population of the former USSR. However, other trends should also be taken into account. For example, there is a noticeable increase among carriers of non-Jewish identity of those in this group who welcome the idea of mixed Jewish-Gentile marriages (due to the reduction in the number of those who are neutral to mixed marriages), thereby demonstrating a tendency to get dissolved in the “extended Jewish community”. In addition, although it was to be expected that the younger the respondents, the higher the chance of a mixed or completely non-Jewish marriage, as was indeed the case in the age cohorts of 26 and older, the proportion of young people under 25 who married to non-Jews was the same as among respondents 61+ (Table 9.12). Keep in mind that a quarter of the closest friendships among young people and people of early middle age (26–40 years old) are with non-Jews, which Table 9.12: Ethnicity of Marriage Partners and Friendship Networks / Age, 2019. What is the ethnicity of your closest friends?

Age Total

–

–

–

Both parents Only father Only mother One of the father’s parents One of the mother’s parents

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

Nobody

of all respondents

%

%

%

%

%

of the married

%

%

%

%

%

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









I am not married No answer Total

+

What is the ethnicity of your closest friends? Mostly Jewish Mostly non-Jewish Half of each No idea – never asked Hard to say Total

163

Jewish Family Space: Marriage Patterns and Identity Transfer

is more than in the two other age groups. But it still includes a solid Jewish component: judging from our survey, it consists of 14% of ethnic Jews (this proportion is higher only in the oldest cohort) and more than 40% (to be more precise, 44%) of equally represented Jews and non-Jews. As a result, the proportion of mixed marriage supporters (28% each) in the two younger cohorts was less than among people of advanced-middle and older age (respectively, 38% and 43%). They also had more respondents (than those over 40) who, without making it a matter of principle, nevertheless considered marriages with representatives of their nationality desirable (Table 9.13). Table 9.13: Оpinion on Mixed Marriages / Gender and Age. Оpinion on mixed marriages between Jews and non-Jews Positive Negative Does not matter Preferably Jewish but not critical Hard to say Total

Gender

Age –

–

–

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%













Total

Male

% % % % %

% % % % %

% ,

Fem

+

In a sense, these data reinforce the position of those who have long noticed what is in their opinion a positive trend: when people of mixed origin look for marriage partners inside rather than outside of the “extended” Jewish population. Such a marriage, in their opinion, being mixedfrom a formal demographic point of view, does not lead to further erosion of Jewish identity (Satanovsky 2002). These people’s interaction platforms, operating in the former USSR for more than 30 years – youth clubs, community centers, educational institutions, and other Jewish community associations – seem to be an aggressive enough environment to draw a significant part of the valences of individuals’ inner circle, regardless of their original identity. This probably explains the phenomenon noted 20 years ago by Gitelman, Chervyakov, and Shapiro in their study of the Jews of Russia and Ukraine. They identified a significant group of predominantly young respondents whose national self-identification

164

Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

was not inherited. These people declared themselves Jewish despite the fact that none of their parents considered themselves Jewish (Gitelman et al 2000, 74). Finally, it is important to emphasize that attitudes toward intermarriage in the former USSR are not a reliable measure of assimilation or a lack thereof. The proportion of carriers of a stable variant of Jewish identification on average was 2.5 times higher than the proportion of those who believed that being a Jew meant being married to a Jew. Among persons of fully homogeneous Jewish origin, this ratio was 6:1, among half-Jews 7:1, among quarter-Jews 6:1, and among respondents without Jewish roots 2:1 (see Table 9.14 below). Table 9.14: Connection between Stable Jewish Feeling and Belief that Being Jewish Means Being Married to a Jew / Ethnic Origin, 2019. Opinion statements

Number of Jewish grandparents Total

Feeling fully Jewish Being Jewish means being married to a Jew Total

–





None

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

%

%

%

%

%

,









In other words, contrary to sentiments in the Soviet Jewish environment and to the traditional Halakhic approach, a tolerant attitude to mixed marriages is not always an indicator of the loss of ethnic identity at this stage.

Contradictions in Jewish Heritage Transmission But how stable is this picture? When asking about the level of desire to raise Jewish identity in existing and future children and grandchildren, such a desire really manifested itself in direct accordance with the ethnic origin of respondents. (For 58% of “full” Jews, 43% of “half-Jews,” and less than a third of “quarter-Jews” it was important that their children and grandchildren “felt” Jewish; Table 9.15.) At first glance, this indicates that the actual or “delayed” loss of ethnic identification is growing from generation to generation. If this is so, then this trend will only intensify with the growth of the share of descendants of mixed marriages in the extended Jewish population. However, this conclusion is contradicted by the fact that there are practically no differences between different age cohorts or gender groups on this issue (Table 9.16).

Contradictions in Jewish Heritage Transmission

165

Table 9.15: Ethnic origin and Importance that (Future) Children and Grandchildren (Will) Feel Jewish, 2019. Importance for (future) children and grandchildren to feel Jewish

Number of Jewish grandparents Total





None

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









Yes No Hard to answer Total

–

Table 9.16: Gender, Age, and Importance for (Future) Children and Grandchildren to Feel Jewish, 2019. Is it important?

Total

Gender Male

Yes No Hard to say Total

Age

Fem

–

–

–

+

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













Another indicator of the ambiguity of these trends were the responses of persons of completely non-Jewish origin, for the most part spouses of Jews, 31% of whom considered it important for their children to have Jewish identification. This number was comparable to the proportion of holders of the same opinion among “quarter-Jews” (Table 9.15). Exactly the same was the proportion of men and women without Jewish roots who were married to persons of full Jewish origin, and both of these categories overlapped in a statistically significant proportion. It is also significant that the proportion of supporters of the idea that being Jewish means being married to a Jew among persons of homogeneous Jewish and completely non-Jewish origin was identical (14% and 13%, respectively, 1.5 times higher than among halfJewish and twice as high as among the “grandchildren” of Jews). In this context, the

166

Chapter 9 Jewish Personal and Group Space in the Former USSR

Jewish ethnic minority rather than the demographically dominant non-Jewish majority seems to be the “strong” (assimilating) ethnic group.50 However, just as in our previous study, differences between the cultureidentification groups of participants became most noticeable in approaching this issue. For example, when asked about the importance of having Jewish children and grandchildren, almost 80% of “Jewish universalists,” 50% of “ethno-civic Jews,” 33% of (Jewish-Gentile) “postmodernists,” 14% of “citizens of the world,” and only 5% of non-Jews involved in some community activities answered positively (Table 9.17). The lack of importance placed upon having Jewish children and grandchildren turned out to be inversely proportional to the “intensity” of respondents’ Jewish selfawareness. Only 7% of “Jewish universalists,” a fifth of ethno-civic Jews and, 73% and 50% in two subgroups of carriers of non-Jewish self-awareness respectively fit that description. It is also important to understand what respondents from all these groups had in mind when they found it difficult to answer this seemingly simple question. We believe that the relatively low proportion of “universalist Jews” who answered this way indicates a significant element of ethnic ex-patriotism in their self-awareness, which, of course, has a different connotation in our time than in the Soviet era. Representatives of two “non-Jewish” culture-identification categories, a third (“cosmopolitans”) and more than a fifth (“ethnic non-Jews”) of which chose this option, demonstrated a conflicting desire to preserve their non-Jewish ethnic identity, while being part of an organized “Jewish community.” Carriers of “ethno-civic” and dual (Jewish and “other”) identity, a third of whom also found it difficult to answer this question, were guided by different considerations though. For the latter, who by self-definition belong to two different ethnic groups and cultures, such a reaction seems natural. And for “ethno-civic” (“Russian,” “Ukrainian,” etc.) Jews, this question speaks of the difficulty this group is facing with their dilemma of full integration into the local post-Soviet nations while maintaining their own ethnocultural identity. And so, the data we collected confirm conclusions of other scientific publications. According to these, with the increase in the proportion of descendants of mixed marriages in Russian-speaking Jewish communities outside of Israel, family remains an important factor in embracing Jewish identity, although it cannot guarantee its sustainability in long-term perspective and functions less and less as a channel for the transmission of Jewish ethnocultural practices. This significantly distinguishes post-Soviet Jewry from their “twice fellow tribesmen” in

 Among numerous studies of ethnic assimilation and separation trends in the context of “strong” and “weak” social entities discourse, see, for example, Crul 2016.

167

Contradictions in Jewish Heritage Transmission

Table 9.17: Importance for (Future) Children and Grandchildren to Feel Jewish / Culture-Identity Groups. Is it important?

Yes

No

Hard to answer Total

Total✶

Year of research

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Rus / Ukr Only Rus / A human Jewish other Jew and Jewish Other being



%

%

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%





%

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%





%

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%





%

%

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Israel, where mixed secular families among Russian-speaking repatriates become for the most part quickly included into the mostly civil and partly religious Jewish culture. This also distinguishes them from the Jews in western countries, such as the USA, where the 2020 Pew Center study showed that over the last decade, 2/3 of intermarried Jewish-Gentile families imbue children with some Jewish identity (Pew 2021, 40, 102–103), and this trend, according to the research, continues to grow. Under these circumstances, a positive alternative to the formation, preservation, and development of Jewish identity is the system of Jewish education and efforts of other community institutions, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure The organized institutional segment of the Jewish space of post-Soviet Eurasia is quite extensive. As mentioned before, it is essentially an alternative, or at least a critical addition, to the family and other traditional social ties in the absorption and transmission of Jewish identity and practices. It is represented in each of the post-Soviet countries by dozens and hundreds of functional and territorial Jewish organizations of various levels, with varying degrees of validity and success, acting on behalf of the Jewish population of specific countries and regions, or even post-Soviet/Russian-speaking Jews in general. Although a generalized and comprehensive historical and sociological analysis of this phenomenon is yet to be done, its individual aspects already described in some detail in the academic literature, including by this author (Gur-Gurevitz 1996; Gidwitz 1999; Khanin 2002b; Gitelman 2003). Therefore, we will confine ourselves to the minimally necessary and maximally brief description of Jewish community structures in favor of our main topic of interest – people’s motives and models of participation in the activities of these organizations and their influence on the personal and collective identification of representatives of various sociodemographic and ethnocultural groups of the Jewish population of the former USSR.

FSU Jewish Education Structure: An Overview It is generally believed that priority here belongs to Jewish educational structures. The large-scale Jewish community and cultural revival started with them in the perestroika and post-perestroika USSR during the late 1980s. The role of Jewish education in the formation and strengthening of the Jewish identification of persons of homogeneous Jewish and mixed origin is well known and well explored, primarily in America and Europe (Cohen S. Veinstein 2011; Ben-Rafael, Glöckner and Sternberg 2011). Our past studies also showed that dependence. For example, surveys of Jewish youth in 2008–2013 showed that more than half of interviewed students at Jewish schools consider themselves Jewish, 43% as carriers of a dual national identity, and only less than 5% had no Jewish component in their self-awareness. Among those involved only in non-formal Jewish education, the proportion of carriers of Jewish national self-awareness was lower (45%), while the proportion of those who did not include the Jewish component in their national selfawareness at all remained the same, about 5%. But among those who did not attend https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-010

FSU Jewish Education Structure: An Overview

169

any structures of Jewish education, only slightly more than a quarter (27.6%) considered themselves Jewish, while a sixth (16.8%) did not include the Jewish component in their national self-awareness at all (Khanin et al 2013, 46–47). This topic was no less important to our current study, and its significance for the Jewish future of local communities is obvious. By the end of the 30 post-Soviet years, due to Jewish communities of the former USSR, their umbrella associations and their sponsors, a fairly developed system of various areas of Jewish education exists in the post-Soviet space, from kindergartens to institutions of higher learning. In general terms, this system took shape already in the first decade after the collapse of the USSR due to activists of the Jewish national democratic movement of the 1970s and early 1980s, with the support of the Perestroika authorities, Israeli, and international Jewish organizations (Khanin 2002c). At the peak of this process in the early 21st century, more than 70 Jewish preschool institutions and about 60 daytime schools of various types (private and state, secular and religious) operated in the CIS and the Baltic countries, 44 of them supported by the Heftzibah program of the Israeli Ministry of Education and the Jewish Agency (“Sohnut”). Forty schools are part of three educational networks: the “secular” ORT, the religious Ohr Avner (Chabad movement) and the Shema Yisrael (other Jewish Orthodox movements), while the remaining four belonged to the so-called “independent schools” category. In addition, more than 120 Sunday schools and other structures of additional and non-formal education were in operation, about 30 elementary (cheders) and advanced (yeshivas) institutions of religious education, as well as dozens of Hebrew ulpans, youth educational centers and clubs, and numerous community educational projects for adults (clubs, courses, public universities, etc.).51 The system of higher and advanced Jewish education included structures for the training of community workers and the future staff of Jewish educational institutions. It also included a network of advanced training seminars for teachers of Jewish subjects and eight or nine Jewish universities in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kiev (Kyiv), Kharkov (Kharkiv), and Odessa, as well as dozens of university-based and independent projects in academic Jewish Studies. In those years, “close-ended educational cycle” systems were formed within individual sectors. For instance, in Odessa, such a cycle is represented by educational institutions created and supported by the Orthodox Ohr Sameach movement. It included a kindergarten, a private high school, a cheder, a yeshiva, and a local “community” branch of the Humanitarian University of Crimea. In Moscow, the Chabad movement controls a similar but much larger system

 Calculated according to the Jewish Agency, Israeli Education Ministry, St. Petersburg Community Center “New Jewish School,” and the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress data.

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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

that includes numerous institutions of preschool, school, additional and religious education, as well as two academic colleges. However, signs of the system crisis were visible even then. This was caused by the conceptual vacuum that arose at the beginning of this decade in Jewish formal education in connection with the cessation of mass aliya to Israel and the parallel inflation of the idea of a “transitional school” that prepares students not so much for life and career in one’s country of residence but for repatriation and continuing education in Hebrew. The second reason became a tangible gap between the growing needs of Jewish schools in the CIS and the financial capabilities of foreign Jewish organizations and other sponsors in funding the teaching of Jewish subjects and related extracurricular activities, which at that time was rather poorly filled with local resources. Finally, a systematic drop in the number of students in most structures of formal Jewish education (Khanin 2008) became reason number three. Ohr Avner, for example, which belongs to the religious Chabad movement, was and is the most widespread Jewish school network in the post-Soviet countries. At its peak in 2003, in consisted of 87 schools, including 32 in Russia, 37 in Ukraine, six in Belarus, three in Kazakhstan, two in Georgia, Lithuania and Uzbekistan each, and one in Azerbaijan, Estonia, Latvia, and Armenia each (Fuxon 2003). In subsequent years, negative demographic trends (a decrease in the absolute number and aging of the Jewish population of the post-Soviet states) and Chabad’s policy to define one’s belonging to the Jewish nation strictly by the Halakhic principles led to a reduction in the enrollment and the total number of schools in this network. (In cases where local rabbis and directors of the Ohr Avner schools showed flexibility in this matter, they not only were able to keep the schools open but also provided an opportunity for the younger generation of the entire extended Jewish population to get a Jewish education.) Nevertheless, despite these and other reasons that the number of Jewish schools in the post-Soviet space is unstable and has tended to decrease across time, there were Jewish day schools in almost every city of the former USSR with any significant Jewish population at the beginning of 2022. In the Russian Federation, according to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR 2022) and field observations, there are today 13 daytime (primary and secondary) Ohr Avner schools, including three in Moscow, two in St. Petersburg and one in Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Perm, Volgograd, Bryansk, and Orenburg each. In addition, there are three ORT schools in Moscow and two in St. Petersburg. On top of this, Jewish schools and Jewish classes in Russian schools that do not belong to either Ohr Avner or the ORT network exist in Kazan, Saratov, Tomsk, Omsk, Tyumen, and Birobidzhan; three such schools operate in Moscow, and four in St. Petersburg. The pre-school and non-formal system of Jewish education in the Russian Federation includes Jewish kindergartens and Jewish groups in Russian kindergartens, as well as

FSU Jewish Education Structure: An Overview

171

Jewish Sunday schools in dozens of cities and towns. In addition, the subject of Fundamentals of Jewish Culture, officially approved by the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation (Savchenko 2010), can be taught to Jewish children in Russian schools at their parents’ discretion. Another country with significant Jewish population, Ukraine, right before it entered a severe military-political crisis in 2014, had Ohr Avner schools in 21 cities: Berdichev, Vinnitsa, Dnepropetrovsk (Dnepr/Dnipro), Donetsk, Zhytomyr, Zaporozhye (Zaporizhzhya), Ivano-Frankivsk, Kyiv (Kiev), Kropivnytskyi (former Kirovograd), Kremenchug, Krivoy Rog, Luhansk, Mariupol, Nikolaev (Mykola’iv), Odessa, Poltava, Kharkov (Kharkiv), Kherson, Khmelnitsky, Cherkassy, and Chernigov (Chernihiv) (FJCU 2021). Since then, the situation has somewhat changed, but Jewish education in Ukraine remained quite accessible until the start of the Russian military invasion in February 2022. According to the Vaad (Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities) of Ukraine, there are 35 Jewish daytime schools in various networks, 12 Jewish kindergartens, and about 50 Jewish Sunday schools in the country (Vaad Ukraine-JPC 2021). Other countries of the former USSR also have their networks of Jewish education: Belarus has two secular Jewish schools in Minsk, the religious Beis-Aharon boarding school in Pinsk, and Sunday schools in most of the two dozen Jewish communities. The capital of Moldova, Chisinau, has two Jewish ORT lyceums (the Herzl Technological Lyceum and the Rambam Theoretical Lyceum). The only state-run Jewish kindergarten and a Jewish Sunday school have been operating in Moldova at the Kedem community center since 1993. A Sunday school is also functioning at the Jewish community center of the town of Beltzy. Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, has an Ohr Avner school with the Georgian-language teaching, Vilnius has the Sholom Aleichem ORT Jewish Gymnasium with Lithuanian as the teaching language, Riga has the secular Dubnov Jewish Secondary School with Russian and Latvian the languages of teaching, Tallinn has a secular Jewish secondary school with Russian-language teaching, and Baku has a religious Jewish school in which Russian and Azerbaijani are the languages used to teach, jointly funded by the government of Azerbaijan and the American Jewish Vaad le-Atsalah organization (STEMGI 2016). The overwhelming majority of these schools enjoy the status of state educational establishments and, besides foreign and local private donations, are also funded by post-Soviet Governments. In addition, in the late 2020 the MOE/JAFI Heftziba program still supported the Jewish studies curricula and complimentary educational events in 46 of the schools, which included bringing experienced Israeli teachers of these disciplines to teach on-site for a period of three to five academic years (Rental et al 2020, 4).

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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

Included in this picture are also Jewish institutions of higher learning in Russia and Ukraine, including the Beit Chana International Humanitarian Pedagogical Institute in the city of Dnipro (Dnepr), which trains teachers for Jewish schools, the Maimonides Moscow State Classical Academy, and a network of specialized Jewish Studies departments that train highly qualified specialists in Jewish disciplines. Such departments are available at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, at the Russian State Humanitarian University, at St. Petersburg State University and the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. All these departments and institutes actively cooperate with Israeli (more rarely with American) academic institutions, primarily the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which regularly sends Israeli specialists to them as lecturers. The Moscow-based Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization has been actively cooperating with Israeli specialists since 1994, and over 6,000 people have taken part in its various programs over the years. So, the question of the extent to which the existing infrastructure of Jewish education in the CIS and Baltic countries is able to meet educational needs of the “core” and “cloud” of the Jewish communities of Euro-Asia is most likely to have a positive answer. But is there a public demand for it?

Jewish Education Involvement Patterns At first glance, the picture looks relatively good, with more than 40% of our respondents in 2019 reporting some form of Jewish education. There are, however, significant differences between the post-Soviet countries: for example, in Moldova, this share was twice as high, and in Kazakhstan twice as low as the sample average. In addition, half of those cases consisted of non-compulsory, non-formal education – classes in Judaism and Jewish history at a community center, synagogue, or a Jewish club, while another 13% were engaged in self-education. Seven percent of respondents had received formal and semi-formal education in day schools and Sunday schools with formal curricula; 3% had experience in the academic study of Judaism; 4% lived and studied in Israel for some time, and 1% were students of cheders or yeshivas. Almost 40% of respondents with children and grandchildren sent them to Jewish day or Sunday schools. It is also interesting to note that involvement in the system of organized Jewish education in Ukraine and Belarus was higher in the capital cities, while in Russia, on the contrary, it was higher in the provinces, and in Moldova it was evenly distributed throughout the country. Compared to the previous survey, the proportion of those who believe it is very important for a Jew to have a good Jewish education has decreased 1.5 times over 15 years (from 41% to 28%), while the proportion of those who consider Jewish education optional has doubled (from 7% to 13%). However, almost half (47%)

173

Jewish Education Involvement Patterns

of those polled (vs. one third in 2004–2005) thought Jews should have at least basic understanding of Jewish history, tradition, and culture. And another 11% found it difficult to answer, which does not unequivocally remove them and their children and grandchildren from among the potential clients of Jewish educational structures. Jewish education was practically the only topic that received diminished enthusiasm among the older generation of 61+. Given that this age category contains the highest proportion of people of homogeneous Jewish origin, it had more supporters of good Jewish education for each Jew than did “half-Jewish” and “quarter-Jews.” However, the older generation considered it important for every Jew to have good Jewish education 1.5 times less often than younger age cohorts. The reason, as one might assume, was the presence or absence of personal experience with this system. This assumption was fully confirmed during the survey: only 1% of respondents aged 61 and older and 2% of the 41–60 age group had experience of a Jewish day or full-time Sunday school (17%-18% attended classes in Judaism and Jewish history at a community center, synagogue, or Jewish club), while the early middle-aged cohort of 26–40 years had 10% of such respondents, and the 16–25 cohort had as many as 25% of them (Table 10.1). Table 10.1: Opinion on Importance and Experience of Jewish Education / Age. Age Total – – – + What is your opinion on Jewish education? It is important for every Jew to obtain good Jewish education

%

%

%

%

%

It is enough to have a general idea of Jewish history, tradition, and culture

%

%

%

%

%

No need to have a Jewish education

%

%

%

%

%

Hard to answer

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Attend/ed academic Jewish studies programs

%

%

%

%

%

Lived and studied in Israel

%

%

%

%

%

Total

% %

Do you have any Jewish education? Studied/study in a Jewish day school Attend/ed Judaism and Jewish history classes at a Jewish community center

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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

Table 10.1 (continued) Age Total – – – + %

%

%

%

%

Got my Jewish knowledge from self-education

%

%

%

%

%

No Jewish education

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,





Studied/study in a cheder or a yeshiva

Other Total

% % 



Note that only 14% of these young people in our 2019 sample were of full Jewish descent, while a third were “half-Jewish,” more than 40% were “quarter-Jews,” and another 12% had more distant Jewish roots or were spouses of Jews and their descendants. Some of them could have gotten into a Jewish school – especially a Sunday Jewish school – along with their Jewish friends, but family still plays the main role in such cases. This makes the situation even more confusing, since both parents of most of the young respondents were of partial or even non-Jewish origin. This paradox has an explanation: the proportion of respondents without Jewish roots (i.e., spouses of Jews and persons of mixed origin) who considered a good Jewish education important turned out to be comparable with (even somewhat higher than) the proportion of “pure” Jews who shared this opinion – 34% and 32% respectively. “I travel a lot around communities,” shared Chief Rabbi of Russia, Adolf Shayevich (according to the Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities in Russia – KEROOR). “In September, I have Russian mothers lining up here. Jewish dads do not even show up. And mothers come, ‘I want my child to attend a Jewish school only.’ Education is good. Attitudes are good. And they (these ladies) do not mean Sunday schools, but full-time day schools.”52 Indeed, about 70% of the “non-Jewish” subgroup had children and grandchildren, a third of whom attended Jewish daytime or Sunday schools (compared to a fifth of the children and grandchildren of the “quarter-Jews,” a third of the children and grandchildren of the “half-Jews,” and half of the children and grandchildren of persons of homogeneous Jewish origin). With the exception of this fact, which

 Opinions of thought leaders and experts presented in this chapter are quoted from the Geneses 2015 research report unless stated differently.

175

Jewish Education Involvement Patterns

makes one more cautious about the conclusion that the “process of ethnic and cultural assimilation of the Jews of the former USSR has become irreversible,” respondents’ confidence in the importance of Jewish education was proportional to the level of homogeneity of their Jewish origin (Table 10.1). Table 10.2: Opinions on Importance of Jewish Education / Ethnic Origin. N of Jewish grandparents Total –





None

What is your opinion on Jewish education? It is important for every Jew to obtain good Jewish education It is enough to have a general idea of Jewish history, tradition, and culture No need to have a Jewish education Hard to answer Total

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % % % %

Do you have any Jewish education? Studied/study in a Jewish day school Attend/ed Judaism and Jewish history classes at a Jewish community center Attend/ed academic Jewish studies programs Lived and studied in Israel Studied/study in a cheder or a yeshiva Got my Jewish knowledge from self-education No Jewish education Other Total

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % ,









Ethnocultural identification seems to be the main factor in the choice of respondents here as well. As follows from the survey data, the vast majority of carriers of universal Jewish identity both today and fifteen years ago favored compulsory Jewish education for the Jews. Obviously, such a choice is due to the ethnic national and cultural priorities of this group. Therefore, as our previous survey showed, these respondents were ready to give the Jewish school a chance, even if “non-Jewish” competitor schools were supposed to be better for a general education (Khanin 2008, 75–77). On the other hand, both then and today the idea of obtaining a general idea of Jewish history and culture was most popular among carriers of intermediate identity models – “ethno-civic Jews” and “postmodernists.”

176

Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

Non-formal educational programs were probably quite sufficient for the ethnic national identification of these categories of respondents. Neither did they reject formal Jewish education: supporters of general Jewish school education for the Jews amounted to a third and a quarter of these two groups respectivel, in 2004, and in our recent study to more than a quarter and a fifth of respondents respectively. Apparently, this choice for oneself or for one’s children is conditioned not only (and in the “postmodernist” group not so much) by the ethnic status of schools, but first of all by their competitiveness in comparison with similar schools outside the Jewish sector. The same opinion was shared by a relative majority in the two “non-Jewish” subgroups – “cosmopolitans” (47%) and ethnic non-Jews (43%). These two subgroups had a higher proportion of those who saw no need for Jewish education in general (22% and 34% respectively). This demonstrates a change in the situation compared to the 2004–2005 survey, when “non-Jews” were the only group that did not mark the option of “no need for Jewish education” at all, while half of them (in contrast to 12%-14% of respondents of the same culture-identification group) found it difficult to determine their attitude to this topic (Tables 10.2–3). Recognition by the majority of “ethnic non-Jews” of the importance of some kind of Jewish education is certainly a positive factor. In other words, even if they did not need Jewish schools as such, either as a means of national identification or as a way of satisfying their cultural needs, these groups have an understanding that the Jewish education system is an immanent part of Jewish community activities, i.e., the environment to which these persons aspire to belong for various reasons. As we can see, Jewish education is not a panacea for all the problems of Jewish life in the CIS, but it is quite capable of closing considerable gaps in the mechanism of structuring today’s Jewish identity and transferring it to future generations. Table 10.3: Comparison 2004–2005 and 2019 Polls / Identification and Cultural Affiliation. What is your opinion on Year of the Poll Total Jewish education?

It is important for every Jew It is enough to have a general idea



%

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Rus / Ukr Only A Jewish other and Jewish Rus / human Jew Other being %

%

– .%

.% .%

 % – .%

% % .% .%

%

%

%

% .%

–

% .%

% %

% –

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Community Activity Resources

Table 10.3 (continued) What is your opinion on Year of the Poll Total Jewish education?

Jewish education is not necessary Hard to answer

Just Rus / Rus / Ukr Only A Jewish other and Jewish Rus / human Jew Other being



%

%

%

%

%

%

–

.%

.%

.%

.%

–

–



%

%

%

%

%

%

.% .%

%

%

–

%

%

%

– .% Total

Ethnic Identity

%

%

%

Community Activity Resources Other aspects of Jewish community activism can also play a significant role in this sense, especially since platforms for this kind of activities have been quite accessible until recently and, we hope, will be so in the future. A map of community institutions. Organized Jewish movement started at the time of Gorbachev’s liberalization with the legalization of the activities of the remnants of the Jewish national-democratic movement of the 1970s and early 1980s that had been destroyed by the end of the Brezhnev era. Support from the late-Perestroika Communist and post-Soviet authorities aiming at changing the image of their regimes was also at the source of organized Jewish movement, as were Israeli and international (religious and secular) Jewish organizations that actively supported and sometimes even initiated the emergence of organized Jewish life and began to create their own institutional infrastructure in the postSoviet countries beginning in approximately 1994. Later, representatives of new professional and business circles also joined the FSU organized Jewish movement with their own resources and vision (Khanin 2011b). In the last four to five years of the existence of the USSR, and three post-Soviet decades later, these factors led to the emergence of numerous Jewish organizations. Their lower level was formed by functional structures of different origin, subordination, and loyalty. They included local religious associations of Orthodox, Conservative and Reformist orientations, which have already been discussed above, and educational institutions of various kinds, as well as social assistance and charity funds and other humanitarian structures, memorial societies, sports unions, youth

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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

associations, local and foreign branches of newspaper groups and electronic media, and many others. The intermediate level of the organized Jewish movement included civic and territorial Jewish community associations of various profiles, in many cases gradually integrating functional Jewish organizations, turning them into their own “professional divisions” and projects. The “upper echelon” of this institutional structure was formed by “umbrella associations.” These were created on the initiative of various categories of post-Soviet Jewish elites who, with varying degrees of validity and success, acted on behalf of the Jewish population of specific countries and regions or even post-Soviet/Russian-speaking Jews in general. Among them have been the declaratively independent Jewish Vaads/Associations of Jewish Organizations and Communities; pro-government and quasi-government representative structures (Jewish Council of Ukraine; Federation of Jewish NationalCultural Autonomies of the Russian Federation, etc.); national associations of Jewish religious communities and Jewish Congresses. There are also “super-umbrella” associations, such as the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, and the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, which also has the continental section capacity (Jews of the former USSR, Balkan and Asian countries outside the EU and Israel) of the World Jewish Congress (WJC) (Ben-Yakov 2019b). So, to what extent are all these structures able to resolve the survival dilemmas and satisfy the needs for activities among post-Soviet Jews? Firstly, from a quarter to almost a third of respondents in our study of the Jewish population in the countries of the former USSR – Belarus, Moldova, the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan – noted that the “Jewish feeling” came to them at events organized by local and foreign Jewish organizations, as well as through an interest in Jewish history, tradition, and culture. Both parameters ranked 2nd or 3rd in the hierarchy of Jewish identity factors after “family tradition and atmosphere,” and this picture was observed in practically all the regions of the former USSR (Table 10.4). Table 10.4: Circumstances of Acquiring a Jewish Feeling / Age. Reasons for acquiring a Jewish feeling

Kazakhstan Total, FSU Europe

Age – – – +

In the family (tradition and atmosphere)

%

%

%

%

% %

Because of my friends and milieu

%

%

%

%

% %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

At a Jewish school At Jewish community events in my city

%

%

% %

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Community Activity Resources

Table 10.4 (continued) Reasons for acquiring a Jewish feeling

Kazakhstan Total, FSU Europe

In synagogue through acquaintance with Judaism and religious ceremonies Due to my interest in Jewish history, tradition, and culture

Age – – – +

%

%

%

%

% %

%

%

%

%

% %

As a result, two-thirds of participants in our poll reported that they regularly (33%) or occasionally (“from time to time” 31%) participate in activities of the Jewish community and/or foreign Jewish organizations in their places of residence (Table 10.5). Table 10.5: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities by Members of the Extended Jewish Population of 5 FSU Countries, 2019–2020. Participation in activities of local Jewish organizations Regularly From time to time No, but if invited I am ready to try No, and do not intend to We do not have such events in our city I know nothing about a Jewish community in my city No answer Total

FSU Europe

FSU Asia

Total Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus Kazakhstan % % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % –

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











The Regional context. In the first and early-second decade of Jewish community formation in the former USSR, this factor was significantly more relevant in provincial regions than in capital cities and large economic centers. At that time, the share of the Jewish population (in the broadest sense) participating in community activities was estimated at 10%-20% in such Jewish centers as Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, Dnepropetrovsk (now Dnipro), and Odessa, and from 30% to 40% in medium and small Jewish centers (Khanin 2002c, 18–20; Gitelman et al 2001a, 223–226). There were several reasons for this, starting with the higher need for social assistance from community charity institutions in the provinces. Such assistance comes from the Hesed

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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

funds sponsored by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC, commonly known in the FSU and Israel as “Joint”) and partly from local donors, in addition to charity they provide various cultural events for their mostly elderly clients. The reasons go as far as the so-called “escalation of mediation” contributing to the separation of people and difficulties in communication in large metropolitan areas, as Gitelman, Chervyakov, and Shapiro (2001a, 225) explained at the time. At the turn of the second and third decades of the 21st century, this difference was still noticeable in some cases, but every FSU country made significant changes to the local specifics. Thus, in Belarus, for various reasons, including those indicated above, the community activities of provincial Jews still oustripped (by about a quarter) the activities of Jews and members of their families living in the capital in terms of respondent participation (Table 10.6). In Ukraine, the dependence was reversed – the larger the city and community, and, accordingly, the number of Jewish institutions and the scale of their work, the higher was the proportion of respondents who took part in them. This gap is much more quantitatively substantial than the trend in other countries: among Jewish respondents in Ukraine, almost half in the capital, 47% in large communities, and a third in small towns participated in Jewish institutions. Participation in community activities in this country seems to have been restricted only by the availability of community services in each city (Table 10.6). Table 10.6: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities in Ukraine and Moldova / Jewish Community Type. Participate in the activities of local Jewish organizations

Ukraine communities Capital Big

Regularly From time to time No, but if invited I am ready to try No, I do not and do not intend to We do not have such events in our city I know nothing about a Jewish community in my city No answer Total

% % % % % % %

small Capital provincial % % % % % – %

% % % % – – %

% % % % % % %

% % %











% % % % % % %

Belarus communities





Community Activity Resources

181

Just like in many other areas, the community of Moldova presented a special case. There was no difference between Jews in the capital Chisinau and in provincial cities. The overwhelming majority of the few local Jews and members of their families both in the capital and in the provincial areas participate to some degree in the activities of the wide range of local and representative offices of foreign Jewish organizations (Table 10.7). On the contrary, in Russia, the overall level of community activities among the Jews turned out to be lower than in any other country of the former USSR, with the exception of Kazakhstan. Still, if compared to similar categories on the community activity typology scale used by Gitelman, Chervyakov, and Shapiro, our study shows that such participation has in fact increased over the past 20 years since their survey. For example, the proportion of surveyed Russian Jews who were members or regular participants in community events increased by almost 2.5 times (from a tenth in their survey of 1997–1998 to about a quarter in our study of 2019–2020). The proportion of those who participate in the events of such structures “from time to time” has not changed much, constituting respectively 29% and 22% of respondents. The share of those who do not yet take part in community activities but are interested has grown almost 1.5 times (from 14.9% to 23%). And the proportion of those who do not know anything about any Jewish community in their city or are sure they do not have such events has fallen by more than 2.5 times (from 33% to 13%). However, the assessments of the experts we interviewed, who for all these years have been observing the formation and development of Jewish life inside Russia in a qualified and close-up manner, were less optimistic. “Generally speaking, some kind of active Jewish cultural life in the Russian Federation exists only in two cities,” says Valery Dymshits, a well-known specialist in the ethnography of the Jews of Russia. “Meanwhile, in Russia there are several large academic centers where it would be nice to build such an infrastructure: Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Nizhny Novgorod, the South of Russia. [Places] where there is potential, but it is not realized.”53 But according to the Chief Rabbi of Moscow Avrum (Adolf) Shayevich, the situation in large industrial and cultural centers was not so bad at that time if compared to small provincial communities. “In big cities (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Samara, Voronezh, etc.) there are kindergartens attached to synagogues or in separate buildings, they still receive some kind of primary Jewish education, there

 In support of this notion of Dymshits, we can say that among our Novosibirsk respondents, the share of participants in Jewish community events was indeed higher than in our Russian sample average. However, a relatively small number of those who were interviewed in this city (49 persons) makes us refrain from making any final judgments on the issue.

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are schools, at least on Sundays. This is not the case in many towns. From children to pensioners, there are people to work with.” Indeed, the potential that exists in the peripheral cities is indicated even by the fact that members of the extended Jewish population living there constantly or sporadically participated in the activities of Jewish organizations and communities twice as often as the Jews of Moscow (Table 10.7). Table 10.7: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities in Russia and Moldova / Jewish Community Type. Participate in the activities of local Jewish organizations

Russian communities

Moldova communities

Moscow St. Province Capital Province Petersburg Regularly From time to time No, I do not, but if invited I am ready to try No, I do not and do not intend to We do not have such events in our city I know nothing about any Jewish community in my city Total

% % % % % %

% % % % – %

% % % % % %

% % % % % –

% % % – – %

%

%

%

%

%











At first glance and considering the fact that, according to the same 1997–1998 survey of Gitelman and his colleagues, the activist “core” in provincial Yekaterinburg was almost 1.5 times larger than in Moscow in the late 1990s, the situation has not changed much over the past 20 years. However, according to the same data, community activities in the provinces were also 1.8 times higher than in the second Russian capital, St. Petersburg. In our study, the picture was just the opposite: community activities of the Jews of St. Petersburg were 2.5 times higher than in Moscow and 1.5 times higher than in provincial cities. It is difficult to say what were the reasons behind the picture recorded by researchers in 1997–1998, but reasons for the alignment we received in 2019 should apparently be sought not so much in the increased demand of St. Petersburg Jews for social services but in their ethnic motivation. For reasons that should be discussed separately, the proportion of respondents with a strong Jewish identity in St. Petersburg turned out to be twice as high as among Moscow Jews (69% and 33% respectively).

Community Activity Resources

183

Finally, in Kazakhstan, the level of Jewish participation in community activities was even lower than in Russia, but unlike in Russia, Jewish residents of the “old” capital, Almaty, where the largest concentration of Jews in Kazakhstan reside, attended Jewish events more often than in any of the surveyed provincial cities (Table 10.8). Table 10.8: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities in Various Cities of Kazakhstan. Participate in the activities of local Jewish organizations Regularly From time to time No, I do not, but if invited I am ready to try No, I do not and do not intend to We do not have such events in our city I know nothing about a Jewish community in my city Total

Total

Communities

Kazakhstan Almaty Karaganda Pavlodar Shymkent % % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % –

% % %

%

%

%

%

%











The ethnic identity factors. The significance of the identity factor was also evident in the sample as a whole: in both our past and present studies, as well as in other studies known to us, the level of Jewish identity was directly proportional to involvement in Jewish community activities (and vice versa). For instance, among carriers of a stable (universalist or ethno-civic) Jewish identity, the proportion of those involved in the activities of local organizations and branches of foreign Jewish structures amounted to 85% and 75% (of which more than half and about 40% did so on a permanent basis). Among carriers of mixed ethnic identity, it was about 60% in general and about a third on a permanent basis; in the “cosmopolitans” culture-identifying group it was 26% and 17%; and among non-Jews 16% and only 3% reported doing it all the time. (The share of ethnic non-Jews who are resolutely unwilling to partake of community activities was 42% – more than five times the sample average; Table 10.9.) However, these three groups are not lost to Jewish activism: from a quarter to a third in each of them reported that although they do not participate in such activities, they have nothing against them and are ready to consider invitations. So, the point apparently is only in the lack of information (or interest in finding it), especially since 12% and 16% of “cosmopolitans” and “ethnic non-Jews” respectively are

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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

Table 10.9: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities by Members of Culture Identification Groups, 2019. Participate in the activities of local Jewish organizations

Regularly From time to time No, but if invited I’m ready to try I do not intend to No such events in our city I know nothing about any Jewish community in my city No answer Total

Total

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Both Rus / Only Rus / A human Jewish other Jew Ukr and Other being Jewish

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

%

%

%

%

–

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











sure that there are no community events in their city or have never heard of the existence of a Jewish community in their city, regardless of whether this conclusion is right or wrong. (For example, the proportion of representatives of this group who know nothing about the local community and its activities was 25% in Moscow and 17% in St. Petersburg, although both cities host dozens of Jewish organizations that organize hundreds of Jewish cultural, educational, organizational, social, charitable, and other events every year). Ethnic origin, age, and participation patterns. As has been repeatedly noted, our study showed a rather close relationship between Jewish ethnic identity and the ethnic origin of respondents, on the one hand. There was also a direct relationship between level of homogeneity of Jewish and other origins with age (the proportion of “pure” Jews increased proportionally, and those of mixed origin decreased proportionally, with age), on the other hand. “Pure” Jews were indeed active participants in community events almost 2.5 times more often than “quarter-Jews” and 1.7–1.8 times more than descendants of mixed marriages in the first generation and persons without Jewish roots (for the most part, spouses of Jews). Over a third (36%) of the “half-Jewish” – more than in any other subgroup – attended such events “from time to time” (Table 10.10). Therefore, one could expect a similar relationship between age and participation in community activities (the older, the more active). In reality, these dependencies were somewhat more complicated.

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Community Activity Resources

Table 10.10: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities / Ethnic Origin. Participate in the activities of local Jewish organizations

Total

N of Jewish grandparents –

Regularly From time to time No, but if invited I’m ready to try I do not intend to No such events in our city I know nothing about any Jewish community in my place No answer





None

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









The study showed that, in comparison with other socio-demographic and age cohorts, people of retirement age are indeed more active, but so are young people (Table 10.11). Meanwhile, the “middle age – middle class” category, who are busy with career, family, and children, devotes less time to such activities. The same trend was observed in Nosenko-Stein’s studies: among visitors of Jewish organizations, the least represented group was middle-aged people, but the proportion of young people and people of retirement age, who not only attend various events often but also volunteer in such organizations and those using their services, was significant (Nosenko-Stein 2020, 29). Table 10.11: Participation in Jewish Organizations’ Activities / Age, 2019. Participate in the activities of local Jewish organizations

Total

Regularly From time to time No, but if invited I’m ready to try I do not intend to No such events in our city I know nothing about any Jewish community in my city No answer Total

Age Up to 

–

–

+

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

% % % % % %

%

–

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,









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Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

Opinions of Jewish figures actively involved in the work of Jewish communities and interviewed among other observers interviewed in the Genesys Fund 2015 qualitative study confirm this conclusion. Activities of Jewish foundations “are focused more on the children’s and youth sector. And this is right – a community without youth has no future,” believes the Co-Chairman of the Vaad (Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities) of Ukraine Yosef Zissels. “There is an older generation, and work with them is sponsored by external sources, the AJJDC (Joint) and religious structures such as Chabad. [But] the middle generation has practically no involvement in Jewish programs as they are busy with survival and earnings. And a community that is not engaged in all important community projects cannot be called a fully-fledged one” (GPG 2015). Borukh Gorin, the above-mentioned publisher of Jewish literature and, at the time of the interview, head of the Department of Public Relations of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, agreed with this assessment. “There are quite a lot of youth programs for advanced youth. And Jewish students, if we talk about Moscow and, to a large extent, about St. Petersburg, are quite “nourished.” The elderly has always been not only the target, but also the natural consumer. However, people of middle age, from 40 to 60, on the one hand, are active and working, and on the other hand, are not included in any category. It seems to me that one could find [attractive projects] for them. Nostalgia for Artek, for example, for Komsomol membership.54 The Jewish community can give it.” Another aspect of the same problem was noted by Mikhail Gold, editor-inchief of the Kyiv Hadashot newspaper. “Sometimes one gets the impression that the local community has frozen in its development. Particular attention should be paid to Jews aged 30–50 – active, self-sufficient, and independently thinking people who are not very interested in community life in its current forms – the community does not offer them anything, unlike programs for youth and the Hesed system for the elderly. But it is precisely the involvement of these people that determines the development of any normal community, its basis, its future after all – because if these people are not “hooked” to anything in community projects now, if they don’t send their children to Jewish schools now, their Jewish identity will simply be lost” (GPG 2015).

 Gorin is referring to the famous Crimean children’s camp Artek, which in the Soviet times was a symbol of the social activism of teenagers. The last generation of apparatchiks (Communist organizations’ officials) and active members of the Communist Youth Union (Komsomol) of the USSR had a lot to do with it. From the beginning of Gorbachev’s Perestroika in the mid-1980s, their ambitious representatives became initiators of many landmark business, cultural, social, and political projects. It is possible that these matured adolescents and youngsters (now 40–55 years old) may feel nostalgic for those times full of innovation and initiative, new opportunities, and hope.

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Indeed, the most socially active groups, the youth and the elderly, more often than other age groups claimed unconditional Jewish identity, while the middleaged groups demonstrated either a situational Jewish identity or a lack thereof (Table 10.12). No doubt, while the Jewish identity of the more ethnically homogeneous older generation could be the result of the family atmosphere and Soviet anti-Semitism, for the generation of young people born after the collapse of the USSR and the extremely ethnically mixed this identity was mostly acquired. And community activities clearly played a critical role in this. Table 10.12: Jewish Identification of Age Cohorts of Extended Jewish Population of Former USSR, 2019. Do you personally feel Jewish?

Yes, absolutely Not always, depends on the situation Not at all Never thought about it No answer Total

Total

Age Up to 

–

–

+

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









Interestingly enough, this phenomenon often persists after emigration to the western countries, where, unlike in the general atmosphere in the Jewish State of Israel, the reproduction and maintenance of Jewish identity is the area of family and community space. According to Daria Vedenyapina’s study of Russian-speaking immigrants who have been coming to France since the 1990s, “young people in their 20s and 40s, for whom it is important to form an active Jewish identity, are feeling more need of the Russian-speaking Jewish community than the older generation, for whom it is enough to be Jewish in origin (or even half-Jewish). We might need to talk about different attitudes to the building of Jewish identity by representatives of different generations, as well as about different attitudes to religious practices, a different level of knowledge of Jewish traditions and culture. In general, the young generation is looking for a chance to reproduce in immigration their social connections and the wealth of community life that young Jews have in big cities of the post-Soviet space (Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, Dnepropetrovsk, Minsk, etc.)” (Vedenyapina 2019, 303). On the other hand, the middle-aged cohorts had a high proportion of those who were ready to consider participation in community activities, “if invited”. It

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is interesting that in the younger segment (26–40 years old) of our respondents, the proportion of those who said that they owe their “Jewish feeling” to their participation in the events of local and foreign Jewish organizations turned out to be equal to the proportion of young 16–25-year-olds who answered this way and who chose the same circumstance in the survey. In other words, this age category that is most targeted by Jewish events often consists of former young activists and people who were “interested” and who for understandable reasons are not able to give them enough time. Distant relatives and newcomers. The next resource could be the category of people without Jewish roots who are not married (15%) or who are married to persons of non-Jewish origin (18%) but at the same time consider themselves part of the “Jewish community.” They made up a statistically significant number in our sample. This rather heterogeneous group that amounted to about 5.5% of the sample included different categories of people. A certain number of them were the widows of Jews or their descendants, who have the right to repatriate to Israel, and in this capacity to receive the services of Jewish communities. It apparently includes even more descendants of the fourth generation of mixed marriages (“great-grandchildren of the Jews”), who can move to Israel before reaching adulthood (with the right to a stepby-step procedure for obtaining citizenship), along with their parents who meet the Law of Return criteria. It is difficult to say what the real weight of this subgroup is, given that the “snowball” quota for the sample of such persons was never set and that almost all of them were interviewed among “affiliated” respondents, whose share in the sample was no more than 35%. In part, they can be described from the repatriation to Israel in 2003–2019, where the “great-grandchildren of the Jews” amounted to 5.8%, with further growth trends in the last 5 years (MOIA 2022). The descendants of the fourth generation of mixed marriages, who, according to observations, show great interest in participating in Jewish programs (Round Table 2020) are joined by another category of (usually young) people without any Jewish roots who for different reasons have found themselves part of Jewish communities (Khanin and Bardach-Yalov 2016). We can assume that if and when they decide to get married, representatives of both categories will look for a spouse among the “extended” Jewish population or go through giyur. The “lost brothers.” Finally, on the periphery of the organized Jewish community exists a category of the “lost brothers” – people who are searching hard for real or imaginary Jewish roots, insisting on their Jewish origin but unable to prove it with documents. Their number and relative weight in this “cloud” is not yet yielding to statistical calculations, but while a couple of years ago such claims were perceived as curious, today this phenomenon is being discussed quite seriously.

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Community Activity Resources

For instance, only 5% of our 2019–2020 survey respondents in five countries of the former USSR believed these were “urban legends” spread by interested parties, while another 14% knew nothing about such cases. At the same time, 31% of respondents believed there were many people with such problems, although they had not met them personally, and 40% claimed that they knew such people. Finally, one in ten said that finding documentary proof of Jewish roots was their problem as well, which apparently corresponds to the proportion of such persons participating in community activities. There were 1.5 times more such respondents who declared at least one Jewish grandparent (“grandchildren of the Jews”) than the sample average – 15%. While the age of respondents, as has been repeatedly noted, was directly proportional to the level of homogeneity of their Jewish origin, the proportion of people looking for their Jewish roots turned out to be inversely proportional to their age. Among young people, this amounted to 13%, among 26- to 40-year-olds 12%, and respectively 7% and 8% in the two older age cohorts (Table 10.13). The conclusion to which this leads is that the younger the respondents, the more likely they are to take part in clubs, cultural events, structures of formal and nonformal Jewish education, and other community and quasi-community institutions. Another indicator is the fact that the proportion of people trying to prove their Jewish origin was significantly higher in large and metropolitan cities. Apparently, this is a consequence of the relatively high concentration of community programs there. For example, 17%, 12% and 5% of respondents respectively gave such an answer in Kyiv (Kiev), the capital of Ukraine and in two large and provincial cities of this country; in Chisinau and the provincial communities of Moldova, the respective Table 10.13: Attitude to “Lost Jews” Phenomenon among FSU Respondents / Age. Opinion on persons of Jewish origin in the CIS who are unable to prove it

Total

I have this problem myself There are such people among my friends and relatives I haven’t met them personally, but I think such people are many Urban legends I know nothing this phenomenon Other

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%%

%

%

%

N

,





Total

Age – – – +

% % 



190

Chapter 10 Jewish Community – Participation and Structure

percentages were 19% and 2%; in Minsk and provincial cities of Belarus, 10% and 4%. In Kazakhstan, this answer was given by 22% of respondents in Almaty, 0–10% in provincial communities, and 12% in the country on average. At the same time, in the Russian Federation, the difference between the capital and provincial centers was not so great. However, this answer option was chosen by 13% of respondents in St. Petersburg and only by 3% in Moscow. Considering that 3.5 times more respondents in St. Petersburg reported relatively active participation in Jewish events compared to Moscow (43% and 12%, respectively), we must admit that the Russian situation also fits the general trend. If all of this is true, then among the different incentives in respondents’ “search for their roots,” community activities seem to be more important than such incentives as the possibility of moving to Israel or receiving social assistance. This hypothesis, of course, requires further verification.

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life Can one say in light of the facts of the previous chapters that anti-Semitism, including one of the most common anti-Semitic stereotypes of modern times – accusations of dual loyalty (that is, real disloyalty or less than full loyalty to the regimes and societies of host countries) – is no longer an essential factor in postSoviet Jewish life? Or, on the contrary, do domestic and international political conflicts, the periodically escalating economic crisis, the growth of social instability, and other negative phenomena negatively affect the tolerant attitude of the authorities and societies of the post-Soviet countries to an ethnic minority whose economic, cultural, and political weight in the host countries significantly outweighs their demographic share?

Anti-Semitism in the FSU vis-à-vis World Trends Data regularly published by various local and foreign monitoring agencies (MJDA 2021; USDS 2021; CSCEJ 2021) may support the conclusion that with the receding of Soviet state anti-Semitism, the situation in the former USSR is somewhat more favorable than in many Western countries. For high-profile anti-Semitic incidents have been recorded in the West, including in places where they seemed to have been completely eliminated or simply impossible. For example, in the United States, with the largest Jewish community in the world, as well as in the united Europe (see Baker 2021; AJC 2021b). In their attempts to assess the level of anti-Semitism in certain countries, observers primarily note acts of physical violence against the Jews, vandalism of synagogues, community centers, schools, Jewish cemeteries and memorials, as well as anti-Semitic and/or neo-Nazi graffiti on objects. If we follow this approach, the picture of physical violence and anti-Semitic vandalism is not so dramatic at first glance. According to the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) and other organizations, the number of such crimes ranged from 9 to 24 (according to other sources, 28) cases per year in Ukraine in 2010–2017 and from 6 to 17 cases per year in Russia, showing a trend of some growth from the middle of the last decade. In Ukraine, according to the Ukrainian Jewish Vaad and Ethnic Minorities Rights Monitoring Group (EMRMG), from 13 to 21 acts of anti-Semitic vandalism were recorded a year from 2004–2010; 9 cases each in 2011, 2012 and 2013; 23 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-011

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Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

incidents in 2014; 22 in 2015, 19 in 2016; 24 in 2017, 12 in 2018, 14 in 2019, and 10 incidents of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2020 (EMRMG 2021). There were also 14 cases of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2021; 5 in 2022 and no crimes like that, according to Ukrainian Jewish Vaad, were registered in Ukraine in the first half of 2023. The Moscow-based Sova Analytical Center insisted in its reports, invited by the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), that in recent years the level of anti-Semitic violence in the Russian Federation remained very low. The level of anti-Semitic vandalism of Jewish objects in the same years “insignificantly increased” (SOVA 2021). Meanwhile, according to The State of Anti-Semitism in 2021 report published by the Jewish Agency for Israel (JAFI) and the World Zionist Organization, nine of the 20 most prominent anti-Semitic incidents in 2021 took place in the USA, three in the UK, two in France, and one each in Argentina, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Germany, and Austria, with none in any country of the former USSR (JAFI-WZO 2022, 23). However, the very existence of such events in the FSU, even if they have substantially decreased in numbers, poses an uneasy challenge to the status and security of the Jewish entities and Jewish communal properties in the post-Soviet space. Besides, we should not underestimate latent anti-Semitic tendencies in the post-Soviet space, as well as open manifestations of political anti-Semitism, incitement and provocations with xenophobic overtones, attempts to defame Jews and Israel, denial of the Holocaust, and Judeophobia disguised as “anti-Zionism” (MJDA 2021, 46–47). So, what is the real situation today? On the one hand, the monitoring of public opinion in relation to various ethno-national and religious groups that the Moscow Levada Center has been carrying out since 1992 demonstrates that the opinion of Russians about their fellow Jewish citizens has been consistently improving for over a quarter of a century. About 12% of respondents are “sympathetic: to the Jews (compared to 5% in 2000), 78 to 83% were “positively neutral,” while only a tenth of respondents expressed a negative attitude toward them (Levada 2020, 41; see Table 11.1 below). Table 11.1: Attitude to Jews of the Russian Public (Levada Center Monitoring of Public Opinion in the Russian Federation, 2000–2020 (in % of Total). 









    −

    −

    −

    −

    

%

%

%

%

%

How do you feel about the Jews? With sympathy, interest Calmly, like anyone else, without special feelings With irritation, dislike With mistrust, fear Hard to answer Total

Anti-Semitism in the FSU vis-à-vis World Trends

193

In general, similar trends with certain fluctuations were typical for most other countries of the former USSR, where Jews have become an “invisible object” for a number of reasons, including due to a dramatic drop in numbers because of emigration. For these and other reasons, the mass consciousness of citizens of almost all post-Soviet countries no longer sees the Jews as their “main internal enemy;” in contrast to the Soviet era, this place is now occupied by “other candidates” (Gudkov et al 2016). On the other hand, judging from the Levada Center data, belief that Jewish people lack “Russian patriotism” but desire to seek personal benefit in everything instead of serving the interests of their country is deeply rooted in the minds of some Russians. According to surveys, the share of those who have such views increased from just over 40% in 1997 to almost 50% in 2015, mainly due to people who had no previous opinion on this issue. It is more often held by poorly educated and elderly respondents. Such views, against the backdrop of not very successful attempts to construct a Russian civil nation and certain shifts in the ideological sentiments of Russians, cause concern among experts. True, ethnic (Russian) nationalism has practically disappeared from the political agenda and inter-party fights in the Russian Federation in the last few years, while slogans like “Russia for (ethnic) Russians” saw minimal support in 2017. However, the 2018 survey gave a different picture, mainly due to an increased number of those who believed that the idea was “long overdue” (an increase from 10% to 19%) and due to the decrease in the number of respondents who are not interested in this topic (see Pipia 2017). In addition to monitoring the acts of violence, vandalism, and public xenophobic statements, the subjective feelings of the Jewish people also serve as an indicator of the dynamics of anti-Semitic manifestations in their cities and countries. Thus, the Levada Center’s 2018 survey of Jews of the Russian Federation on the level of anti-Semitism in the Russian Federation showed that in the 12-month period before the interview 40% of respondents had heard phrases that “interests of the Jews in Russia are very different from interests of the rest of the population” with varying degrees of intensity, while one fifth quoted phrases that “Jews are not able to integrate into the Russian society” (Levada 2018, 90–94). Our study of Jewish communities in five countries of the former USSR (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine) conducted in 2019–2020 also showed that Jewish people’s subjective assessments of the scale of anti-Semitic manifestations in their regions and countries differ significantly from official monitoring data. According to this research 14% of respondents stated that the level of anti-Semitism in their city and country has markedly increased in recent years. At the same time, respectively 22% and 6% believed the contrary, that it had decreased or that anti-Semitism in their “city and country never existed and

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Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

still does not exist.” The largest group (38% of respondents) noted that they feel there were no changes in this area, while one-fifth found it hard to assess the dynamics of the process. Almost identical (43% and 10%) was the share of the later subgroups among Jewish participants of the Levada Center 2018 study, as well as of those who indicated that anti-Semitism in their country had increased (17%). However, the share of those who believed that this level substantially or slightly decreased was twice as high as in our study (33%). Nevertheless, more than 40% of respondents admitted that they had been objects of threats, attacks, and other types of aggression in the past five years; 44% of respondents in this category (i.e., about 18% of the entire sample) had reasons to believe that attacks on them had a clear anti-Semitic nature (Levada 2018, 22–24). In our 2019–2020 study, the picture was pretty similar: more than a quarter (26%) of respondents or their peers had faced anti-Semitic attacks in recent years. 27% of respondents had no personal experience of such attacks but know people who did. A fifth of respondents had heard of such incidents, although not from their personal experience or from the experience of anyone they knew. The remaining 24% had not encountered such phenomena and knew nothing about them. At the same time regional, socio-demographic, ethnocultural, and identification differences in the assessment of this phenomenon by members of the “expanded Jewish population” of the post-Soviet countries were also significant.

Regional Differences The lowest level of anti-Semitism, judging by the data of our study, was recorded in Belarus (where the survey was conducted before the anti-authoritarian revolutionary events of summer 2020 and their heavy-handed suppression by the authorities could negatively influence the situation) and Kazakhstan – only 5% of Jewish respondents in these countries insisted that the level of anti-Semitism in recent years had significantly increased. In fact, Jews in Kazakhstan declared that “anti-Semitism never existed and still does not exist” ten times (!) more often than Jews in the European republics of the former USSR on average (59% compared with 10% in Belarus, 8% in Russia, 5% in Moldova, and 3% in Ukraine). The highest share of respondents confident that anti-Semitism in their city and country had grown was in Moldova: 26% (1.5 times more than in Ukraine, three times more than in Russia, and five times more than in Kazakhstan and Belarus; Table 11.2). This subjective assessment of such a low level of anti-Semitism in Kazakhstan is usually explained by both the high tolerance of the local society toward Jews

Regional Differences

195

Table 11.2: Subjective Assessments of Anti-Semitism in Respondents’ City and Country of Residence at the Time of the Survey, 2019–2020. Anti-Semitism in your city and country in general: Significantly increased Significantly decreased No significant changes Never existed and still does not exist Hard to say Total

Former USSR (Europe)

CIS (Asia)

Total Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus Kazakhstan % % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











and the official policy of the post-Soviet Central Asian states whose authorities usually declare concern for the disappearing Jewish minority. However, some alarming trends were noted in the post-Soviet Central Asian states a year or so later. For instance, statements by Ministries of Foreign Affairs of both Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan during the anti-terrorist Guardian of the Walls Operation of the IDF (May 2021) expressed “concern about the situation” and became almost unprecedented. Although they did not directly condemn the Jewish state, their statements provoked a reaction in social media from users exposed to anti-Israeli Iranian and Turkish propaganda (Levin 2021). The highest share of respondents confident that anti-Semitism in their city and country had grown was in Moldova: 26% (1.5 times more than in Ukraine, three times more than in Russia, and five times more than in Kazakhstan and Belarus). It is not yet quite clear what caused the “Moldovan” phenomenon (according to local experts, there is no question of “skewing” the sample): the pinpoint situation at the time of the survey (second half of 2019) or the long-term processes experienced by the country, directly or indirectly affecting the self-awareness of the Jews. The facts speak in favor of the first version: Ilan Shor, a Tel Aviv native of Jewish-Moldovan origin and the key figure in the corruption scandal that spilled out all over Moldova and far beyond its borders, successfully ran for the Parliament of the Republic of Moldova in 2019. This businessman and politician, according to the court’s verdict, was the mastermind of corruption schemes that allowed him to extract one billion dollars from the country’s banking system. In addition, out of the seven deputies of his Shor Party (most of whom featured in the “billion case”), at least two were also Jewish, and another two were said to have had some Jewish

196

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

roots.55 The head of the Jewish Ethnology group at the Institute of Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Moldova, Victor Damian, believes all of this caused a negative reaction within Moldovan society and was projected onto all the Jews of Moldova through the efforts of interested parties.56 Despite the fact that Shor did not identify himself either with the Jewish people or with the organized Jewish movement of Moldova, his behavior, according to director of the local Institute of Jewish Studies, Yevgeniy Brik, “fits the antiSemitic stereotypes about Jews as thieves,” and thus online articles about him were “invariably followed by a cascade of anti-Semitic rhetoric in comments” (Liphshiz 2019). Thus, the Jews of Moldova might have gotten the impression that the prosecution of Shor or his Jewish party associates was largely dictated by anti-Semitic motives. The tone of such suspicions could have been set by the trial, ongoing since 2017, of the case of businessman Alexander Pinchevsky, who at one time held the post of a co-chairman of the Jewish community of the Republic of Moldova. Another explanation suggests that this story is just an episode in the confrontation between oligarchic clans fighting for power and resources amidst many years of turbulence of the political system and the socio-economic crisis in the country (Secrieru 2020; Channel 24 2021). Jews, as has often been the case in such situations, became a convenient “lightning rod” of public irritation for those interested, especially in the midst of unreported societal and latent anti-Semitism (see Winer 2015). If this is correct, it explains the nature of the high-profile anti-Semitic incidents in recent years: repeated vandalism of the Jewish cemetery in Chisinau, acts of aggression against community members, desecration of public exhibitions with Nazi symbols, insulting inscriptions, and other crimes motivated by interethnic hostility that have received unprecedented public outcry in this small country (see JewishRu 2020). All of this seems to have formed a corresponding perception of the level of anti-Semitism in a small Jewish community of Moldova, whose members are concentrated in three or four cities, and who, in contrast to the equally small but dispersed community of the Jews of Kazakhstan, appear as a single “social network”. These feelings did not arise from naught, however. According to the leaders of the Jewish Community of the Republic of Moldova, the growth of anti-Semitic manifestations was directly related to anti-Semitic prejudices, attempts to denigrate

 In Moldova, this party was considered to have been controlled by the former “owner” of the Republic of Moldova, the oligarch Vladimir Plahotniuc. See RBC 2020.  Comment received from Victor Damyan by e-mail, 07.09.2021.

197

Regional Differences

the Jews of Moldova in the media, and negative statements made by public figures (STMEGI 2020; JTA 2018). If the negative dynamics in people’s attitudes towards the Jews is more likely a consequence of the political atmosphere in the country rather than a show of a “stable” societal anti-Semitism, we can assume that the intensity of this phenomenon is inversely proportional to proximity to the center of political influence. The share of Moldovan respondents interviewed who believed that anti-Semitism in the country had dropped significantly in recent years was almost three times higher in provincial cities than in Chisinau. Conversely, the share of those convinced of the growth of anti-Semitism in their city and country was equally high in the capital and in provinces: 26% (Table 11.3). Table 11.3: Assessments of Anti-Semitism in Respondents’ City and Country of Residence in Recent Years (According to Respondents’ Country of Residence). Anti-Semitism in your city and country in recent years Community category

Significantly Significantly No significant Never existed Hard Total increased decreased changes and still doesn’t to say

Ukraine Capital Large communities Small communities

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % % % % %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % % %

% %

% %

% %

– %

% % % %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % % %

Russia Capitals Provinces Moldova Capital Provinces Belarus Capital Provinces

Meanwhile, this dependence was inverse in Ukraine and Russia (Table 11.3). In Ukraine, the share of respondents who claimed that the level of anti-Semitism in their city and country had significantly increased was almost twice as high in provinces as in Kyiv, and even higher than in such large cities as Odessa and Dnipro. In fact, in Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk), unofficially referred to as the “Jewish capital of Ukraine”, the share of those who noted a “significant decline”

198

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

in anti-Semitism was 1.5 times higher than the share of those in Kyiv. In Dnipro, there were 2.5 times more optimists than in such a “Jewish” city” as Odessa, and three times more than in small provincial communities (Table 11.4). Table 11.4: Assessments of Anti-Semitism in Respondents’ Cities and Countries of Residence in Recent Years (Among Respondents from Ukraine). Recent anti-Semitism in your city and country: Significantly increased Significantly decreased No significant changes Never existed and still does not exist Hard to say Total

%% N

Total % % % % %

Kyiv

Odessa Dnipro Small towns

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% %

%

%

%











In Russia, the same pattern was noted, although the difference between the provinces and the capital cities in the Russian Federation is not so significant: 11% of respondents in provincial communities reported a rise in the level of anti-Semitism in their cities in recent years and 7% in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Belarus occupies an intermediate position, where in the capital city of Minsk the share of respondents who believed that anti-Semitism had significantly increased in their city and country coincided with the share of similar responses in the capital cities of Russia (7%). But at the same time, Minsk residents, like the Jewish residents of Chisinau, noted the growth of anti-Semitism more often (although not three times, but “only” twice as often) than the Jews of the Belarusian province. Probably already at that time respondents were able to discern certain trends that, according to commentators, became visible due to the mass protests that began in the summer of 2020 against what protesters firmly believed were falsified presidential election returns. The harsh suppression of the emerging revolutionary movement by the authorities was accompanied by widespread anti-Semitic rhetoric from supporters of pro-government structures, as well as (on a much smaller scale) the use of the Holocaust theme by the opposition (Friedman 2020). This trend was mentioned in the Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs 2020 report, which for the first time ever included the Republic of Belarus. The report talked about the obvious provocations in Slutsk on October 21, 2020, at the Yama Holocaust Memorial on December 5, 2020, in Minsk and in Novogrudki on January 23, 2021 (MJDA 2021, 120–122). At the same time, public attention was drawn to the antiSemitic statements of state propagandists who presented protests in Belarus as

Regional Differences

199

Jewish provocation, hinting at the alleged Jewish origin of its leaders and pedaling Jewish themes in their reports (Euroradio 2021). Alexander Friedman of the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin noted the deliberate use of anti-Semitic rhetoric to achieve political goals, often accompanied with explicit denial of the Holocaust (Belsat TV 2021). There are several hypotheses that at least partially explain this phenomenon of “provincial anti-Semitism.” In the metropolitan centers, which are cosmopolitan and have adopted the modern values of tolerance, public manifestations of xenophobia are widely deemed less appropriate than in the provinces, where “everyday anti-Semitism” can still be considered allowable and is more often used by political stakeholders. “In small towns, where local clans constantly replace each other at the helm, political rivals use everything to fight each other,” says Mikhail Gold, editor-inchief of Jewish Kyiv-based Hadashot newspaper. “For example, the disgusting story of [putting] crosses at the Jewish cemetery in Sambir has been going on for more than 20 years. And while the current mayor is willing to meet the Jews halfway, the former head of the city and now the main opposition leader, will certainly raise a protest campaign. Nothing personal, just business.”57 In addition, the presence of international and local human rights organizations, diplomatic missions and Jewish umbrella structures is more noticeable in the capitals and large Jewish centers such as Dnipro or Novosibirsk, where a picture similar to the large cities of Ukraine is recorded. Such structures usually react more actively and harshly to any trace of anti-Semitic xenophobia. This encourages the authorities to take appropriate measures to preserve the image of a tolerant country (this applies to a greater extent in Ukraine, and to a lesser extent in Russia and Belarus). Small communities in provincial cities receive less attention, with very limited resources and leverage. The peculiarity of the Ukrainian situation (and in many respects Belarusian, too, we believe), notes Gold, is that in small towns, especially in the west of the country, the Jewish population destroyed in the Holocaust has been replaced by post-war Slavic migrants from neighboring villages, for whom Jews are completely alien. This stands in contrast to the large cities of the east, where Ukrainians viewed Jewish doctors, teachers, engineers, etc. as a natural part of the cityscape and communication networks. An even more unique case in this sense is Kazakhstan, whose predominantly Jewish population, as was said, mainly appeared in Kazakhstan during World War II and thereafter. Our survey did not record any significant difference between the state of affairs in the “old capital,” the largest Jewish center of the

 Michael Gold’s opinion was received by e-mail, 08.09.2021.

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Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

country, Almaty, and other cities with demographically significant Jewish populations (Karaganda, Pavlodar and Shymkent). The only difference was that in Almaty, the share of those who believed that anti-Semitism remained at the same level was 2–5 times higher than in the provinces, and in the “provincial” cities the percentage of those convinced that “anti-Semitism never existed and still does not exist in their city and country” was much higher (Table 11.5). Table 11.5: Perceived Incidence of Anti-Semitism at City/Country Level by Jews Living in Kazakhstan in Recent Years. Anti-Semitism in your city and country:

Significantly increased Significantly decreased No significant changes Never existed and still does not exist Hard to say Total

Total

Kazakhstan Almaty

Karaganda

Pavlodar

Shymkent

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%











In general, the level of anti-Semitism in Kazakhstan and (until recently) in Belarus remains, according to local respondents, rather low both in comparison with the small community of Moldova and the two largest Jewish communities of the postSoviet space, Russia and Ukraine. Meanwhile, the differences in assessments of the level of anti-Semitism in these latter two countries are themselves remarkable. There were 2–2.5 times more pessimists among Ukrainian Jews than among Russian Jews. We can hardly explain this gap by higher levels of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in Ukraine compared to other countries of Eastern Europe. Statements of this kind, as other articles in this book illustrate, are usually not verified by facts. Rather, it is the influence of the tense social atmosphere in a country that is at war and in a difficult economic situation. And, due to the historical volatility of the topic of anti-Semitism and the stormy political discussion of accomplices to the Holocaust in the territory of Ukraine, any anti-Semitism-related event immediately receives a large-scale public response (amplified many times by the local information market, saturated with many competing publications). In any case, we are talking not only about acts of direct physical violence or persecution (hate crime), but also verbal attacks (hate speech). The need to include the latter in official statistics of anti-Semitic acts became the subject of heated polemics among various factions of the Jewish elite (Khanin 2023).

201

Regional Differences

The personal experience of Jews in diaspora is also an important criterion of the public assessment of levels of anti-Semitism. For this reason, respondents were asked whether they or their loved ones had been victims of anti-Semitic attacks, insults, or threats in recent years, and, if so, how often (Table 11.6). The highest share of those who declared multiple personal clashes with antiSemitism was in Ukraine – 12% (1.5 times higher than in Russia and Belarus and three times higher than in Moldova; in Kazakhstan this answer was practically left unmentioned). But most of those who indicated a one-time anti-Semitic experience were found in Moldova (39%). The same country had a higher share of respondents (49%) who had not personally encountered aggression, but who had knewn victims of anti-Semitic attacks (respectively, over twice and almost twice as many as the other four countries). Belarus reported the highest percentage of respondents who had heard of anti-Semitic incidents but had not personally known any victims. Finally, 88% of the interviewed respondents in Kazakhstan (compared to 24% on average for the four countries of the European part of the former USSR) stated that they had not personally experienced any anti-Semitic incidents or heard about them in recent years (the second largest group of those who responded this way, by a large margin, were Jews from Russia, at 35%). Table 11.6: Have you or Your Relatives Been Targets of Anti-Semitic Attacks, Insults or Threats in Recent Years? (FSU Countries). Have been the target of anti-Semitic incidents:

Countries of the former USSR (Europe)

CIS (Asia)

Total Ukraine Russia Moldova Belarus Kazakhstan %

%

%

%

%

%

Yes, – times

%

%

%

%

%

%

Personally no, but know people who were

%

%

%

%

%

%

Have heard about the phenomenon, but do not personally know any victims

%

%

%

%

%

Have not seen or heard about such incidents

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

–

%

–

%%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N

,











Yes, many times

Couldn’t answer Total

202

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

Once again, the geographic differences in responses are quite noticeable. In Ukraine, for example, about a quarter of respondents or their relatives claim to have become targets of anti-Semitic attacks in recent years in the capital (Kyiv) and large Jewish centers (Odessa and Dnipro); a further third and quarter were respectively familiar with such victims. In small Jewish communities (mainly in the north-east of the country), almost half of respondents and/or their family members stated they were victims of anti-Semitic xenophobia. The share of respondents in provincial communities who had not had such experiences nor heard about such incidents turned out to be two times lower than in Kyiv and 2.5 times lower than in Odessa and the Dnipro (Table 11.7). Table 11.7: Have you or Your Relatives Been Targets of Anti-Semitic Attacks, Insults or Threats in Recent Years? (Ukraine, by Type of Communities). Have been the target of anti-Semitic incidents in recent years:

Ukraine (communities) Community Communities in Communities in in Kyiv big provinces small provinces

Yes, many times

%

%

%

Yes, – times

%

%

%

Personally no, but know victims of such attacks

%

%

%

Have heard about the phenomenon, but do not personally know any victims

%

%

%

Have not seen or heard about such incidents

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%







Couldn’t answer Total

So, from the point of view of anti-Semitism, the post-Soviet space is no longer a single block. Judging by the data above, the situation in each country of the former USSR is determined by the local economic and political situation and the local socio-cultural traditions more than by some common heritage of the “Soviet empire.”

203

Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population

Table 11.8: Perceptions of Anti-Semitism among Respondents in City/Country in Recent Years (According to Gender and Age). Anti-Semitism in my city and country:

Significantly increased Significantly decreased Did not change Never existed and still does not exist Hard to say Total

Total

Gender

Age

Male

Female

–

–

–

+

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,



,









Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population Age differences were also obvious in assessing manifestations of anti-Jewish xenophobia. Older respondents (61+) were more optimistic, while those aged 41–60 were more convinced that anti-Semitism has been on a rise. In the early middle age category (26–40 years old), more respondents had not noticed any visible changes in the level of anti-Semitism. Finally, young people under 25 found it difficult to answer this question more often than others (Table 11.8). These differences are probably due to the personal experience of generations. Older respondents (among whom there is a high proportion of people of homogeneous Jewish origin) may be recalling the government-led and commonplace antiSemitism of the Soviet era, finding the current situation favorable by comparison. This age cohort logically contained higher numbers of those who, when asked under what circumstances they felt they were Jewish, answered that the “antisemitic environment did not allow me to forget” (16%, compared to 3% respondents under 40). Among them was also a relatively large number of those who believed that “being Jewish today means fighting anti-Semitism” (22%). Respondents of the “advanced middle age” group are obviously disappointed with negative changes, comparing the present time with the era of Perestroika and the subsequent realization of their Jewishness and participation in communal life. As adolescents and very young people at that time, they barely caught the rabid anti-Zionist (and in fact, anti-Semitic) propaganda and other aspects of state anti-Semitism in the USSR, and only witnessed radical improvements in the status of the Jewish minority in the post-Soviet countries. Not surprisingly, this category

204

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

demonstrates a lower “threshold of tolerance” (in comparison with other groups) in relation to political, informational, and everyday anti-Semitism in the present. People of early middle age (26–40 years old), representing the first postSoviet generation of the local “expanded Jewish population”, seem to have no such sentiments: the oldest of them were 6–7 years old at the time of the radical changes in the “Jewish policy.” Therefore, their assessments relate exclusively to the situation in the FSU heir countries, which shed the practice of state antiSemitism at least three decades ago and which have full and often rather warm relations with the Jewish state. The lack of such comparative historical reference points may explain the confidence of this age cohort that the level of antiSemitism has not changed in recent years. Representatives of the second post-Soviet generation we interviewed are in a similar situation. These are young people of 16–25, whose worldview has been shaped by post-Soviet experience and a globally-comparative perspectivec. A relative majority of them found it difficult to assess the dynamics of anti-Semitic acts, possibly because this group has a high number of those born into mixed marriages of the first and second generations (in our sample, respectively 33% and 41%). It is no coincidence that the relative majority of this subgroup (and more than other age cohorts) has never encountered or heard of anti-Semitic encounters (28%). The proportion of people who had experienced physical or verbal antiSemitic aggression at least once or twice among young people (26%) was approximately equal to the proportion of respondents of both middle-aged cohorts together Table 11.9: Jews’ Personal Experiences of Anti-Semitism in Five Countries of the Former USSR (According to Gender and Age). Have been the target of anti-Semitic incidents in recent years

Total

Gender Men

Age

Women – – – +

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

– times

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Personally no, but know victims

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Have heard about the phenomenon, but do not personally know any victims

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Have not seen or heard about such incidents

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

% %

%

%

%

Yes, many times

Couldn’t answer Total

% %

Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population

205

(26–40 and 41–60 years old) who answered this way (23% and 26% respectively). Plus, respondents from the last two age groups more often reported never having experienced anti-Semitic attacks personally but having known other victims. Almost a third of respondents aged 61+ reported negative personal experiences (31%). This is likely due to the higher proportion of persons of homogeneous Jewish origin in the older age cohort (60%, compared with 34% of the sample average). In addition, representatives of this subgroup are most widely represented among participants in Jewish community events, which are often the trigger for anti-Semitic attacks (Table 11.9). Anti-Semitism and ethnic origin. The share of persons of fully Jewish origin who reported that in recent years they had been victims of verbal or even physical attacks repeatedly or 1–2 times was nearly 2 and 1.5 times higher than the sample average respectively. However, people of mixed origin and non-Jewish members of Jewish families also said they had had such experience. In fact, the “half-Jewish” experienced such manifestations twice as often as “quarter-Jews” and members of the extended Jewish population without Jewish roots. (This once again brings us back to the hypothesis of the connection between the anti-Semitic experience of “half-Jews” and the “abnormally high” level of pro-Israeli patriotism in this group, which we identified in the course of our study and presented in chapter 5.) It is logical that among “100%” Jews the proportion of those who believed the level of anti-Semitism in their city and country had increased significantly in recent years was higher than in the other subgroups (Table 11.10). No less indicative is the comparison of the share of those who believed that the level of anti-Semitism in their city and country had increased significantly with the share of those who held exactly the opposite point of view in each of the four ethnic categories. Among “100%” Jews, the proportion of supporters of the second approach was 1.5 times higher than of the first. The ratio was the same among persons without Jewish roots, whose worldview in this case was identical or close to the feelings of their spouses – persons for the most part of homogeneous Jewish origin and descendants of the first generation of mixed marriages. Among the “half-Jewish,” the difference in the proportion of supporters of these two assessments was already insignificant. It was, however, different with “quarter-Jews,” among whom the proportion of those who believed that antiSemitism in their cities and countries of residence had noticeably decreased was twice as high as the proportion of those who believed otherwise. All of this fits well with the above-mentioned intergenerational differences in respondents’ perceptions and personal experiences of anti-Semitism in the countries of the former USSR, given the noticeable age differences among members of categories ranked by level of homogeneity of Jewish origin. (Recall that the lower this level, the younger the corresponding subgroup was on average, with the

206

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

exception of non-Jews, who were dominated by spouses of descendants of homogeneous Jewish and mixed marriages.) Table 11.10: Did You or Your Relatives / Friends Experience Anti-Semitic Attacks in Recent Years?. Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –





None

Have been the target of anti-Semitic incidents in recent years Yes, many times Yes, – times Personally no, but know victims Have heard about the phenomenon, but do not personally know any victims Have not seen or heard about such incidents Hard to say

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

Estimation of anti-Semitism your city and country in recent years Substantially increased Substantially decreased No visible change in either direction There was none in the past and there is no anti-Semitism now Hard to say Total

% % % % % ,









Ethnic identity. Another dependency that we repeatedly observed was between the ethnic origin and ethnic identity of respondents. This observation also emerges from the relative perception of anti-Semitic manifestations among members of various cultural-identification groups. As seen in the table below, the proportion of Jewish universalists who believe that anti-Semitism in their country and city in the years preceding the survey had grown significantly (23%) was 1.5 times higher than among carriers of the local Jewish identity. It was also twice as high as it was among the holders of a dual, Jewish-Gentile identity, three times higher than among “cosmopolitans,” and almost eight (!) times higher than in the group of “ethnic non-Jews (Table 11.11).” The opposite opinion – that “anti-Semitism in the respondents’ city and country has significantly decreased in recent years” – expectedly showed an inverse dependency, although the difference in the proportion of those who answered in this way in each of the cultural identification communities was not large in absolute terms.

Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population

207

At the same time, the relative majority of members of each of these categories did not detect any significant changes in the level of anti-Semitism in their cities and countries in recent years. In absolute terms, the proportion of those who chose this answer slightly decreaed in proportion to the level of stability of Jewish ethnic identity (or lack thereof) in each, until it reached 31% in the category “ethnic non-Jews” – 9% lower than among “Jewish universalists.” We can see whether such an assessment indicates a “stably high” or “stably low” background of experience with anti-Semitism in the cities and countries of respondents’ residence from the distribution in ethno-identification categories of the answer option “There was no anti-Semitism in the past and there is none (in my city and country) now.” Such answers were twice as many among members of the “ethnically non-Jewish” group as among the “universalist Jews” and 1.5 times more than in the sample average. But even there it did not exceed a tenth of respondents. This means that not many people from each cultural-identification category that felt any connection to the Jewish community of their countries and cities effectively denied the existence of post-Soviet anti-Semitism. Table 11.11: Assessment of Level of Anti-Semitism / Ethnic Identity. Anti-Semitism in your city and country

Ethnic Identity Stable

Non-stable

None

Total Just Rus / Rus / Ukr A human Only Russian / Jewish other Jew and Jewish being other Substantially increased

%

%

%

%

%

%

Substantially decreased

%

%

%

%

%

%

No visible changes in either direction

%

%

%

%

%

%

There was none in the past and there is none now

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,











Hard to say Total

It is also interesting that a fifth of our respondents found it difficult in principle to answer the question about anti-Semitism, and for two categories of holders of different non-Jewish identities, only about one-third chose this answer. This, apparently, was mostly due to the presence or absence of interest in this topic, dictated

208

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

by the social environment of the respondent and to their personal experience of xenophobic or anti-Semitic attacks, or familiarity with such events (Table 11.12). As one can see from the data we collected, 42% and 30% of the two groups with a stable universal or local Jewish identity had one-time or multiple personal experiences with such incidents, as did a fifth of carriers of a dual ethnic identity and 14% of the “citizens of the world”. Less than a tenth of those who called themselves ethnic Russians, Ukrainians, or representatives of another non-Jewish ethnic group reported as much. Statistically weaker but similar was the trend in choosing the answers “Personally no, but know people who experienced these events” and “Heard about events like that but do not know people who personally experienced them.” Finally, among members of the two non-Jewish subgroups, the share of respondents who admitted never having encountered events of this sort or having heard of them was visibly higher. There may be different reasons for this. For example, this group’s relatively high proportion of people of homogeneous Jewish origin, who stand out from the surrounding population by their appearance or behavior, more often became targets of such verbal or physical attacks. Another reason could be the willingness of carriers of a stable Jewish identity to detect anti-Semitic undertones in hooliganism, verbal attacks, and other personal hostility aimed at themselves and others Table 11.12: Personal Experience of Anti-Semitism / Ethnic Identity. Have been the target of anti-Semitic incidents in recent years

Ethnic Identity Total Just Rus / Ukr / Both Rus / Only Rus / A human Other / Jewish other Jew Ukr and Ukr / being NA Jewish Other %

%

%

%

%

%

%

Yes, – times

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Personally no, but know victims

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Have heard about the phenomenon, but do not personally know any victims

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Have not seen or heard about such incidents

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













Yes, many times

Hard to say Total

Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population

209

with whom they are close, as well as against fellow tribesmen in general, more often than persons with a weak or absent Jewish identity. Religion and community affiliation. Another point may be participation in the activities of Jewish organizations, which, as expected, turned out to be directly proportional to the level of Jewish identity. Vandalism of the property of Jewish communities, insults, occasional attacks on community meeting participants, and similar actions make up the vast majority of xenophobic and anti-Semitic hostilities. Such things make activists within Jewish organizations subjectively apprehend a greater scale of violent anti-Semitism than appears to people who do not take part in the activities of Jewish religious communities and secular organizations (See Table 11.13 below). This is especially so since anti-Semitic attacks are often triggered by the “external marks” of being Jewish, for example the Shabbat clothes of Hasidim walking down the street or the rabbis’ garb. One such example of this was the hooligan attack on Israeli pilgrims, Bratslav Hasidim, in Uman in October 2020, triggered by their traditional appearance, which was regarded by both the authorities and Jewish organizations as a criminal act with anti-Semitic overtones (Lehaim 2020). Table 11.13: Personal Experience of Anti-Semitism / Religious Identity. Experience of anti-Semitic attacks in recent years

Total

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

No

Hard to say

%

%

%

%

Yes, – times

%

%

%

%

Direct experience, total

%

%

%

%

Personally no, but know victims

%

%

%

%

Have heard about the phenomenon, but do not personally know any victims

%

%

%

%

Have not seen or heard about such incidents

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,







Yes, many times

Hard to say Total

Nevertheless, religious people interviewed in our study reported a noticeable decrease in the level of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in their cities and countries even somewhat more often than respondents who found it difficult to determine the degree of their religiosity or declared its absence. Apparently, their assessments

210

Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

were influenced by the active support or at least the tolerant attitude of the authorities of most post-Soviet countries to the Jewish religious communities loyal to these authorities and their institutions (Table 11.14). Table 11.14: Assessing the Level of Anti-Semitism / Religious Identity. Anti-Semitism in your city and the country in recent years:

Total

Consider themselves religious: Yes

Hard to say

No

Substantially increased

%

%

%

%

Substantially decreased

%

%

%

%

No visible change in either direction

%

%

%

%

There was none in the past and there is no anti-Semitism now

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,







Hard to say Total

Israeli immigrants. Let us look now at another important segment of the Jewish population in FSU countries: persons who once repatriated to Israel and then, for various (most often, personal or professional) reasons, “returned” to their regions of exodus, or those who live in two (or more) countries. From the mid-2010s, this group has grown to include a significant number of Jewish representatives of the post-Soviet middle class, who divide their time between Israel, where most families live, and the major cities of Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, or the Baltic republics, where they have professional and business interests. (For more on this phenomenon see Khanin 2022.) Estimates of the size of this group differ, but the most plausible guesses are close to 45,000–50,000. Our studies show that the collective well-being of Israelis in the FSU countries, where they are involved in diverse interrelations in their sub-community and Jewish and general environment, often depends on the factors that help define the life of the local Jewish population. This is especially true in the context of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. However, Israeli citizens perceive their stay in the countries of the former USSR for the most part as more or less temporary, and are less often than local Jews ready to evaluate certain anti-Semitic acts as forms of anti-Semitism “you can live with.” The study showed that comparable proportions of Israelis agreed with two opposite statements: 19% claimed that the level of anti-Semitism in their city and

Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population

211

country as a whole had noticeably increased in recent years, while respectively 16% and 6% believed that anti-Semitism had noticeably decreased or that “antiSemitism in our city and the country never existed and still does not exist.” On the contrary, there were twice as many optimists as pessimists among the Jews who did not have an Israeli foreign passport (darkon). The largest group of Israeli respondents, 47% (37% among local Jews) noted that the level of anti-Semitism has not changed, and 14% (1.5 times less than among the local Jews) found it difficult to assess the dynamics of this process. Israelis in Ukraine noted anti-Semitic experiences 5–6 times more often than their fellow citizens in the Russian Federation. There were twice as many pessimists among them as among the Ukrainian Jews who did not have an Israeli passport. (There were two or 2.5 times more pessimists among the local Jews than in Russia.) Nevertheless, anti-Semitism is unlikely to be among the factors influencing the operational plans of Israelis who have returned to the countries of the former USSR, who are staying there temporarily, or who shuttle between them and Israel. At the time of the survey, it was clear that dramatic events affecting general security and their direct and indirect socio-economic consequences could play a much more significant role in this sense. This was fully confirmed after the start of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. ✶✶✶ Respondents’ assessments of the overall dynamics of anti-Semitism in their countries and cities of residence obtained in our study may serve both as a sort of an index of the level of anti-Semitism and as a demonstration of differences in definitions of anti-Semitism and the “tolerance threshold” depending on local civic culture. A noticeable but understandable paradox in the data we collected was a certain disproportion in assessments of the level of anti-Semitism and personal experience of antisemitic incidents: answers to the relevant questions by members of some socio-demographic and cultural-identification categories contained no direct interdependence between the two parameters. One way or another, judging from regular measurements, the share of supporters of the pessimistic view of things among all Jewish groups in the former USSR turned out to be significantly lower than among Jewish citizens of the EU (EUAFR 2018). But although at least some of the polls in both Russia and Ukraine reflect the presence of a norm condemning open manifestations of ethnic inequality and hostility, as well as condemnation of discrimination against Jews following from them, this does not mean the absence of latent hostility. It is by no means tantamount to the disappearance of ethnic prejudices or phobias as such, nor does it exclude manifestations of xenophobia in other forms (Gudkov 2021;

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Chapter 11 Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism as Factors of Post-Soviet Jewish Life

Nakhmanovich 2017). This might open the way to a relatively easy violation of the public ban on anti-Semitism by various institutions in the public sphere. For example, Kyiv tried to use the Holocaust in the interests of its informational and diplomatic war with Russia. Perhaps the most striking example of this was the statement by President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to members of the Israeli Knesset, where he articulated parallels between the Russian invasion and the Holocaust. He insisted on his right to speak this way based on the fact that, according to him, “Ukrainians have made their choice 80 years ago. They rescued Jews [during the World War II] . . . the Righteous Among the Nations are among us. People of Israel, now you have such a choice” (Interfax Ukraine 2022). Besides this, disappointment with Israel’s condemnation of the Russian invasion but refusal to supply Ukraine with lethal arms or join in official economic sanctions against Russia was openly vocalized by Ukrainian public figures (such as Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba, who returned to the same phraseology in his April 2022 interview for Ha’aretz [Rozovsky 2022], and others), in some way led to (not a huge) revitalization of societal anti-Semitism in social networks and beyond. However, the Russian side has gone incomparably further in this sense. Its anti-Ukrainian propaganda, which attempts to substantiate claims that Russia, according to them, “is not fighting with Ukrainians but with the nationalist, neofascist, Russophobic, and antisemitic regime” that has allegedly “illegally seized power in Kyiv in 2013–2014,” widely used the most odious of anti-Semitic myths. The reason for such use was not so much classical as so-called “instrumental” anti-Semitism: an attempt to explain how Ukraine’s top leadership contained an unprecedentedly high number of people of Jewish origin (including the President of the country, V. Zelensky, former Prime Minister V. Groysman, Minister of Defense A. Reznikov, Kyiv Mayor V. Klitschko, former head of the parliamentary opposition, V. Rabinovich, and many others), might fall under the definition of “anti-Semitic and Nazi.” An explanation was proposed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. In an interview on May 1, 2022 to Italian Mediaset, he attempted to defend Russian claims of the need to “denazify” Ukraine and dismissed Zelensky’s argument of how there could be Nazism in Ukraine if he is a Jew. According to Lavrov, “I may be mistaken but Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood, too. This means absolutely nothing. The wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews” (Quoted by MFA RF 2022).58

 Russian version: «Могу ошибиться, но у А.Гитлера тоже была еврейская кровь. Это абсолютно ничего не значит. Мудрый еврейский народ говорит, что самые ярые антисемиты, как правило, евреи». (Интервью Министра иностранных дел Российской Федерации

Perception of Anti-Semitism by Specific Segments of the Jewish Population

213

This is very close to one of the classic anti-Semitic clichés: “Jews themselves are to blame for anti-Semitic persecution throughout their history” (an opinion that, according to Levada’s research, was fully or partially shared by 30% and 31% of Russians polled in 1992 and 1997 respectively, and by 53% and 55% Russians polled in 2015 and 2020 [Gudkov 2021b, 97]). Although later Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly apologized to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for Lavrov’s anti-Semitic comments (Lis 2022), further events showed that his “slipup” fit the policy of Russian authorities to pressure Jewish organizations, including Jewish federations and large charitable foundations (such as Genesis). It also fits with the public shaming, with a strong antiSemitic smell, of prominent journalists, businessmen, scientists, “stars” of show business, and other Russian celebrities of Jewish origin who emigrated to Israel en masse. And finally, it fits with Russian threats to ban the Jewish Agency (Gross 2022b). Due to such things, many Jews in Russia and outside were concerned about the potential return of a “state anti-Semitism,” i.e. provocative anti-Semitic statements and actions undertaken by the media, bureaucratic, and other mechanisms controlled by the government. At this stage, there is low probability of governmentsponsored anti-Semitic campaigns in Russia and Belarus, and even less in Ukraine and most of the other former Soviet states; however, if such signals appear, in some of these places they might find an echo in the mass consciousness. We can only hope that the largest “hot phase” of the Russian-Ukrainian military confrontation, which began in February 2022 and is still going on at the time of this writing, will not result in the growth of antisemitism despite the widespread instrumental use of the Jewish theme in the political propaganda and diplomatic war between the two countries that accompanies this confrontation (Khanin 2023).

С.В.Лаврова итальянской телекомпании «Медиасет», Moscow, 01.05.2022, https://mid.ru/ru/for eign_policy/news/1811569/). Accessed 27.02.2023.

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews Waves of Jewish Migration after the Collapse of the USSR: The General Picture As we already mentioned, the “migration explosion” of 1989–1991 immediately reduced the extended Jewish population of the Soviet empire on the eve of and immediately after its collapse by more than 1/5 (460,000 people). But even after it was over, migration trends including internal migration from peripheral cities to large metropolitan areas of the post-Soviet states, aliya to Israel, and emigration to Western countries remained essential features of FSU Jewish society. Beginning in 1990 Israel resumed its role as the primary destination for this migration movement. More than 750,000 people moved there in the first decade of the “great aliya” of 1989–1998. They formed the core of the Russian-speaking community of Israel. Over the same period, more than 275,000 Jews and their family members left the post-Soviet countries for the United States, and more than 120,000 emigrated to Germany and other countries of Western Europe (Tolts 2020, 323–324). Throughout the second half of the 1990s, Jewish emigration gradually declined, and in fact it ended in its classical forms by the end of that decade. Jewish emigrants of the new wave that began in 1999 were for the most part people who had deliberately connected their life and career prospects with the newly independent countries that arose on the ruins of the USSR but were “pushed out” therefrom by the fiscal default and economic crisis at the end of the first post-Soviet decade. The vast majority (more than 2/3) of these migrants made aliya to Israel, where about 120,000 Jews and their families arrived before 2000.59 In terms of their values and stereotypical orientations, they were already significantly different from the Jews of the late Soviet and early post-Soviet aliya of the 1990s. It is no coincidence that the share of repatriates from these years, who decided to return or move to “third countries” in 2002–2004, i.e. in the period when the consequences of the financial and economic crisis of 2000–2001 had been overcome, was twice as high as the share of emigrants from Israel in the same years throughout the Israeli Russianspeaking community on average (Khanin 2022, 41–42).

 Here and after the statistical data on Jewish migration into and out of Israel is from the Israeli Ministry of Aliya and Integration, unless stated otherwise. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-012

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In 2002, a rapid recession in emigration was registered. It could be seen in the numbers of annual Jewish emigration from the post-Soviet countries with the largest Jewish population: the Russian Federation and Ukraine. These numbers dropped from more than 12% in 2000 to a little over 2% in 2006 in Ukraine and from more than 6% to 2% in Russia (Boyd 2022, 4). Aliya to Israel declined from 33,775 people in 2001 to 18,914 people in 2002, and this decline continued until the “turning point” of 2009. Apparently, this “aliya of the 2000s” (including a total of 72,000 people), as well as general emigration from the FSU countries during the same period, was comprised of a separate socio-cultural group dominated by people from the geographic, economic, and cultural periphery of the CIS and Baltic countries. Their move was mainly motivated by family ties, personal motives, and financial incentives. The youth cohort, as well as among those previously affiliated with Jewish organizations, for the first time gained a noticeable portion of people whose identity had developed in the revived Jewish education system and Zionist-oriented community projects. Almost one-third of FSU repatriates who arrived in Israel around these years and were interviewed in late 2017 and early 2018 in the survey made by the Ministry of Aliya and Integration (formerly, Immigrant absorption of Israel – hereafter MOIA) registered a desire to live as a Jew in the Jewish State as the reason for their emigration.60 The reciprocal process of Russian-speaking immigrants of different years departing from Israel became more active at the same time, reaching its peak in 2004. More than 36,000 Russian-speaking citizens left Israel, which was 4,000 more than in the entire previous 12 years since the beginning of the “great aliya” from the former USSR. Many of these people became part of the “returned migration” back to FSU industrial and culture metropolises (Khanin 2022, 43–44). Jewish immigration from the former USSR to English-speaking countries in those years also dropped to a minimum. For example, in the early 2000s and especially after the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, when the US tightened its immigration policies, less than 1,000 Jewish immigrants from FSU countries per year received refugee status by the middle of the decade, which was incomparable with the large-scale figures of the previous decade (NCSJ 2003, 6–7; Rozenberg 2015). In its turn, Germany continued to receive 15,000–19,000 Jewish immigrants a year from the former USSR in the late 1990s into the first half of the 2000s. According to Popkov and Popkova’s qualitative study (a series of in-depth interviews) of 43 Russian-speaking immigrants in 2005–2006 and 2011 in Munich, the main motives  In the course of survey conducted by Martin Hoffmans’ Co Ltd., a total of 1,200 respondents that arrived in Israel in 1998–2017 (600 from FSU and 200 each from English, Spanish and French-speaking countries) were polled in face-to-face interviews with the method developed by this author (MOIA-MH 2018).

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

behind moving to Germany were, first of all, economic, then a desire to live in a “free and developed European country,” and then ethnic discrimination in the country of origin (Popkov and Popkova 2020, 234–236). In 2002–2004, for the first time ever, more emigrants were going there than to Israel. However, due to the change in the German immigration policy (adoption of the Immigration Act of 1 January 2005, which replaced the Quota Refuge Act of 1991) this trend ceased the very next year, in 2005. In 2007, further admittance of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union was allowed, albeit with stricter requirements than before (for more details see Schoeps and Glöckner 2008). As a result, over the next decade and a half, Germany accepted no more than 20,000 Jewish immigrants from the former USSR (compared to more than 100,000 in 1999–2005), even after emigration rules changed in 2015, which expanded Germany’s policies on Jewish immigration to match the Israeli Law of Return (allowing entry to Jews up to the 3rd generation of descendants of mixed marriages, rather than the 2nd, as was the case before). As a result, Israel resumed its place as the ultimate emigration destination of FSU Jews and their family members – and the country preserves this status today. In 2009–2013, a growth of aliya has begun again. Around 7,100–7,500 people come to the country every year (compared to 5,800 in 2008). Half of the more than 37,000 repatriates of those years were immigrants from the Russian Federation. The immediate trigger for the surge of this Jewish (as well as other) emigration apparently was the global financial and economic crisis of 2008–2010, which, according to economists, hit Russia harder than other countries. This caused its population to feel dissatisfied and pessimistic, which resulted in massive social and political protests in 2011–2012. There were other signs of the exhaustion of the Russian economy’s growth potential that emerged in the 2000s as well, which largely influenced other CIS countries. The social atmosphere was also influenced by the war between Russia and Georgia in the summer of 2008 and rising irritation with the growing authoritarian tendencies of the Russian government among pro-Western residents of the capital and other large cities, where Jews were disproportionately represented. In the sociocultural and motivational sense, this group was a continuation of the “emigration of the 2000s,” i.e., the first post-Soviet, in the full sense of the word, generation of emigration and repatriation from the CIS and Baltic countries. According to a study of the Jews of Russia done in 2010, i.e., at the very beginning of the process, and presented in the work of Osavtsov and Yakovenko (2011, 215), the 1,300 respondents interviewed by the “snowball” method were roughly equally divided into three groups: namely, those who would prefer that their existing or future children and grandchildren (and, accordingly, themselves) leave Russia; those who, on the contrary, preferred to stay in Russia, and those who found it difficult to answer the question or reported (only 6%) that their children and grandchildren

Waves of Jewish Migration after the Collapse of the USSR: The General Picture

217

already live abroad. Israel was named as the destination of possible emigration by more than 80% of members of the sub-sample of attendees from the Moscow Choral Synagogue, about 79% of Mountain Jews, and almost half of the activists and participants in Jewish youth organization events. But in their all-Russian sample, only 28% of respondents named Israel as their desired address (another 22.3% preferred the EU countries, almost 20% the USA, Canada, Australia, or another country, and more than 30% found it difficult to choose a desired address). The increase in repatriation to Israel in these years most likely occurred due to those who had previously been in the “wavering” category but abandoned their doubts in the light of the rapid economic growth in this country, who managed to cope with the long-term consequences of the “Al-Aqsa Intifada,” practically “failed to notice” the economic consequences of the Second Lebanese War and two Gaza operations, and who looked at the “Arab Spring” from the outside. Some confirmation of this hypothesis can be found in the two surveys of FSU repatriates by the Ministry of Aliya and Integration of Israel. According to the first of them, the main reason for aliya among Israeli arrivals of 2009–2011 included the desire to secure the future for children (63%), economic motives (44%), the influence of relatives and friends already living in Israel or ready to leave (44%), and the desire to live as Jews/raise children in the Jewish state, 23% and 27% respectively (MOIA- PORI 2012). On average, almost one-fifth of respondents (17% of arrivals from European countries of the FSU and a third of people from post-Soviet Central Asia and the South Caucasus) admitted that they had been considering the idea of emigration to countries other than Israel before they undertook aliya (MOIA- PORI 2012, 29). According to the second survey of 1997–2017 arrivals (MOAI 2018), 2/3 of these repatriates from the former USSR at the end of the first and beginning of the second decade of this century (and, presumably, emigrants from the FSU to any destination in general) decided to emigrate immediately before leaving. (Their number, by the way, was 2.5–3 times higher than among repatriates of the same years from English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking countries) (Table 12.1). The same phenomenon was noticed at the next stage in 2014–2019 – a real surge in aliya, which received the unofficial name of “Putin’s” or the “Crimean” aliya. In 2014, a total of 12,099 repatriates arrived in Israel from FSU countries – almost twice as many as in 2013. And this rise continued, with a slight decline in 2016, for another half a decade. In general, the aliya of January 2014 until the end of 2019 brought more than 103,000 repatriates from the CIS and Baltic countries, about 40% of whom were from Ukraine and more than 53% from Russia. The main role in this growth apparently belongs once again to the “push” factors – the short- and medium-term consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict that began after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula by the Russian Federation, which seriously affected the economic situation and the general socio-political

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

Table 12.1: Timeline for Deciding to Re-Settle in Israel by Olim Arrivals of 1997–2017 / Years Spent in Israel by the Time of Interview. Timing of decision to make aliya

Total

Years spent in Israel after aliya Up to 

 to 

 and more

Olim from the FSU Always wanted to make aliya Long before the aliya On the eve of aliya Did not really want at all This was not my decision Hard to say

.% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .%

Total

%

.%

.%

.%

Olim from western countries who decided to emigrate to Israel right before aliya English-speaking French-speaking Spanish-speaking

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

atmosphere of both countries.61 More than a third of repatriates from FSU countries interviewed in the MOIA study in 2017–2018 who had been in Israel for less than 5 years at the time of the survey replied that their aliya was made for political reasons: they could not accept the regime in their country of origin. Another more than 25% cited economic difficulties there (Table 12.2). Table 12.2: Motives for Aliya among Russian-speaking Israelis of the 2000s-2010s, (MOIA 2017–2018 research). What were your major reasons for leaving your country of origin? Lack of personal security in country of origin Anti-Semitism Political situation and unacceptance regime in country of origin Economic difficulties in country of origin

Time spent in Israel, years –

–

–

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

 The years 2014–2019 “cost too much to all post-Soviet countries except the Baltic ones,” says economic observer of an influential Russian opposition-based Novaya Gazeta. The rest of the countries had GDPs lower than the world’s average. And citizens of the three leading post-Soviet economies – Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan – lost over a quarter of their wealth (Prokofiev 2022).

Waves of Jewish Migration after the Collapse of the USSR: The General Picture

219

Table 12.2 (continued) What were your major reasons for leaving your country of origin? Desire to live as a Jew in the Jewish State Family members’ decision Impact of friends and relatives that already lived in Israel

Time spent in Israel, years –

–

–

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

Similar trends, although with a slightly different distribution of opinions among respondents, came in the large-scale representative survey of repatriates from the former USSR in 1989–2017 conducted in 2017 by the PORI Institute, which, as was said, also included an expanded sub-sample of representatives of “Putin’s aliya” in 2014–2017. Of the 20 motives for emigration offered to respondents at that time, six received a relative majority of answers (16–25% each). Of these, three were push factors in the country of origin: “lack of personal security,” “an unfavorable political situation,” and “an unfavorable social atmosphere.” Two other motives were of a “national-personal” nature: a “desire that children and grandchildren grow up in the Jewish state” and “the desire to provide them with a better future.” One more motivation was “joining the family that had already been living in Israel by that time”. The distribution of opinions on this issue among immigrants from various regions of the former USSR of those years is also indicative. Among repatriates from the Donbass and adjacent regions of Eastern Ukraine, the proportion of those who noted the lack of personal security and the unfavorable social and political situation in the countries from which they arrived was, respectively, 2.5 and 1.5 times higher than in the sample average. This seems quite logical, since these people were, in fact, part of the first generation of Ukrainian Jewish refugees in the war that broke out in 2014 between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatist formations in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics.” The political situation in country of origin as a factor in deciding upon aliya was more often noted by repatriates from Ukraine as a whole than by immigrants from other FSU countries. Immigrants from the Russian provinces mentioned the unfavorable social atmosphere in their country more than others. Former Russian provincial residents mentioned their state of health and hopes for good medical care in Israel more than others, while residents of Russian capital cities declared their hopes for better professional prospects twice as often as the sample average. (Natives of the Asian republics of the former USSR had other interesting results in the same category: they stated that their primary motive was the desire to improve their financial situation four times more often than others.) Finally, former metropolitan Russians,

220

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

along with repatriates from Ukraine outside Donbas, gave national motives for their repatriation much more often than others (Table 12.3). Table 12.3: Reasons for Repatriation: “Putin’s Aliya” of 2014–2017. Reasons for Aliya to Israel:

Total

Russia

Ukraine

Moscow& Other S.P-b

East Other and Donbas

Other FSU countries Europe Asia

Push Factors in the Country of Origin .%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Unfavorable political situation

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Unfavorable social atmosphere

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Desire to leave with no options other than Israel

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Desire to live as a Jew in the Jewish state

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Desire to raise children and grandchildren in the Jewish state

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Desire to provide a better future for children/grandchildren

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Hope for better professional prospects

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Desire to improve material position

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Health condition, hopes for good medical care

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

Lack of personal security Anti-Semitism

.%

Pull Factors – National motives .%

Pull Factors – material motives

Personal and Family reasons Left under the influence of a spouse Left with or after parents

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Waves of Jewish Migration after the Collapse of the USSR: The General Picture

Table 12.3 (continued) Reasons for Aliya to Israel:

Left after or together with children/grandchildren Joined family already living in Israel

Total

Ukraine

Moscow& Other S.P-b

East Other and Donbas

Other FSU countries Europe Asia

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.% N

Russia

N=

.% .% N=

N=

.% .% .% .% N=

N=

N=

N=

Unfortunately, we are unaware of studies on the motives of FSU Jews’ emigration to other countries in the second half of the 2010s. But judging from our and others’ observations, we can assume that they – except for national motives – were mainly guided by the same considerations as those Russian-speaking Jews who in those years moved to Israel. One way or another, by the end of 2019, the peak of the first wave of “Putin’s emigration” had passed. The very next year, 2020, Jewish emigration declined sharply, especially aliya to Israel, which accounted for half the previous numbers. The same trend continued a year later. In addition to travel restrictions and related challenges associated with the COVID-19 epidemic, two other factors appear to have played a role. First was a marked decrease in stress over the uncertainties attending Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the outbreak of war in Eastern Ukraine, and a new round of confrontations between the Russian Federation and the “collective West,” which was noted by many observers. Secondly, the gradual easing of the crisis and the renewed moderate economic growth in Russia, Ukraine, and some other FSU countries in 2021 (see IEF 2022). The earlier process of return by Jewish (and other) emigrants to their countries of origin, primarily Russia, has also intensified. For example, by May 2022, at least a quarter of “Putin’s aliya” repatriates to Israel, especially arrivals from Russia, had already received Israeli citizenship, solved their bureaucratic problems, and moved on to live and work abroad. A large number (about half) of them had spent a very short time or practically no time at all in Israel (Khanin 2022, 292–293). We might add to this a significant increase in the role of “trans-migration:” many thousands of Russian-speaking Jews, having formally emigrated from the former USSR, in reality lived and/or worked in two (or more)

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

countries. Meanwhile, the Jewish communities of the post-Soviet Eurasian countries still held considerable emigration potential.

Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context All of this rather complicated but generally well-established (by late 2019 to early 2020) migration pattern was shown in our study of the “extended Jewish population” of five FSU countries carried out around the same period. Let me try to highlight its main objectives and factors (see Table 12.4 below). Table 12.4: Emigration Plans of Members of the “Extended Jewish Population” of 5 FSU Countries, 2019–2020 (EAJC/IEAEI Surveys). Planning to emigrate

Total

Including: Ukraine Russia

Size of the “extended Jewish population”

,

Belarus Moldova

, ,

,

Kazakhstan ,

Ready to emigrate Yes No Did not decide (yet)/ Hard to say

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

Destination (for those who have decided or are still hesitating) To leave this country, does not matter where Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European states Other FSU countries Other destinations Hard to say

%

%

%

%

%

%

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

– % –

% % –

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

Timing (for those who decided or still hesitating) Shortly In a year or two In a few years

% % %

223

Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

Table 12.4 (continued) Planning to emigrate

Total

Including: Ukraine Russia

Do not know yet, depends on the situation Hard to say Total

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

Belarus Moldova %

%

%

%

%

%

Kazakhstan %

%

Emigrational orientations and values. About a quarter of interviewed respondents expected to emigrate from their countries “in the foreseeable future” (from “immediately” to “in the next year or two”). Slightly more than a third had not yet decided at the time of the survey (in this subcategory, a fifth of respondents were thinking of it in the more distant future or expected to decide “depending on the situation”). And finally, 40% of respondents gave a rather firm “no” in answer to this question. Judging by these data, members of the extended Jewish population of Moldova were the most “emigrant-confident” – more than half and more than a third of respondents respectively had intentions to leave the country or toyed with this idea, with 20% intending to do so immediately or in the next year or two, 28% within a few years, and 52% depending on the situation. Economic reasoning seemed to be one motive among many others. The proportion of respondents planning to emigrate or considering such an idea (89%) was almost identical to the proportion of Jews and their family members who defined their economic situation as “quite prosperous” or “generally satisfactory” (these made up 88%, which was more than a quarter more than the average for four countries of the European part of the former USSR). Without data to confirm or refute the obvious assumption of the direct relationship between these two parameters, we should look at the general context of an unprecedentedly high political turbulence in the country, which is negatively affecting its economy and is teetering between pro-Western and pro-Russian segments of the ruling elite (Gotisan 2020). “Winter and spring of 2018–2019 was a period of expectation and hope for many citizens, including Jews, for the changes that were to come in the country after the parliamentary elections of 2019,” says Victor Damian, head of the Ethnology of the Jews Group at the Institute of Cultural Heritage of the Republic of Moldova. “When the oppositional forces, with which many Moldovan Jews identified

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

themselves, did not get the expected results, this resonated among the people and prompted a return to the old mood of doom, hopelessness, and the impossibility of change. And emigration seemed a reasonable way out to many.”62 In the most general terms, we are talking about the phenomenon of a demographically weak community, whose aspirations are often oriented outside of its host country. This is also true of Moldovan society as a whole, where about a third (or even more) of citizens temporarily or permanently live and/or work abroad (MFA Moldova 2021). This formed, according to researchers, a so called “migration culture,” which increases and facilitates migration intentions (Tabac and Gagauz 2000). This emigration, according to observers, has a pronounced sociocultural accent. The preferred destination for ethnic Moldovans is Romanian-speaking countries (especially Italy), for ethnic Slavs it is Russia and Ukraine, for Turkic-speaking Gagauz it is Turkey – and for the Jews, not surprisingly, it is Israel. Out of all our 2019 survey respondents in Moldova who were planning on or considered leaving, 82% (more than in any other country where the survey was conducted, and 1.5 times more than the sample average) named Israel as their emigration destination. The smallest number of potential emigrants to Israel from all countries in our 2019–2020 survey was registered in Kazakhstan – 39% (although even there Israel was the destination of choice of a relative majority of respondents). In part, this can be explained by weak personal acquaintance with Israel among the Jews of Kazakhstan (in comparison with members of other FSU communities). (As was noted above, 68% of Kazakhstan respondents have never been to Israel, even though they have friends and relatives in Israel no less often and sometimes even much more often than respondents in any other FSU country.) But this is clearly not the only reason. The external vector of cultural and life orientations of many members of the Jewish community of Kazakhstan, was mainly directed towards Russia in the post-Soviet era. However, in the last 1.5 to 2 decades, the system of material, educational and career values started to become progressively “Americanized” for much of the population of large cities, primarily Almaty, where the absolute majority of the country’s Jewish population is concentrated. Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Kazakhstani sample was the only one in our study where the proportion of respondents who declared their readiness or intention to consider emigration “to another CIS country” (obviously referring to the Russian Federation) was statistically significant – 11%, while in the remaining four countries this number did not exceed 1–2%. Even more significant was the share of Kazakhstani

 This comment was received by this author by e-mail, 07.07.2022.

Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

225

citizens of Jewish origin who, while thinking about emigration, hoped to move to the United States or Canada. These made up as much as 25% of our Kazakhstani sample, which is 3–3.5 times more than in other countries. In general, Kazakhstan had the lowest share of respondents inclined to emigrate or ready to discuss this topic (36%) – half the sample average in the European FSU countries, and even less than a quarter (23%) of those expected to do so within the next three years. The same number of respondents postponed concrete steps in this direction for a longer period, and more than half, for an indefinite period (“depends on the situation”). This phenomenon is likely to reflect a rather stable situation in the country, devoid of any zigzags in social moods and specific problems for the Jewish community. Indeed, 61.2% and 67.6% of Kazakh citizens surveyed in the annual Gallup Global poll at the end of 2018 and 2019 respectively showed obvious social optimism, believing that coming years will be better than the previous year. The Kazakh Jews gave the same responses: only 8% of respondents noted that, although they had enough money for food, they had run into financial difficulties when buying clothes and basic household appliances. Another 45% reported that their income allowed them to maintain a modest but generally prosperous lifestyle (“able to buy food, clothes, and basic household appliances, but buying large appliances is a problem”). More than a third (37%) could afford high quality everyday consumption and new household appliances. And slightly less than one tenth (8%) admitted that they are able to buy expensive things – a car, a summer house, etc., in general deny themselves nothing (in Almaty, the share of respondents who answered this way was 1.5 times higher than in the Kazakh Jewish sample average). However, the share of “social optimists” among the surveyed Kazakhstanis (presumably including Jews) noticeably decreased to 55.8% at the end of 2020 and 58.8% at the end of 2021. The reasons were primarily economic: the share of those who assessed their financial situation in 2019 as “having enough money for food only” (3.4%) had tripled to 9.4% by 2021. And on the contrary, the share of those able to buy basic household appliances without a loan decreased by more than 1.5 times over the same years (from 46.9% to 29.3%), while the share of those who could afford to buy a new car on the same terms decreased three times – from 24.7% in 2018 to 8.2% in 2021 (Reinhard 2022). In light of these circumstances and against the background of “the ongoing shock from the events of January 2022 and the nervousness and uncertainty in connection with the war in Ukraine, which did not bypass Kazakhstan”, as one of the leading Kazakhstani sociologists put it, the period from 2018 to early 2020 looked almost like the “golden age” (Gurevich, 2022).63

 This opinion of Leonid Gurevich was received by e-mail 7 July 2022.

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

An intermediate model of emigration sentiment, as can be seen in Table 12.4, was evinced by the Jewish communities of the three Slavic countries of post-Soviet Eurasia (90% of the Jewish population of the former USSR). A quarter of respondents surveyed in Ukraine and a fifth of respondents in Belarus and the Russian Federation declared their readiness to leave their host countries; another quarter of respondents in Russia, more than a third in Belarus and more than 40% in Ukraine did not rule out such a possibility. From 40% to 60% of these potential emigrants (more than half in the sample average) named Israel as their intended destination, 7–8% named the USA or Canada, and from 9% in Ukraine to 15% in Belarus (1.5 times more than the sample average) intended to get to Germany or another EU country. At the same time, respondents in Russia most often reported that they had no intention to leave – 54%, compared to 44% in Belarus and 34% in Ukraine. Social, political and economic context. These results on the whole resemble the larger picture of public sentiments for a short period when aliya and emigration were still relevant to the local Jewish agenda. At the same time, a growing feeling was noticed in various polls that “sustainable instability” in the host countries was being replaced by a state of “unstable sustainability,” with a range of moods from moderate optimism, as was the case in Ukraine,64 to detached indifference and growing underlying irritation, as was the case in Russia and Belarus (Volkov 2019; USAID 2019; Thinktanks.by 2018; Urban 2019). This conclusion is well illustrated by a map of emigration sentiments in various types of Jewish communities in these countries. Tables 12.5 and 12.6 show significant differences in migration plans among Jewish residents of capital cities and members of provincial Jewish communities. For example, among respondents living in provincial cities of Russia, the share of those inclined to emigrate was almost 3.5 times higher than among residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg (40% and 12%). And the share of residents of the two Russian capitals who stated that they did not intend to leave their host country was almost four times higher than among residents of the provinces (67% and 20%). This can be easily explained by the fact that it was in the capital and other large manufacturing, commercial, and cultural centers of the country that a relative stabilization of the socio-economic sphere was noticeable after the recession caused by the financial and economic crisis and western sanctions set down in response to the annexation of Crimea. Residents of Russian capital cities assessed their economic

 According to Gallup International Global End of Year Survey, in Ukraine, compared to 2018, there was a significant increase in optimistic sentiment in 2019, and the optimism index (accounted as the difference between “optimists” and “pessimists”) valued 25 against 4 percentage points in 2018. In general, Ukraine took 15th place among 46 countries measured by the level of optimism of inhabitants (KIIS, 2020). See also Rating 2019.

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Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

situation as completely or quite prosperous more often than respondents in the provinces. About a quarter of Moscow and St. Petersburg respondents noted that their income was enough to meet basic needs, about half of respondents said it was enough to secure a higher level of consumption, including durable goods, and about a third could afford expensive things or deny themselves nothing at all. Among those who came from Russia to Israel after 24 February 2022, two-thirds were from St. Petersburg and Moscow. Of these, more than 63% reported that before the war, they had no problems with economic expenses and could afford “some expensive things,” while 9.5% replied that they “denied themselves nothing” (MOIA-Tel Dor 2022). A close, although not so radical, delimitation between the capital and provincial communities in terms of both emigration sentiments and self-assessment of standard of living was also observed in Belarus (Table 12.5).65 Table 12.5: Emigration Plans and Self-Assessment of Economic Situation of Jewish Population of Russia and Belarus / Type of Jewish Communities, 2018–2019. Total

Russia region

Belarus

Capital

Province

Total

Capital

Provincial communities

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

% % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

N













Emigration intentions Yes No Still undecided Total

Self-assessment of own economic situation Quite good In general, satisfactory Not satisfactory Hard to estimate Hard to say Total

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % –

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%













 According to an expert assessment of those years, “for the first time in many years, a turn is taking place in the lack of public demand for reforms . . . There is tiredness from the hopeless stability; a dynamism is wanted. Migration from provinces to Minsk, from Belarus to other countries is another proof that people are ready to do something, to realization their potential” (Zaprudsky 2019).

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

In Ukraine, a completely different picture was recorded. The relationship between type of the Jewish community and self-assessment of economic situation was even more pronounced here than in other countries (the proportion of those who defined their situation as “quite prosperous” among the people of Kyiv was 1.5 times higher than among the Jews of other large cities and three times higher than among members of small provincial Jewish communities). But in terms of emigration, as Table 12.6 shows, the dependence was reversed: Jews of the capital city turned out to be more susceptible to emigration moods than the inhabitants of the provinces. In fact, unlike the latter, they were noticeably more likely to implement their plans immediately or within the next year or two, while almost 60% of members of the provincial communities (1.5 times more often than the people of Kyiv) gave a vague answer – “depends on the situation” – to the question of “when” they might emigrate. There is an obvious explanation for this Ukrainian anomaly. At the end of the 2010s, pro-western and globalist sentiments in the public discourse of Ukraine, especially among residents of big cities, grew stronger and received visible support after the anti-authoritarian pro-European “Revolution of Dignity” in the winter of 2013–2014. In 2019, China became the country’s main trading partner for the first time in history. The share of the EU in total exports was more than 41%, while Russia, once the main trade and economic partner of Kyiv, accounted for only 6.5% of total exports in 2019 (compared to almost a quarter in the last “pre-revolutionary” year of 2013 [NV Kyiv 2020]). We can assume, therefore, that the “cautious optimism” mentioned above was associated with the feeling of Ukraine’s rapid transformation into a part of the European and global world, a symbol of which was the abolition of the visa regime with EU countries in 2017 and the enshrining of the principle of the “European identity of the Ukrainian people and irreversibility of the European and Euro-Atlantic course of Ukraine” in its Constitution. All these developments were likely to encourage the Jews, one of the most dynamic groups within Ukrainian society, to realize their prospects and ambitions abroad. And it was the capital that turned out to be most susceptible to these trends. At the same time, “push factors,” first of all the difficult economic situation of citizens, especially in relatively small peripheral cities and regions close to the war zone in the east of the country, did not go away but remained a certain incentive for emigration, now for negative reasons. It is no coincidence that respondents among the emigration-prone members of small Jewish communities of this kind twice as often said their goal was “to leave this country and go to any place where life would be better”. However, Israel remained the most desirable option among members of all categories of Ukrainian Jews. A similar trend took place in Kazakhstan, where the Jewish residents of Almaty, who were noticeably more economically prosperous than their provincial

Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

229

Table 12.6: Emigration Plans of Members of the Extended Jewish Population of Ukraine / Type of Jewish Communities, 2019. Total

Communities Capital

Large

Small

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

N









% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

N









% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

% % % % %

%

%

%

%

%

N









Planning to emigrate Yes No Still undecided Hard to say Total

If yes, when? Shortly In a year or two In a few years Do not know yet, depends on the situation Hard to answer Total

If yes, where? Just to leave, does not matter where to Emigrate / return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries Other Total

counterparts, were planning to emigrate two to three times more often than residents of provincial cities. And just like in Ukraine, the Jewish population of provincial cities was 1.5 to 2 times more likely than Almaty residents to simply leave their country and go no matter where, while the Jews of the “old Kazakh capital” were ready to consider the United States or Canada twice as often as provincial Jews. Finally, as with the Jews of Ukraine, the main destination for the possible migration of members of the Jewish (in the broad sense) community of Kazakhstan was Israel. Specific motivations. Specific motives for the possible emigration of FSU Jews and their family members were not studied in this research, but they can be

230

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

surmised from the survey of the Jewish population of Russia (where 65% of the extended Jewish population of the former USSR lives) conducted in 2018 by the Moscow-based Yuri Levada Analytical Center (Levada Center) on the invitation of the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC). The general picture of emigration seen from this study was close or identical to ours: 42% of the Levada Center’s respondents thought about emigration (54% emigration to Israel, 28% to Englishspeaking countries, 18% to EU countries), and more than half of them, just as in our case, undertook certain steps. Meanwhile, 56% of respondents (including 5% of those who left and returned to Russia) did not plan any radical changes in their place of residence. This, according to sociologists, is identical to the corresponding sentiments of the entire Russian “middle class: – the more educated, qualified, successful, and wealthy residents of the largest cities of the young and middle generations” (Levada 2018, 43; 2019). Socio-economic, family, personal, and political motives dominated among the most important rationales for leaving Russia. “The desire to ensure the future of children” (86%) and “the desire for a prosperous and civilized life” (77%) ranked first among them. These were followed by the desire to reunite with the loved ones who were already abroad (66%) and “disbelief in the possibility of socio-political improvements in Russia” (64%). There were no significant differences in the popularity of such considerations in 2018 compared to a similar survey by the same center in 2006. The only – and an essential – difference concerned Jewish people: “antiSemitism and unfriendly attitudes towards the Jews” was considered a very important motive for possible emigration in 2006 by 1.5 times more respondents (45%) than twelve years later (29%) (Table 12.7). (In our 2017 study of Russianspeaking citizens of Israel, less than 10% of repatriates who arrived in the country in 2014–2017 noted anti-Semitism as a factor in their aliya. Most often, this factor was mentioned by people from eastern Ukraine and Donbass, as well as from Belarus, Moldova, and the Baltic countries, and least of all by former Russians.) In other words, anti-Semitic xenophobia has significantly lost its acuteness as the most important reason for emigration, although it has by no means disappeared in the FSU. “And so,” the authors of the report concluded, “Jewish people’s general opinion on the reasons for possible emigration from Russia consists of the attractiveness of an imaginary way of life in other countries, which they want to provide for their children, and ideas of a prosperous and comfortable life in the family circle, which seems impossible in today’s Russia” (Levada 2018, 47). Age and gender. It is believed that women are generally less inclined to change their place of residence than men, which was once again confirmed by our survey. However, as follows from the data of a qualitative study conducted in 2016 by the Tel Aviv PORI Sociological Institute commissioned by the World Zionist Organization, Jewish women have been the ones who initiated the emigration process in the

Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

231

Table 12.7: Comparison of 2006 and 2018 Survey Data on Motives for Possible Emigration by Jews of Russia (Levada Center/REC, May 2018). Most important motives:

Desire to secure the future of children Striving for a prosperous and civilized life Desire to reunite with loved ones Disbelief in the possibility of socio-political improvements in Russia Desire to live a full Jewish life Anti-Semitism and anti-Jewish attitudes

Survey date 



   

   

 

 

last two decades, at least regarding aliya to Israel. According to their data, it was the women of Russian-speaking Jewish families that prompted the move, even if they asserted that the final decision belonged to their husbands. And young men more often referred to the decision made by their fathers or other older men in the family (PORI 2016). With age, the desire to leave weakens. The strongest desire to emigrate from Russia, according to the Levada Center, belonged to the youngest respondents (16–24 years old) – 53%, while among people of retirement age this share was 13%. When asked whether they were preparing for emigration, the youngest respondents most often answered in the affirmative – 54% (with an average of about a third in most groups). However, for the elderly and the poor, these figures were noticeably lower (Levada 2018, 44). Our study of a larger sample showed approximately the same trend. Willingness to emigrate ranged from 42% in the most relocatable youth cohort, aged 16–25, and 30% and 22% in the early- and advanced-middle-age subgroups respectively (similar to the Levada study). The number was 13% among persons over the age of 60. Another 40–41% of 16- to 40-year-olds, more than a third of 41- to 60-year-olds, and a quarter of the older age cohort were ready to consider this idea or, without rejecting it in principle, to postpone its specific implementation to the future (See Table 12.8). There were no significant differences in the regional age breakdown, with the exception of some indicative situations. In Belarus, young people were less inclined to name Israel as the country of their possible permanent relocation. This cohort was the only one where a relative majority of respondents mentioned Germany, Poland, or other EU countries as such. (In recent years, these countries have been some of the main directions of labor and political migration from Belarus as a whole; Petrakova 2021.) The same picture was observed in Kazakhstan. In Ukraine, the gap between age cohorts with regard to Israel as the main destination of emigration was

232

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

Table 12.8: Emigration Plans of the “Extended Jewish Population” of 5 FSU countries / Age and Gender, 2019–2020. Planning to emigrate to another country Total

Gender

Age Up to  – – +

Male Fem Yes No Still undecided Hard to say Total

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % %

%

%





,

% % % %





% % % %

% % % %

% % 



smaller, but even there, the proportion of respondents thinking of other options among young people was almost 1.5 times higher than among middle-aged people and three times higher than among those over 60. Among respondents in Russia, Israel clearly dominated in all age cohorts. At the same time, Germany and the EU countries ranked first in the “anti-rating” among older people – those who considered this as a possible emigration destination in this subgroup were three times fewer than the sample average. (It is difficult to say whether the stronger negative historical memory of this generation, and/or official emigration policy and diminished emigration incentives following 2005, or other factors played a role in this case) (Table 12.9) . Table 12.9: Directions of Possible Migration of Jews and Their Family Members in 5 FSU Countries / Age, 2019–2020. If yes, where?

Age

Total Up to 

–

–

+

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % – % %

– % – % – % %

%

%

%

%

%











Belarus Leave this country, does not matter where to Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries Other FSU countries Other Hard to say Total

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Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

Table 12.9 (continued) If yes, where?

Age

Total Up to 

–

–

+

% % % % % % %

% % % % – % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

%

%

%

%

%











% % % % % % %

% % % % % – %

% % % % – % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % – % %

%

%

%

%

%











% % % % %

% % % % –

% % % % %

% % % % %

– % – % %

%

%

%

%

%











% % % %

– % – %

% % – –

% % % –

– % – –

Ukraine Leave this country, does not matter where to Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries Other FSU countries Other Hard to say Total

Russia Leave this country, does not matter where to Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries Other FSU countries Other Hard to say Total

Kazakhstan Leave this country, does not matter where to Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries Other FSU countries Total

Moldova Leave this country, does not matter where to Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries

234

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

Table 12.9 (continued) If yes, where?

Other Hard to say Total

Age

Total Up to 

–

–

+

% %

% %

% %

% –

% –

%

%

%

%

%











Ethnic origin and ethnic identity. Despite the fact that the stability of Jewish identity clearly correlated with the homogeneity of the ethnic origin of respondents, as seen in Chapter 3, no similar interdependence was recorded between these two parameters, on the one hand, and willingness to emigrate from the post-Soviet countries, on the other. The desire to emigrate among persons of (almost) wholly Jewish origin was less pronounced than in any group of partly Jewish and non-Jewish origin. This can be explained not so much by any special attachment of these people to their host country (no significant differences in local patriotism were recorded in our study between subgroups ranked by degree of homogeneity of Jewish origin), but by the disproportionately wide representation of persons of older age less prone to change their place and lifestyle in the group of “100% Jews. (Table 12.10)” Table 12.10: Emigration Plans of Jews and Their Family Members in 5 FSU Countries / Ethnic Origin, 2019–2020. Are you planning to emigrate to another country?

Total

Number of Jewish grandparents –

Yes No Did not decide (yet) Hard to say Total





None

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

,









At the same time, the desire to leave one’s host country was directly proportional to the level of one’s Jewish identity among respondents. This opinion was expressed by more than a third of the “universalists,” about a quarter of the carriers of ethno-

235

Jews’ Migrations Plans in 2019–2020 and their Sociological Context

civic Jewish and mixed Jewish-gentile identity, a fifth of the “cosmopolitans,” and less than 10% of those who declared non-Jewish ethnic identity (Table 12.11). Table 12.11: Emigration Plans and Directions of Jews and Their Family Members in 5 FSU Countries / Ethnic Identity, 2019–2020. Total

Ethnic Identity Just Rus / Ukr / Rus / Ukr A human Only Rus / Other Jewish other Jew and Jewish being Ukr / Other

Plans to emigrate to another state Yes No Yet to decide Hard to say Total

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % –

% % % %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

% %

– %

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

,













If yes, where: Doesn’t matter Emigrate/return to Israel The USA or Canada Germany/other European countries Other Hard to say Total

The obvious explanation for this fact is that after the collapse of the USSR, the main driving force of Jewish emigration from the former USSR was Israel. From 2005 till recently, it was practically the ultimate symbol for Jewish emigration. Identification with Israel, as presented in detail in Chapter 4, is the most important element of the core Jewish identity in the former USSR. And it is directly proportional to the level of its stability. We believe it is correct to assume that emigration – or its rejection – is perceived, consciously or subconsciously, as an act of ethnic (but not civil) declaration and self-representation by the respondent. Accordingly, the share of those who chose Israel as the destination of possible emigration from the country of origin comprised an absolute and/or relative majority of answers in all cultural and identification categories among those planning to

236

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

emigrate and who in one way or another were aware of their belonging to or involvement with the Jewish communities of their countries. This varied from almost three-quarters (73%) in the “universalist” subgroup of Jews to more than half (55% and 52%, respectively) in the categories of ethno-civic Jewish and mixed Jewishgentile identity, to more than a third of “cosmopolitans,” to slightly more than a quarter of “ethnic non-Jews.” In these two “non-Jewish identity” categories, the proportion of respondents planning to move to the USA, Canada, Germany, or other countries rather than Israel was from 1.5 to more than 2 times higher than the average for the choice. All of this, among other things, gives us reason to emphasize again that Jewish origin is an important, but far from the only, factor influencing the ethnic identity and behavioral patterns of members of the extended Jewish population of the former USSR. In any event, coming back to the calculations of Israeli “demographic minimalists” of the total number of members of the extended Jewish population in the five countries of our study as being about 850,000 at the end of 2020, we may estimate the operational potential of their emigration at that moment. It was 100,000 to 120,000 from Russia, 45,000 to 50,000 from Ukraine, 5,000 to 7,000 from Belarus, 4,000 to 5,000 from Moldova, and 1,500 to 2,000 from Kazakhstan. About half were likely to make aliya to Israel, in which the proportion of the core Jewish population would be noticeably larger than in the extended Jewish population of post-Soviet Euro-Asia as a whole. It was assumed that, unless something particularly dramatic happened, the realization of this potential would be significantly extended over time.

Emigration against the Background of the War: Portrait and Trajectories Indeed, emigration of representatives of these communities in 2020, 2021, and early 2022 remained fairly moderate. The only local outburst took place in 2021 in Belarus, which by all indications was a reaction to the violent suppression of an attempted anti-authoritarian revolution by the authorities in the summer of 2020. (As a result, 1.5 times more emigrants from Belarus arrived in Israel that year than in the previous year.) But after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the moderate dynamics gave way to a sharp migration surge, including a significant increase in internal migration – primarily by Jewish persons displaced in Ukraine, as well as a new wave of emigration of the postSoviet Jews to Israel and Western countries.

237

Emigration against the Background of the War: Portrait and Trajectories

From the end of February to the end of October 2022, more than 45,000 new Jewish immigrants (olim66) arrived in Israel alone from the FSU countries, compared to less than 13,000 in 2021; 1,059 people arrived in January 2022 and fewer than a thousand between 1–23 February 2022 (Table 12.12). All in all 66,000 immigrants from later 2022 till Jabuary 1, 2023 includes more than 14,000 from Ukraine, more than 43,000 from Russia, and about2,000 from Belarus. Table 12.12: Comparative Data on Aliya from the FSU between January 2021 and September 2022 / Country of Origin. Country

–.

Total Jan

Total

Feb

, , ,

Ukraine , Russia , Belarus , Other FSU ,

   

   

March April

May

June

July

Aug

Sept

Oct

, , , , , , , ,  ,  

, ,  

, ,  

, ,  

 ,  

 ,  

 ,  

 ,  

Judging from these data, it is logical to assume that the majority of those who were not sure about their emigration plans in the course of our 2019–2020 survey (26–41%) have decided in favor of emigration today or intend to do so in the near future. And a significant part of respondents who at the time of the survey did not intend to leave their country (31% to 55%) have probably changed their intentions given the new situation. (Among other things, one indication was a growing interest among Jewish parents in sending their children to various youth prealiya programs, such as “kdam Na’ale,” etc.) This assessment is confirmed by the Israeli MOIA’s April to early-May 2022 study of repatriates from the former USSR who arrived in Israel from January 1 through April 2022. More than half – almost a third and a fifth of respondents respectively – noted that they either “hesitated whether to go in principle, and if so, when” or were not going to emigrate from their country of origin in the foreseeable future. But the war forced both categories to make this step. Moreover, immigrants from Ukraine stated 3.5 times more often than repatriates from Russia that if it were not for the war, they would not have left their country (see Table 12.13 below).

 Olim (singular – oleh, literally meaning “those who ascend,” from Hebrew Aliya, literally “ascent”), is the official Israeli definition of Jews and their family members who resettle from the Diaspora in their historical Homlend, the Land and the State of Israel.

238

Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

Table 12.13: Impact of War on Causes for Aliya among FSU Arrivals to Israel from January to MidMay 2022, According to the Inst. for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (2019/20) and the Israeli Aliya and Integration Ministry (April-May 2022). Research Planning to emigrate IEAJS MOIA IEAJS MOIA MOIA IEAJS MOIA IEAJS

Total

Ukraine

Yes % % Planned long ago, coincidentally emigrated now .% .% No % % Never planned, but the war forced me to .% .% Still undecided % % Hesitated, but the war forced me to .% .% Hard to say .% % Other .% .%

Russia and others % .% % .% % .% % .%

On the other hand, the share of respondents surveyed in April-May 2022 who were planning to emigrate to Israel in the near future anyway, for whom the outbreak of the war simply coincided with their intentions, turned out to be almost twice as high among repatriates from Russia and other CIS countries as among immigrants from Ukraine (respectively, 64.8% and 37.2%, with 49.5% as the sample average). The reason, as understood at the time of writing, was predominantly technical. As of May 2022, about 10,000 “family units” of potential repatriates from the former USSR (married couples with or without children, single parents with children, and single parents aged 18 and over, more than 20,000 people in total) were in the process of getting their visa documents, according to consulates. The vast majority of these people were citizens of Russia. Their move to Israel has been hampered by the fact that the first priority of Israeli consulates has been the repatriation of Jewish refugees from Ukraine, as well as by an acute shortage of transportation and logistics support – which, after a sharp drop in repatriation from Ukraine at the end of May 2022, remained the main problem.67 This probably explains why two-thirds of arrivals from Russia (and Belarus) in Israel from January to May of this year were people who had been planning

 According to the Israeli Consulates, by early July 2022, the number of potential repatriates awaiting the possibility to move to Israel or for a change from their tourist status to a repatriate status after arriving in Israel on their own made up around 10,000 families, or around 27,000 people. This figure increased when, in August 2022, the Russian authorities threatened to ban the activities of the Jewish Agency in the country and in September 2022 announced a partial mobilization of its army for war in Ukraine. By early January 2023 the number of persons who had come from the FSU to Israel as tourists and were waiting for Israeli citizenship was about 7,550 persons.

239

Emigration against the Background of the War: Portrait and Trajectories

repatriation before and have probably solved their visa and other administrative problems already. The proportion of those “previously hesitant” and previously confident that they would not leave Russia in the foreseeable future among those who arrived after the start of the war was 1.5–2 times higher than the proportion of repatriates who moved to Israel between January 1 and February 24, 2022. (Table 12.14) Table 12.14: Impact of the War in Ukraine on Motives of FSU Arrivals in January-May 2022 / Date of Arrival (Ministry of Aliya and Integration Research, May 2022). The impact of war on emigration plans

Total

Date of arrival January

–/

/+

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

N









%

%

%

%

%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

N









%

%

%

%

%

Ukraine Planned long ago, coincidentally emigrated now Hesitated, but the war forced me to Never planned, but the war forced me to Other Didn’t answer Total

Russia and other FSU countries Planned long ago, coincidentally emigrated now Hesitated, but the war forced me to Never planned, but the war forced me to Other Didn’t answer Total

Even with this circumstance in mind, the proportion of repatriates from Russia who said their pre-planned emigration simply happened to coincide with the beginning of the Russian invasion into Ukraine was comparable to the proportion of those who were initially determined to repatriate to Israel (60%) in our interview of Russian Jews planning to leave or weighing the option of leaving in 2018–2019. These numbers seem to include most of those Russian and Belarusian Jews who related in our survey that their goal was to move to other countries or “to leave this country and go no matter where.” They claimed these two options much more often than our respondents in Ukraine. For example, among those interviewed in 2019 in Russia who met the criteria of the Israeli Law of Return and

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who named Israel as the goal of their planned or possible emigration, almost a fifth on average (and almost a quarter in two out of four age cohorts) marked the option “Israel or another country.” Among those in Ukraine who considered the option of leaving, the proportion of people who had not decided on the destination of their possible emigration was 1.5 times higher than the entire sample average in five FSU countries. This is also why it did not come as a surprise that, after the start of the war, Ukrainian Jews were ready to consider such options as the EU (primarily Germany) and other Western countries much more often than Russian, Belarusian and other Jews. In the first weeks of the war, Ukrainian Jewish emigration was predominantly oriented towards Israel – with almost 6,000 arriving there in March 2022, which was almost twice as many as from Russia (less than 3,300 people). But already in April, it shifted towards Europe when Israel received half that number. In May 4.5 times fewer, and in June almost 7.5 times fewer repatriates from Ukraine came to Israel than in March (respectively 3,054, 1,314, and only 796 persons). Meanwhile, aliya from Russia remained relatively stable over these months (see Graph 12.1 below).

Graph 12.1: Dynamic of Aliya (Jewish immigration) to Israel from Russia and Ukraine (CSB of Israel, 25 July 2022).

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At the same time, according to the data of two surveys among community leaders and professionals, conducted by the Central Council of Jews in Germany (CCJG) in Mach-April 2022 and August-September 2022 respectively and shared with this author,68 suggested that 7,000 persons was the biggest possible number of Ukrainian immigrants that had arrived in Germany by that time who had any trace of Jewish heritage (i.e., any kind of Jewish roots or membership in Jewish households), including around 2,600–3,000 refugees that had at least one Jewish parent. Besides, there were reported on about 25,000 war refugees from Ukraine that had, at least once, contact with German Jewish communities (including, of course, many nonJews without any Jewish heritage). By September 2022, according to the same source, 8,000 persons with a Jewish heritage were in an ongoing relationship with Jewish communities. According to updated estimation released by the CCJG in January 2023,69 by the end of 2022 European countries received about 13,000 Jewish refugees from Ukraine from the beginning of the war. Of them at least 10,000 were received by Germany, some 800 by Austria, more than 800 by Romania, 350 by Poland, more than 180 by Spain, 130 by Switzerland, more than 100 by Slovakia, Bulgaria and France each. Other European states as well as the USA and Canada received from a few dozen to several hundred families. There is no exact data on the total number of Jews from post-Soviet countries who moved to Western countries, but it can be cautiously assumed that they make at least 15,000 to 20,000 people. The share of immigrants from Ukraine seems to exceed noticeably the share of the Jewish community of this country in the “extended Jewish population” of the former USSR. In general, aliya and emigration from Ukraine seem to include, for the most part, “war refugees” in the full sense of the word, while Jewish emigration from Russia (for which Israel remained the main destination), as well as emigration from the Russian Federation as a whole, was primarily motivated by the negative economic outlook in that country, disagreements with official policy, and fears of the isolation of the country from the civilized world. It is no coincidence that emigration sentiments (and the accompanying increase in the number of people coming to Israeli consulates for new immigrant visas and the number of students in Hebrew classes in different cities of the country)70 have sharply increased in

 Received by e-mail in September 2022.  Received by e-mail on 5 February 2023.  Information received by the author from 30 participants in a seminar for Jewish Sunday school directors and teachers from a wide range of cities in the former USSR, including 22 from the Russian Federation, five from Belarus, and one each from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan (Jerusalem, 28 July 2022).

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connection with the intention of the Russian authorities to declare the Jewish Agency (Sokhnut) a “foreign agent” and close its office in Russia (for details on the JAFI collision, see Gross 2022a). However, by that time it was still too early to determine the veracity of the popular opinion that Israel is losing potential repatriates in favor of German and other European welfare packages” (Cf. Detaly 2022a) But regardless of the motives and directions of Jewish emigration from Ukraine, Russia, and other FSU countries, just like “Putin’s aliya” from Russia and the “economic aliya” from Ukraine and other CIS countries in 2014–2020, it represents almost the entire social sample of the extended Jewish population but on a significantly larger scale, i.e., from pensioners to the wealthy to people of high status. It has captured the Jewish communities of large post-Soviet megacities much more than its previous waves. And the megacities have a markedly higher proportion of members of the “core” Jewish population, which, as has already been mentioned, may have new demographic consequences. It is not yet clear how many (if any) of these migrants from Ukraine and Russia intend to return to their cities and countries after the end of the active phase of the armed Russian-Ukrainian conflict. Speaking of the prospects for Ukrainian citizens who have found salvation from the war abroad, local demographers believe that “without a doubt, some of the evacuated women and children will settle abroad, improve their lives, and will never return to Ukraine. Moreover, their men and parents will come join them as soon as possible” (NV 2022). Ukrainian Jews will likely undergo the same processes as Jews from other regions of the former USSR. Judging by the sentiments of the 2022 “war aliya” repatriates interviewed by the Ministry of Aliya and Integration, about 80% of immigrants from Ukraine and more than 80% from Russia believed, or were sure, that they would stay outside their countries of origin. Just as with the above-mentioned direct interdependence between level of Jewish or other identity and firmness of the decision to emigrate, willingness to stay in Israel on a permanent basis was also directly proportional to the stability of a respondent’s Jewish identity (Table 12.15). On the other hand, respondents who had close relatives abroad (parents, spouses, children, etc.) still showed a markedly lower degree of confidence that they would stay in Israel in the long run than those with no such relatives abroad. Moreover, among immigrants from Ukraine, this difference was obviously greater than among immigrants from Russia and other FSU countries (15% and 6% respectively). The delineation was no less noticeable among those who could not answer the question about their future migration plans, choosing the option “I don’t know whether I will stay or not, it depends on the situation.” The proportion of those who answered this way among respondents with close relatives in the diaspora in both subgroups was 1.5 times higher than among those who did

243

Emigration against the Background of the War: Portrait and Trajectories

Table 12.15: Desire to Stay in Israel among 2022 Aliya Members from Ukraine / Ethnic Identity. Will you stay in Israel permanently? (Ukraine)

Ethnic identification Jew

All

Ukrainian Jew Another identity

Yes, for sure Probably, yes Not sure yet Probably no, or didn’t answer

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .% .% .%

Total

%

%

%

% %

N

















not have such relatives (almost 15% and 9.5% of Russian olim and more than one fifth and 13.2% from Ukraine respectively) (Table 12.16). Table 12.16: Desire to Stay in Israel among “War Aliya” Members vs. Peers that Stayed Abroad. Repatriates of “war aliya,” total Intention to stay permanently in Israel

Total

Relatives abroad Yes

No

Yes, for sure Probably, yes Not sure, depends on the situation Probably or for sure, no Didn’t answer

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .

.% .% .% % .

Total N

,





.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%







.% .%

.% .%

.% .%

Repatriates from Russia and other CIS countries Yes, for sure Probably, yes Not sure, depends on the situation Probably or for sure, no Didn’t answer Total N Repatriates from Ukraine Yes, for sure Probably, yes

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Chapter 12 Migration Trends and Emigration Plans of Euro-Asian Jews

Table 12.16 (continued) Repatriates of “war aliya,” total Intention to stay permanently in Israel

Total

Relatives abroad Yes

No

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

Total N







Total %

.%

.%

.%

Not sure, depends on the situation Probably or for sure, no Didn’t answer

A noticeable gender bias was an additional factor in this demarcation. Among olim from Ukraine aged between 18 and 60 years, the proportion of women significantly exceeded the proportion of men, since the latter, as those liable for military service, were forbidden to leave the country. Among olim from Russia, at the time of the study (May 2020), such a bias has not yet been observed. However, the situation became different as President Vladimir Putin ordered in late September 2022 Russia’s first wartime mobilization plan since the Second World War. This move, obviously very unpopular in Russia, stimulated a phenomenon of “escape from the army conscription” (including emigration abroad), which made its impact also on the gender composition among the aliya from Russia to Israel. Since 21 September 2022, male immigrants of relevant ages were predominant in this category of newcomers. So, although the main vector of the potential reunification of Jewish families who left the post-Soviet countries after the start of the war in Ukraine and partially ended up in Israel is apparently directed towards the Jewish state, any final conclusions on this subject would be premature. We do not have data on this subject from other countries of Ukrainian Jewish emigration, but observers reported the presence of similar sentiments among most Jewish refugees who ended up there as early as March-April 2022. But there is also a reverse trend: in April-May 2022, unlike in the first weeks of the war, authorities of European countries began to drop more and more hints that “Ukrainian and Russian Jewish refugees are here temporarily.” In their turn, not all Ukrainian Jewish refugees are reaching a mutual understanding with their Jewish host organizations. As was revealed in the abovementioned Central Council of Jews in Germany research, “during recent weeks/ months [e.i. in August and September 2022] the number of Ukrainian War Refugees that have contacted local Jewish communities just for initial first help, has significantly decreased.” This data comes up against the review of the British

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245

anthropologist Marina Sapritsky, who reported that, initially welcomed with open arms, Ukrainian Jews in Berlin have only just begun to discover the emotional and communal deprivations of refugee life. Some of them even complained “that the Berlin Jewish community takes care of us, but we are also treated like children who aren’t old enough to understand the complexities of life” (Sapritsky 2022). This is why, according to a source in the Israeli government, “many refugees today are considering the idea of returning . . . Future steps, will largely depend on Israel.”71 It also looks like the migration sentiments of members of the extended FSU Jewish population, which in 2022 found themselves in Europe, fall in line with the general atmosphere among the millions of FSU “war immigrants” as a whole. This assumption is supported by the opinion of one of such immigrant from Ukraine, Natalia Sansay, who described herself as “a forced migrant with roots in Israel, albeit not strong ones.” This woman, who apparently lives in Europe today, noted that while living with a friend’s relatives, she “suffers from uncertainty,” since “there is no cell here where I could fit in and be useful. Meanwhile, they are waiting for me in Israel, I have already received several calls . . . [My] cell is there . . . dear and familiar, where I know what to do, where I know how to be useful.” Noting that she does not consider Israel her permanent residence, her goal at this stage is to get to her “near and dear in a familiar environment, where I have the assigned role of a sister and friend, rather than this role of a weak-willed unfortunate refugee whom everyone pities, feeds but keeps in isolation from the rest.”72 Thus, according to the same Israeli Government source, “With the appropriate information and proposals, a significant part of these people will be able to repatriate, and if not, they will either return or make every effort to stay in Europe.” In other words, in full congruence with the mainstream of migration theory, emigration from the former USSR throughout the post-Soviet decades has continued to be a result of the balance between “pushing” and “pulling” factors, even if the specific weights of these factors vary significantly depending on the profile of migrants and the general economic, cultural, and political contexts in countries of origin and host communities (of the numerous publications of these issues, see Arango 2004; Leshem and Shoval 1998; Meyers 2000). It is still difficult today to predict how events will develop in the distant and even in the near future. But there is no doubt that the post-Soviet space will remain a region of active migration, with the Jewish factor playing a very prominent role.  Personal interview with this author, Jerusalem, July 2020.  Natalia Sansay’s comment on Velvl Chernin’s post on Facebook, 29 March 2022. https://www. facebook.com/velvl.chernin/posts/5068277273209184?comment_id=5068570819846496¬if_id= 1648562999656781¬if_t=feedback_reaction_generic&ref=notif. Accessed 27.02.2023.

Epilogue: Perspectives and Challenges from Jewish Life in the Former USSR in Light of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict The invasion of the Russian army into the territory of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, had and continues to have significant impact on the Jewish population and the organized Jewish movement of post-Soviet states. Above all, this impact has been felt by the FSU’s two largest communities – Russian and Ukrainian. A significant increase in internal migration – first of all, the unprecedented number of displaced Jewish persons in Ukraine, as well as a new wave of emigration of the post-Soviet Jewish population to Israel and the West – is obviously the first and most visible outcome of the war, the immediate and long-term consequences of which are yet to be assessed. A few additional questions are to be raised about the possible prospects and format for the existence of post-Soviet Jewish communities, even if any unambiguous answers to them are premature today. Should we expect a significant increase, or, on the contrary, a decline in the social and cultural-political processes that have taken place in the Jewish environment of the countries of the former USSR over the past two decades? How will these processes and the trends accompanying them affect the transnational post-Soviet Jewish diaspora formed after the collapse of the USSR in December 1991, including the identity models and sociocultural framework of the global Russian-speaking Jewish subethnos in general and its local (regional and national) components in particular? And no less important, how will all of the above affect the relationship between Israel and its Russian-speaking community with the Russian-speaking Jewish communities of the countries of the Jewish diaspora? Let us try to address these issues by using data from monitoring, expert assessments, and studies whose results were known at the time of this writing.

Prospects for Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora Trans-Nationalism The first difficult question is how, under conditions of ongoing war and mass migration, sociocultural mechanisms might ensure the bonding, or vice versa, the dispersion of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora that forms the territorial and material framework of a new subethnic group of the Jewish people – the Russian-speaking Jews living in dozens of countries around the world.

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Epilogue

In other words, what will be the long-term consequences of a possible escalation of an already too far gone inflation of the “regional” collective identity of the Jews of the former USSR? That is, will the war between the key post-Soviet states – Russia, supported de facto by Belarus, and Ukraine – become a trigger for the collapse of the barely formed “Russian-speaking Jewish” subethnicity in general? (Remember that the war has already demanded a completely different level of loyalty to their countries from with these two largest Jewish communities in the region.) More precisely, will some of its demographically significant local Jewish communities be morphed into independent Jewish subethnic groups while the rest disappear? Or, on the contrary, will this Russian-speaking Jewish subethnicity get strengthened due to the extension of transnational individual and group ties within its framework and additionally increase the importance of Israel and Jerusalem as the focus of this community? If we talk about the two key Jewish communities of the post-Soviet space – in the Russian Federation and Ukraine – and recall the “ideological rift” between some of their members that began after the Russian military invasion, the first scenario is not excluded at all. On the other hand, if the Russian-Ukrainian vector of relations in the post-Soviet Jewish world, as shown in chapters 4 and 5, is not decisive, since Israel is the main focus of this system, then arguments can be found in favor of the second scenario, too. In fact, some movement in this direction is already noticeable. To begin with, the conflict and clashes expected between many new olim (repatriates) from Russia and Ukraine in Israel based on assessments of the RussianUkrainian war did not emerge. Despite some such cases, these repatriates, according to observers, either have similar opinions on what is happening in Ukraine, or prefer to put their differences “outside the brackets of relations.”73 The common denominator of this mutual understanding, among other things, can be seen from the MOIA’s April and May 2022 study: two-thirds of the interviewed war emigrants believed the Jewish state to be “their own country” to a large or very large extent only a few weeks or months after arrival (Table E1). An intuitive explanation for this phenomenon may be repatriates’ assessments of the effectiveness of the work of Israeli state structures (Israeli embassies, consulates, the Nativ, the Ministry of Aliya, etc.), and national institutions (primarily the Jewish Agency for Israel) in evacuating Jews and their families

 A similar opinion predominated during brainstorming and other discussions among almost 190 representatives of Israeli state and municipal authorities, the Jewish Agency, researchers, educators, social workers, employees and activists of public associations, and other experts directly involved in the process of receiving and adapting the “war Aliya” repatriates in Israel. Personal impression of the author, Jerusalem, 18 July 2022.

Prospects for Russian-Speaking Jewish Diaspora Trans-Nationalism

249

from the conflict zone and their reception in Israel. Of course, as is often the case in an era of crises and human tragedies of this magnitude, not everything goes smoothly. For instance, media and social networks are full of stories of disappointed potential repatriates bemoaning the difficulties of communicating with Israeli officials during and after their arrival in Israel. Nevertheless, the same two-thirds (66.6%) of repatriates who were forced to leave their cities reported that Israeli structures helped them get to intermediate evacuation points in Western Ukraine and Eastern Europe, and then to Israel. However, despite its significance, this circumstance is unlikely the only or even the main one. In fact, there was no significant difference between olim from Ukraine and Russia or other countries of the former USSR. Among the latter, the proportion of those who already call Israel “their country” to a large or very large extent was even slightly higher (60.5% from Ukraine and 66.7% from Russia and other CIS countries). And this even though, unlike the olim from Ukraine, repatriates from the Russian Federation and other countries of the former USSR received normal services of JAFI and consulates and traveled to Israel the usual way, or came to Israel as tourists and changed to a new immigrant (oleh) status locally. Apparently, for the reasons detailed in Chapter 5, aliya and the circumstances accompanying it fell on well-prepared ground when Jews in the diaspora were already viewing Israel as “their own state.” This picture, at least for Ukrainian Jews, might be changed vis-à-vis the significant rise of Ukrainian national and civic patriotism, which captured the local Jewish community together with other segments of Ukrainian society as the backdrop of the Russian military invasion of Ukraine. Meantime, judging by the results of the latest (by the time of this writing) studies (MOIA-Teldor 2022), this Israeli view of olim who came both from Ukraine and Russia did not change, especially given the fact that almost all had, if not relatives, then at least friends and acquaintances in Israel. In this sense, members of the “war aliya” of 2022 are practically no different from the previous waves of repatriates from the former USSR in the last decade. For example, 48% of Russian-speaking repatriates, who at the time of the survey (2012) had been in the country for less than three years, said they feel “at home in Israel” to a “large or a very large extent,” 32% said “to some extent,” and only 19% admitted that their sense of Israel as their home was weak or totally absent (MOIA-PORI 2012, 144) (Table E1). The next significant occurrence regarding the fate of the Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora and the Russian-speaking Jewish subethnic group was another result of the last wave of mass migration, due to which the number of members of many “nuclear families” and other close relatives of the Jews of the former USSR who ended up in different countries has significantly increased. Almost three-quarters of our

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Table E1: To What Extent Do You Feel Israel Is Your Country? FSU aliya – (MOIA-PORI, )

Extent:

War aliya  (MOIA-Teldor, )

Total

Total

Feel at home in Israel✶

Russia/other

Feel that Israel is their Country✶✶

% % % % %

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .%

%

%

.%

.%

.%

N



,





To a very large extent To a large extent To a certain degree To a very small extent To no extent / do not know Total

Ukraine

✶

MOIA-Pori research, December 2012. MOIA-TelDor Research, April-May 2022.

✶✶

respondents from among the repatriates of the “war aliya” from the post-Soviet countries reported that they had relatives who remained abroad. This included 60% of those who left one or both of their parents abroad, more than 40% of those who left one of their siblings, more than a quarter a child or a few children, and a fifth one or more grandparents. Table E2: Presence of Close Relatives in the Diaspora among Repatriates from the Former USSR in 2022. Did you leave behind any of your relatives?

Total

Country of aliya Ukraine

Russia, etc.

Yes, including: One or both parents One or more siblings Children Spouse due to military duties Spouse for other reasons Some or all of my grandparents

.% .% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .% .% .% .%

Total

%

%

%

%

N

,





Directions of Ethnic Dynamics

251

Table E2 above clearly shows that repatriation from Ukraine is more of a “family” affair, apart from almost half of the families who left behind their spouse due to military duty in Ukraine. (On this point, repatriates from Ukraine are radically different from repatriates from Russia, where slightly more than 1% of respondents found themselves in a similar situation.) The same circumstances – a draft or volunteer work in a country with a war going on – constituted one reason why the proportion of immigrants from Ukraine who noted that their children remained abroad was 1.5 times higher than that of Russian repatriates. In all other categories of kinship, the proportion of immigrants from the Russian Federation and other post-Soviet countries who reported that their family members remained in the diaspora exceeds, sometimes quite significantly, the proportion of repatriates from Ukraine who answered this way. It is still too early to talk about the prospects for preserving or changing this picture. According to the data presented in Chapter 12, husbands and sons of military age remaining in Ukraine were given a high degree of probability of joining their spouses, parents, and children in Israel upon completion of the active phase of hostilities. Meanwhile, the possible migration vectors of repatriates from Russia (where about 60% of the “extended Jewish population” of the post-Soviet countries live), as well as immigrants from these two countries in Europe, can be much more multidirectional. One way or another, all this will become a significant addition to the large-scale system of closely related and friendly relations among post-Soviet Jews and members of their families in different states that has formed over the past three decades. This can strengthen the infrastructure of transnational relations within the Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnos, at least in the short run, especially if the forecast proves correct that the preservation of the Russian language acts as the main tool of communication and as an ethnic and cultural symbol of the transnational diaspora of the Jews from the former USSR.

Directions of Ethnic Dynamics If this conclusion is correct, then we can also make a cautious forecast about the possible impact that a new wave of Jewish migration could have on the models of cultural and ethnic identity among the emigrants of the transnational Russianspeaking Jewish subethnicity – the aforementioned local, or ethno-civic, communities of Jewish immigrants from the former USSR and their descendants. We are talking about the likelihood of one of three possible scenarios in the countries that have accepted the bulk of these emigrants – primarily Israel and Germany. Namely, the appearance in these countries of “branches” of ethno-civic communities of “Russian” and “Ukrainian” Jews in parallel with the existing Russian (or

252

Epilogue

Russian-speaking)-Jewish communities that have long been established there. As another option, the newcomers may join the communities of Russian-speaking Jewish old-timers as their subcultural home. Or, as has already happened with the previous waves of aliya and Jewish emigrants from the FSU, it can lead to the complete absorption of newly arrived Jews from the former USSR among the already established Russian-speaking Jewish communities along with their integration into the society of these countries as a whole. In favor of one of the first two versions, at first glance, speak the data from our large-scale study of members of the extended Jewish population of five postSoviet states presented in detail in this book. According to it, one may detect a clear trend in the strengthening of local Jewish Identity in the last fifteen to twenty years at the expense of the universal one. First of all, this is due to the growing proportion of family members of Jews of mixed and non-Jewish origin in the community that identifies itself with the Jews of this country. We may recall that approximately equal portions (40% and 37%) of those interviewed in the course of the study of persons of homogeneous Jewish origin declared their belonging to one of the two cultural identification groups – “universalist Jews”/“simply Jewish” and “Russian, Ukrainian, Belarus, Moldovan, etc. Jews.” These two groups together amount to more than half of the extended Jewish population of the former USSR. However, representatives of the second group were twice and three times as numerous among the second and third generations of descendants of mixed marriages. A representative survey of 1989–2017 repatriates from the former USSR conducted in Israel in 2017 also included an expanded sub-sample of representatives of Putin’s aliya of 2014–2017 (Table E3). The study showed a cultural and identification demarcation approximately similar to the situation in the countries of origin. Slightly more than half of repatriates whose experience in Israel at the time of the survey ranged from one to three years were almost equally distributed (25%: 27%) between two models of Jewish identity as such – “universalist Jews” (simply Jewish) and “Russian-speaking Jew/Jew of the country of origin.” The carriers of mixed (“simultaneously Jewish and a different ethnic group”) and nonJewish identity (non-Jewish ethnic or “cosmopolitan”) accounted for almost 28% and 21% of respondents respectively. The ethno-identification structure of people from the capital cities of Russia, where the proportion of people of homogeneous Jewish origin is high turned out to be approximately the same (25.1% “simply Jewish” and 24.5% “Russian-speaking Jew”). And among people from the Russian provinces, where most of the local extended Jewish population is ethnically mixed, the proportion of respondents who declared their belonging to the second cultural-identification group was three times higher than the first. Also, the proportion of carriers of a mixed Jewish-Gentile and

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253

completely non-Jewish ethnic identity among the “provincial” olim was, respectively, 1.5 times and more than four times higher than among former residents of the capital cities. Among respondents from Ukraine in the same years, the picture of ethnoidentification sentiments was a little vaguer, but close enough. Slightly more than half of respondents from this country who before coming to Israel lived for the most part in the capital and large industrial, commercial, or cultural centers of the northeast and south of Ukraine, just like former residents of Russian capitals, were almost equally divided between two cultural-identification groups: “simply Jewish” and “Jews of the country of origin.” Meanwhile, the share of the “mixed Jewish-Gentile” group was somewhat higher, and the share of carriers of various forms of non-Jewish identity was, on the contrary, more than twice as low as among immigrants from Russia. We may notice, however, the peculiarity of a specific group of immigrants from Ukraine – the repatriates from Donbass. This group is more than twice as weak as its counterparts from other cities who identified themselves with the community of “Ukrainian Jews.” And vice versa, they declared their mixed identity noticeably more often and their non-Jewish identity twice as often as the sample average for repatriates from Ukraine in those years. However, general differences between immigrants from different regions of Ukraine (as well as from repatriates from most other post-Soviet countries) were insignificant throughout the “Great Aliya” from the former Soviet Union, according to the same survey. Such differences could be explained by the fact that it was representatives of the first generation of Ukrainian Jewish refugees of the war that began in 2014 between the Ukrainian army and Russian-backed separatist units in the selfproclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk “People’s Republics.” This war moved a significantly wider segment (according to available data, from half to almost two-thirds) of the local “extended” Jewish population from their homes along with many residents of Donbass in general. If this is so, then a similar alignment of models of ethnocultural identification should have been expected from members of a new and much larger wave of repatriates in 2022. However, a survey of the “war aliya” from the former USSR gives us a different alignment. For instance, there were twice as many representatives of the “universalist Jews” as there were “Jews of the country of origin.” Both groups together accounted for 75% of the total, which was 1.5 times more than in all other measurements of Ukrainian Jews in Israel and the diaspora in different years. Moreover, there was no significant difference across identity models between immigrants from Russia and Ukraine who arrived in Israel in 2022 (Table E4).

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Table E3: How Would You Place Yourself on the Scale between Jewish and Russian? (Repatriates from the Former USSR, 1989–2017). Ethnic Identity

Total, FSU

Russian Federation Moscow and S.Pb

Other

Ukraine Total

Eastern Ukraine and Donbass

“Putin’s aliya,” – Simply Jewish RSJ, Jew of the country of origin Both ethnic Russian, Ukrainian, etc. and Jewish Only Russian/another non-Jewish ethnicity Just a human being, regardless of ethnicity or religion Total

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% % .%

.% .% .%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

% .%

%

.%

N=

N=

N=

N=

N=

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.%

.% .% .%

.%

N =

N = N = N =

N =

FSU aliya of –, overall Simply Jewish RSJ, Jew of the country of origin Both ethnic Russian, Ukrainian, etc. and Jewish Only Russian/another non-Jewish ethnicity Just a human being, regardless of ethnicity or religion Other Total

At first glance, we have an anomaly that does not fit any of the above-described trends in the evolution of Jewish identity from the former USSR in recent years in Israel and the diaspora. But a verification survey of 298 respondents from the “war aliya,” conducted two months after the previous survey, in order to clarify the identity and migration plans of this group after the first shock from the moving and settling in a new place, showed a different layout. Thus, at the end of June 2022, 36% and 22% of respondents respectively called themselves “simply Jews” and “Jews of the country of origin;” 21% Jews and representatives of another ethnic group; 19% “cosmopolitans, without distinction of religion or ethnicity;” and 4% carriers of Russian or other ethnic or other non-Jewish identity. This was already

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Table E4: Ethnic Identity and Countries of Origin of FSU Olim Arrivals in Israel in 2022 (MOIA Research, April-May 2022). Ethnic Identity

Total

Country of aliya Ukraine

Russia, etc.

. .

. .

. .

. . .

. . .

. . 

%

%

%

%

N







Sustainable Jewish Just Jewish Russian, Ukrainian, etc. Jew Combined or Non-Jewish Both Jewish and Gentile, a citizen of the world, other Ethnic Russian, Ukrainian, etc. No answer Total

much closer to the average values for the community of immigrants from the former USSR in general. In reality, there is no essential contradiction between the data of the two surveys: our survey of the Jewish population of the former USSR in 2019–2020 showed that the vast majority (96% and 75% respectively) of both cultural identification categories have a common denominator – their unconditional Jewish identity. In other words, we are talking not so much about the influence of the “cloud” of the “extended” Jewish population, but about the internal restructuring of its ethnic core in all of these cases. The further the mentioned erosion of the collective identification of Soviet Jewry, the more their representatives perceived themselves as a specific integral element of the local civil collective and political nation (and what is no less important, the society and authorities of their countries perceived them the same way). All this may mean that relocation of some of these people into another civilcultural context could reformat the basic – and quite flexible and mobile – components of their identity in accordance with standards of the local ethno-civic segments of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. Confirmation of this conclusion can be found in the data of the MOIA-MH (2018) study of the 1998–2017 repatriates’ identities and motives for aliya. People from the Anglo-Saxon countries (USA, Canada, Australia, and the UK) and Latin America, comparing their ethnic identification at the time of the survey and of repatriation, reported on the strengthening of the “universalist Jewish” (“simply Jews”) identity due to a weakening of communal Jewish (“Jew of the country of

256

Epilogue

origin”) components. Natives of France, on the contrary, noted the strengthening of their identity as “Jews of the country of origin” over the years after aliya, while the level of the universalist Jewish and non-Jewish components in their identity remained practically unchanged. Only olim from the countries of the former USSR of the last two decades demonstrated parallel processes of simultaneous strengthening of universalist Jewish and communal (sub-ethnic) Jewish identity alongside a reduction of the prevalence of Russian, Ukrainian, Georgian, or other non-Jewish ethnic identities (Table E5). Table E5: Olim from 4 Language Groups in 1998–2017: Identity Before and After Aliya, 2018. sustainable identity

Language groups English

French

Russian

Spanish

Simply Jewish

Before aliya After aliya

. .

. .

. .

. .

A Jew of the country of origin

Before aliya After aliya

. .

. .

. .

. .

Ethnicity of the country of origin

Before aliya After aliya

. .

. .

. .

. .

As was also mentioned above, in contrast to the Soviet trend toward the “spinning off” of new ethno-civic groups from the community of former Soviet Jews, an opposite process is taking place in Israel. Namely, the gradual convergence of immigrants from various countries of the former USSR into the community of “Russian Israelis.” At the same time, the concept of “Russian Jew” is also changing; its meaning undergoing a transformation within a few years after repatriation. It gets perceived not as “Jew of a particular country of origin” (Russia, Belarus, etc.), but as denoting a member of the Russian-speaking community of Israel, which is part of the social and cultural mosaic of its Jewish community. There is reason to expect that as representatives of the “war aliya” adapt to life in Israel, similar rethinking of the cultural-identification model of the “Jew of the country of origin” would take place among them. And just as it happened with past waves of aliya from the former USSR, it will become acceptable to the carriers of the “universalist” Jewish identity. This is especially so in light of the indications noted by observers of a certain counter-cultural influence among repatriates of the last wave on the olim – old-timers from the former USSR. One such example was an informal but well-organized and very effective group of volunteers that provided multilateral assistance to the last wave of repatriates settling in Northern Galilee and the Haifa region. The core of this group

The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Jewish Communities

257

was formed by representatives of the so-called “1.5 generation” of repatriates (that is, those who were children and teenagers at the time of aliya to Israel) from the former USSR. And it was precisely such activities of members of this group, as well as their communication with new fellow citizens in general, that significantly strengthened the Russian-speaking Jewish-Israeli identity of this group, according to the evidence we received.74 Note that everything said at this stage is still hypothetical and certainly needs further verification. Judging by the data of the studies presented here, we may conclude that the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish sub-ethnic group still has a common infrastructure for the identity of its ethnocultural groupings. This is reflected in different but comparable proportions, represented in its main segments in Israel and the countries of the former USSR, and, judging by studies from different years, also in North America and Europe.

The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Jewish Communities The next important question is to what extent these trends will affect the stability and prospects of the vibrant infrastructure of organized Jewish life that has emerged in the countries of the former USSR over the past three and a half decades. As was shown above, this question involves local and umbrella organizations, educational, cultural and charitable institutions, religious communities of various make-ups, memorial, sports and other associations, Jewish media, etc. In Ukraine, at first glance, the revival of organized Jewish life on the same scale is hardly possible against the backdrop of mass emigration, even if part of the Jewish refugees return to their cities. According to observers, the organized urban Jewish communities (about 200 in total, according to the available data) can be divided into four categories by their condition. The first of these includes urban communities from which most of the Jews living there have departed, and the institutional infrastructure of these communities is almost completely destroyed. These most likely included most of the 27 Jewish communities of Ukraine in the cities under Russian military occupation (data from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine, quoted in Vesti-Ynet 2022). The most striking example is Mariupol, a city where 430,000 people lived before the Russian invasion, including, according to various estimates, from 3,000/

 Testimony of the chief social work officer working with the repatriates of Northern Galilee, Ksenia Svisa, personal interview, 18 July 2022.

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Epilogue

4,000 to 16,000 Jews. For more than three months, the city was under Russian siege and desperately resisted while suffering a humanitarian catastrophe. Menahem-Mendel Cohen, the chief rabbi of the Mariupol community, described the situation at that time as follows: Everyone is in basements with no communication, not by phone, not through other people, and there is no one to go with and see if they are all right . . . We have an iron curtain around the city. Only a few can find a signal and at least report that they are still alive . . . People evacuated to Zaporozhye or Dnipro, but it was dangerous because car convoys were constantly hit. Our community is dispersing. Some had to leave their relatives. It divided the families. (Quoted in Gryvnyak 2022)

This category also includes the then-thriving 20,000-strong Jewish community of Kharkiv, the most “Russian-speaking” city of Ukraine prior to the war. In the very first days of the war, its main symbol, the Great Synagogue, Europe’s second largest, was damaged by a Russian rocket explosion next to a shopping center nearby at a time when more than 100 Jews were hiding in its basement. With a shortage of food and medicine and difficulties with their delivery, employees and activists of the Jewish religious movement Chabad and the Jewish Federation of Ukraine, one of the umbrella structures of local Jewish organizations, arranged a mass evacuation of Jews (and many non-Jews) from Kharkiv. As an example of the current state of its community institutions, we can cite the words of Director of Kharkov Jewish school No. 170 and chairman of the United Jewish community of the Kharkov Province Grigori Shoikhet: “of 300 pupils at my school only 7 remained in the city. The rest (with their families) spread across Europe, very many of them left for Israel, and I suspect many will not return.”75 A similar picture was presented by the director of the Jewish Hillel-CASE Student Union and executive director of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, Iosif Akselrud: The most beautiful and largeest Hillel chapter in Ukraine – in Kharkiv – is now completely destroyed due to the rocket attack. For us it was a big shock. The big Hillel center was in the very heart of the city. For those who used to attend it that was a real tragedy, almost all of the Kharkiv students and volunteers left – some went abroad, some relocated to other cities of Ukraine. Only two employees remained in a city. We are keeping in touch and helping them as far as we can. (EAJC 2022)

The second category includes most of the peripheral Jewish communities in the east and south of Ukraine, with their progressive disintegration of community

 Grigori Shoikhet, interview with Pavel Zhuravel, 26 May 2022 (the transcript was forwarded to this author by e-mail, 17 September 2022).

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259

infrastructure. It also includes several large Jewish communities in these regions (in Kyiv, Dnipro, Odessa, etc.). According to evidence, from half to two-thirds of the Jewish population had left these regions by April 2022 (according to the information of the CEO of the Federation of Jewish [Religious] communities of Ukraine, Rabbi Meir Stambler, 30,000 Jews were evacuated from these cities in the first month of the war alone). The institutional clusters of these communities were mostly frozen or redirected to perform other, more urgent tasks. For example, as Akselrud notes, “guys from Kharkov and Odessa are doing serious and important volunteer work in the center of the country. Therefore, all regular educational and entertainment programs of Hillel are significantly minimized” (quoted in Goldman 2022). However, this is not only about large-scale community projects, such as the education system, mass holidays, or institutions of permanent social assistance, but also about basic services that have been taken for granted for decades. “A concrete example,” one of the observers notes in correspondence with this author, “is how this [2022] year it was more difficult to get matzah [in Kyiv] (I don’t think they sold it at all). Previously, the Kyiv matzo-bakery provided its products not only to Ukraine, but also to a number of CIS countries [and sometimes even exported to Israel – author.], but this year it was replaced by matzah from the UK. We had enough, but we strained a lot.” The main problem, apparently, is the inflation of the organized core of such urban communities in connection with the departure of the “backbone” of religious communities of observant large families. In principle, such a phenomenon should be considered natural: in the 2019–2020 survey of the Jewish population of Ukraine (as well as in general in the former USSR), the intensity of emigration intentions was directly proportional to the level of religiosity: among religious respondents, the share of those intending to emigrate from their countries was 1.5 to two times higher than in the other two groups; among the non-religious, there was a noticeably higher proportion of those who did not intend to leave at all, and among those who doubted their religiosity, there was a relatively higher proportion of those who waffled on their emigration intentions (Table E6). Judging by the data of the MOIA 2022 study, the relationship between the level of religiosity and the real motives for aliya from Ukraine was approximately the same. Among the non-religious there were a lot of those who had no desire to emigrate, but the war forced them to. Among the partially religious and/or those who doubted their religiosity, there was a noticeably larger proportion of those who “hesitated, but the war forced them to” make this choice. And among the religious respondents in 2022, there were still relatively more of those who had decided to leave before; while 60% of them had been planning to go to Israel.

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Table E6: Religious Identity vs. Emigration plans, Ukrainian Jews, 2019–2020. Total Ukraine

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

no

DK/NA

Are you planning to emigrate from the country? % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

%

%

%

%









% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % % % %

% % % % – % %

%

%

%

%

%

N









Yes No Undecided (yet) Hard to say Total

%% N=

If yes, where to? Leave this country, does not matter where to Emigrate/return to Israel Try to emigrate to the USA or Canada Try to emigrate to Germany/other European countries Other FSU countries Other Hard to say Total

However, their absolute share turned out to be noticeably (more than 9%) higher than the share of those who were unambiguously inclined to leave among our religious respondents in the relatively calm Ukraine of 2019, prior to the COVID-19 epidemic and the war (Table E7). Therefore, it seems that many of those religious people who were ready to consider other options three years ago have also found themselves in Israel. It is difficult to state the reason behind such sentiments: the very fact of regular and close interaction of people who are consistently thinking about emigration, or perhaps the increased level of social anxiety inherent in religious Jews in Eastern Europe? In fact, the organized communities, and in particular their religious segments, turned out to be more prepared for an emergency than many other structures in the country. “The system for evacuation of families of members and service personnel of the religious community was developed long ago, almost immediately after the outbreak of the war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea,” says Rabbi Haim Feigin, head of the youth programs of the Litvak Jewish

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Table E7: Religious Identity of Ukrainian Jews vs. Wishes to Emigrate from / Stay in Ukraine and the Realities of Doing So. Planning to emigrate to another state?

Total

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes

No

Do not know

Extended Jewish population of Ukraine ( research) % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

 (%)

 (%)

 (%)

 (%)

Planned long ago, coincidentally emigrated now Never planned, but the war forced me to Hesitated, but the war forced me to Other Total

.% .% .% .% .%

.% % .% . .%

.% .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% . %

Total (N/%)

 (%)

 (.%)

 (.%)

 (.%)

Yes No Undecided (yet) or do not know Total Total (N/%) Aliya from Ukraine  (April-May  research)

religious community founded more than 30 years ago in Odessa by rabbi Shlomo Baksht. “Everything was ready in advance: an “alarming” supply of food, medicines, clothing, equipment, transport. On the morning of February 24, buses were already parked at the synagogue, and the first group of community members left for Romania, where they had a previously prepared and agreed address. The rest joined us within the next few days.”76 Similar, although not always equally pronounced processes took place in other Jewish communities of the country. “It was hard for them to get up,” says editor-in-chief of the all-Ukrainian Kyiv-based Jewish Hadashot newspaper Mikhail Gold, “but once they left, they are unlikely to return.”77 Together with members of the organized religious segment of these communities or shortly after them, the first (already at the end of February 2022) and second (in the first weeks of March 2022) wave of emigration included many persons affiliated with community institutions: students, parents of students and teachers of

 Telephone interview with Rabbi Haim Feigin, Jerusalem – Mangalia, 23 August 2022.  E-mail correspondence with Mikhail Gold, March-May 2022.

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Epilogue

Jewish schools, professionals and activists of charitable, informational, and cultural community organizations, etc. And through them, this trend apparently captured wider circles of the periphery (“visitors” and “interested ones”) in the organizational infrastructure of the Jewish community of Ukraine. The proportion of people who named Judaism “their” religion in all categories of religiosity (“fully”, “somewhat”, and “not at all religious”) among those who immigrated to Israel after the outbreak of hostilities turned out to be noticeably higher than among the FSU Jews surveyed in our 2019–2020 study (Tables E8 and E9). Table E8: Cultural-Religious Identification vs. Religious Identity of Extended Jewish Population of the FSU and Members of Aliya 2022. All degrees of religiosity, “my” religion:

Total

Consider themselves religious Fully / To some extent or hard to say / No Yes To some extent / hard to say

Aliya  (April-May  research) Judaism Christianity / another religion Both Judaism and Christianity No religion Total, N

.% .% .% .%

% % % %

,



.% .% .% .% .% .% .% .% 



FSU extended Jewish population (– research) % % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Total, N

,







Total, %

%

%

%

%

Judaism Christianity/ another religion Both Judaism and Christianity No religion

This phenomenon is certainly not limited to Israel. Moreover, as was shown in the previous chapter, already in April-May 2022 Europe became the main preference for Jewish emigrants from Ukraine. “Such people, scattered all over the world today, did not just form the core, they are the future of the community”, concludes Gold. “They leave and, as a rule, intend to build their lives in a new place.” The third category includes Jewish communities of cities located in the regions of the center and especially the West of Ukraine, almost unaffected or little affected by the war. They did not only retain their institutional infrastructure,

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Table E9: Cultural-Religious Identification vs. Religious Identity of Members of Extended Jewish Population of Ukraine. All degrees of religiosity, “my” religion:

Total

Do you consider yourself religious? Yes, fully

Yes, in some way

hard to say

no

Extended Jewish population of Ukraine (– research) Judaism Christianity/ Another one Both Judaism and Christianity No religion

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

% % % %

Total, N









Aliya from Ukraine to Israel  (April-May  research) .% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

Total, N











Total, %

%

%

%

%

%

Judaism Christianity/ Another one Both Judaism and Christianity No religion

✶

In 2019 FSU research, this option was not suggested

but in a number of cases radically increased their organizational and social relevance, becoming kinds of humanitarian hubs of volunteer and information activities, providing services not only to the Jews, but to all those in need. “Intra-Ukrainian migration brought about not only a depopulation of the Jewish communities in the east of the country, but also a certain revival of smaller communities in western Ukrainian cities such as Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk or Chernivtsi,” notes Likhachev (a Ukrainian-based publicist and researcher). The Chernivtsi rabbi says he doesn’t remember when his congregation had a minyan more than once a week in the past 20 years. Now Chernivtsi Jews host a community from Kharkiv, and religious life has become much more active (Likhachev 2022b). The Jewish community of Moldova, demographically weak and torn apart by contradictions and conflicts in the past, can be attributed to this same third type. The religious Jewish community of the Haymarket Synagogue (Agudat-Israel), headed by Rabbi Pinchas Salzman, the United Jewish Community, the Jewish Congress of Moldova and its President Alexander Belinkis, all worked quickly and

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efficiently: they deployed 11 refugee reception and support centers throughout the country, raised funds, and mobilized volunteers and material resources.78 As our respondent noted, “The events mobilized the citizens of the Republic of Moldova. A lot of refugees needed help, including the enormous Jewish community of Ukraine compared to the Republic of Moldova. And all Jewish organizations rallied in the face of their joint challenge of helping primarily to Jewish refugees. In this situation, there is no time for resentment or infighting. In my opinion, they did several times more than they could do.”79 A certain side effect of this phenomenon was a significant increase in the number of members of the extended Jewish population of this country, who, having become involved in the process of helping Jewish and other refugees, begin to consider themselves persons affiliated with the organized Jewish community of Moldova, with which they previously had no special connection. Another variation of this model can be seen in groups of Jewish volunteers acting either in coordination with formal community organizations or as independent informal or formalized initiatives. For example, student activists of the Hillel-Ukraine organizations, most of whom, according to its head, stayed in the country, and even those who were forced to leave their cities, are actively working in the field of collecting and distributing humanitarian aid, accepting refugees, and have joined in to help with the evacuation of the civilian population in other areas. “Guys are helping the refugees in spending their free time, escaping from the terrible reality: they hold various educational events, arrange Shabbat celebrations.” (As an example of such activity, Akselrud mentioned Lviv, with more than two hundred thousand internally displaced persons at the time of the interview; more than a million people used the city as an intermediate point on their way to the border with Poland) (EAJC, 2022). The 4th model is represented by attempts to restore the “organized core” of Ukrainian (and not only) Jewish communities in a new place, including abroad. One such example is the followers of the Chief Rabbi of Ukraine (according to Chabad) and the head of the All-Ukrainian Congress of Jewish Hasidic Religious Communities, Moshe-Reuven Asman, who settled relatively compactly in Cyprus and in Israel, where, according to evidence, a certain version of community ties is maintained. Approximately the same pattern appears among the leaders of Ukraine’s largest Kyiv and Odessa communities of Progressive Judaism. According to Alex Duchovny, the Chief Rabbi of this movement in Ukraine, about half of his parishioners remained in

 This situation was described by representative of the Conference of European Rabbis Rabbi Shalom Kaplan, in the course of our conversation on 23.08.2022. See also IPN 2022.  This was a testimony received by e-mail, 12 June 2022.

The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Jewish Communities

265

Kyiv, and the rest moved to Israel, where Duchovny is trying to create a new reformist community of former Kyivans in the city of Haifa. A similar thing is being done in Germany by the rabbi of the Odessa community of Progressive Judaism, Julia Gris, who has gathered almost 40 people from Kyiv and Odessa around herself. The chief rabbi of the Jewish community of Dnipro, Shmuel Kaminetsky, managed to move his yeshiva from that city to Germany’s Düsseldorf, while some of his parishioners made attempts to recreate their community in Vienna, gathering around refugees from Dnipro and other cities of Ukraine.80 The emergence of a Ukrainian Jewish community became a real challenge for the Jewish Federation of Vienna in their efforts to integrate Jewish newcomers.81 To the best of this author’s knowledge, this is one of the few examples of ethnic cultural development among new FSU emigrant communities that meet the “second possible scenario” as defined above – establishments of “branches” of ethno-civic communities of “Russian” and “Ukrainian” Jews in parallel with the veteran Russian-speaking and other Jewish communities in the host states. The most “radical” version of the “communities of Ukrainian Jews in exile” is being built by the head of one of the segments of the split Kyiv Jewish community Karlin-Stolin, Rabbi Yakov-Dov Bleich, and the head of the Odessa Lytvak community, Shlomo Baksht. The first managed to partially recreate his community in the capital of Hungary, Budapest, and in the city of Irshava in Ukrainian Transcarpathia. In both places, religious life familiar to the members of these communities was restored (moreover, in Budapest, the community received from the municipality the building of one of the local synagogues that had stood empty for decades). And their leaders, to the best of their ability, made sure that their parishioners, as well as the Jewish refugees from Kyiv and other cities who had joined the backbone of the former community in the new place, had decent living conditions and employment opportunities. Shlomo Baksht managed to transfer the organized core of his religious community (employees, formal members, regular participants in community events, and recipients of regular assistance – about 30–35 families in total) and its immediate periphery – students of community educational institutions and their parents, as well as their Jewish University students to Romania. He also brought teachers of general education disciplines and service personnel from the community structures of both Jewish and non-Jewish origin. The group (about 800 people in total) settled

 Testimony of the editor-in-chief of the all-Ukraine Jewish newspaper Hadashot (Kyiv), Mikhail Gold, April 2022.  Testimony of Euro-Asian Jewish Congress CEO Dr. Haim Ben Yakov, 6 September 2022.

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in three neighboring rented 5-storied hotels in one of the closed resort complexes in the Mangalia region on the Black Sea coast of Romania. There, with the help of foreign sponsors, a synagogue was recreated and a full cycle of Jewish education for parishioners was restored – a kindergarten, a comprehensive school, a cheder for boys, the Beit Yaakov religious school for girls, and a kolel (religious courses for adult men). They also opened a shop, a cafe and resolved basic household issues (food, issuance of funds for entertainment, transport, and other operational needs) for community members and their families. According to the testimony of Shalom Kaplan, Baksht and his associates are actively looking for a small provincial town in Romania where they could settle compactly and, in addition to the Jewish traditional way of life, establish an ordinary life in general.82 According to other sources, members of Baksht’s community intend to spend no more than a year in Romania, following which, if the situation in Ukraine stabilizes, they will return to Odessa, and if not, they will move to another European country that would be more convenient for their life plans, without excluding the option of collective repatriation to Israel. In any case, the main criterion remains the possibility of maintaining the unity and the way of life of the community that has developed over the years. Finally, there is evidence of attempts to implement community projects in a much more “integrative” plan. In particular, in Israel, a new wave of emigration from the former USSR stimulated attempts to resuscitate communities of people who came from the same cities and regional associations that used to play a significant role in uniting and integrating repatriates from the former USSR in the first decade of the “Great Aliya” of the 1990s. (The goal of creating the Association of Organizations and Communities of New Repatriates and Veterans – immigrants from the former USSR in Jerusalem – was, for example, formulated at a meeting of representatives of volunteer and professional associations that provided assistance to repatriates and refugees of the last wave, held in August 2022 in the capital of Israel.)83 Perhaps something similar should be expected in Europe. Nevertheless, the main question today is whether these and other leaders will be able and willing to “repatriate” their communities to their places of origin and, most importantly, to restore the institutional infrastructure created around them after the end of the active phase of hostilities. The answer to this question is not obvious in relation to those who, like Asman, retained and strengthened their authority during the crisis, all the more so in relation to those who decided to

 Interview with Shalom Kaplan, Jerusalem, 23 August 2022.  Personal observation of the author, Jerusalem, 22 August 2022.

The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Jewish Communities

267

leave the city (such as some Kharkov rabbis, who also helped in the evacuation and collection of humanitarian help, but from afar). An important aspect of this issue is the prospect of mobilizing the necessary financial and other resources for this, especially if the looming financial crisis deprives Jewish communities of many of the traditional donors from among wealthy Ukrainian Jews who discontinue their support. In July 2022, this topic acquired new meaning in light of the decision, unexpected for many, of Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to revoke the Ukrainian citizenship of three of the wealthiest and most influential Jews in Ukraine, including two who had been instrumental in funding Jewish infrastructure projects – Igor Kolomoisky and Hennadiy Korban, as well as Vadim Rabinovich, President of the Ukrainian Jewish Congress, a former tycoon and Parliamentary opposition leader. (Vadim Rabinovich was deprived of Ukrainian citizenship and a criminal case was initiated against him.) Explanations for such a decision that circulated in public– from the formal reason of their all having foreign citizenship, including Israeli (technically illegal in Ukraine but widely tolerated in real life) to the rumor of these three oligarchs’ participation in large-scale corruption schemes – did not convince many. Even fewer were ready to accept the story that these steps were taken in connection with Ukrainian leaders’ fight with current and potential agents of Russian influence in Ukraine – at least in concern of Kolomoisky and Korban, who have strong patriotic credentials. Therefore, more believed that the matter rested not so much on ideology but on the power struggle between various factions of Ukrainian business and political elites. “Whatever Zelensky’s motivation, the move could have sweeping consequences for efforts to reinvigorate Jewish communities in Ukraine”, concluded political reviewer JTA Cnaan Lipshitz (rightly). “Now, the question may be whether those wealthy Ukrainian Jews remain Ukrainian at all” (Liphshitz 2022a). A similar problem may arise in Russia, where funding for an impressive system of Jewish community institutions, in addition to investments from Israeli and international Jewish organizations and private western donors, depend more and more on donations from wealthy Russian philanthropists, primarily billionaire oligarchs. But now, many of the Russian-speaking Jewish oligarchs who used to fund these activities in Russia are under crippling sanctions that have tied up their funds in the West. One such is Roman Abramovich (a leading donor to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia), Mikhail Freedman and Peter Aven (founders and major donors of Geneses Philanthropic Fund and Executive Committee members and donors of the Russian Jewish Congress), God Nisanov, Viktor Vekselberg, Moshe Kantor (who had to resign from the post of President of the European Jewish Congress, as well as from other positions in the World Jewish Congress and Yad Vashem memorial in

268

Epilogue

Jerusalem) and other Russian Jewish billionaires and businessmen (many of whom with Ukrainian roots). These persons and many other businessmen and public activists of this caliber excluded themselves from all kinds of public activities in this country and had to abandon their philanthropic activities outside of Russia, including in Israel. It remains to be seen whether this situation will change in the near future, and if not, to what extent Israel and the Jewish world will be able to fill this vacuum both in Russia and in Ukraine (as well as other countries of the former USSR). The main element in the potential demographic recovery of the Jewish communities of Ukraine after the “hot” phase of the battle is over will apparently be the return of internally displaced persons. This will include Jews and members of their families who ended up in countries that became transit points for Jewish and nonJewish refugees from Ukraine (Poland, Romania, Moldova, etc.) and who for various reasons refrained from further resettlement in the countries of Central and Western Europe, America, or Israel. (It was these people, according to eyewitnesses, who prevailed upon those Ukrainian refugees, including Jews, who began to return to Kyiv and some other cities of Ukraine already at the end of April 2022.) The potential for the return of those Jewish emigrants who have ended up in Israel and other western countries should still be assessed as not too high. As discussed in Chapter 11, MOIA’s April-May 2022 survey showed that more than 80% of new “war era” repatriates from Ukraine were sure that they would stay in Israel, or thought they would. Respondents from among members of the “core” of the organized Jewish community of Ukraine were even less inclined to leave Israel at the time of the survey than those who made up the “cloud” of this community (Table E10). Table E10: Desire to Stay in Israel by Members of the 2022 Aliya from Ukraine / Cultural-Religious Identification. Will you stay permanently in Israel?

All

Judaism

Christianity, etc.

None

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

.% .% .%

%

.%

.%

N





I’m sure, yes I think yes Don’t know yet or think no Total

Self-defined religion

.% .% .% .%



,

269

The Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Jewish Communities

One way or another, some kind of reformatting of organized Jewish life after the end of the war, according to observers, is still possible, and the Ukrainian Jewish community, albeit reduced in number, will need the full range of social, educational, religious, and cultural services. It will also undoubtedly remain an important factor and symbol of the Ukrainian civil nation, with political and lobbying needs and opportunities corresponding to this status. In Russia, the picture seems to be somewhat different. If Israel is taken as an indicator, with its overwhelming majority of Jews and members of their families who emigrated there from the RF after the start of the war, then most of them (83%) so far intend to stay in it, just like repatriates from Ukraine. And those who had a stable Jewish identity declared this intention noticeably more actively than immigrants of mixed or non-Jewish identification (Table E11). Table E11: Desire to Stay in Israel by Members of the 2022 Aliya from RF and Other FSU States outside of Ukraine / Ethnic Identification. Will you stay permanently in Israel? (Russia, others)

Jew

All

Russian, another Jew Another identity

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

%

.%

.%

N





I’m sure, yes I think yes Don’t know yet Think no, or didn’t answer Total

Ethnic identification

.% .% .% .%

.% .% .% .%

.% .% 



But the share of Jewish emigrants in the overall demographic potential of the Russian community is still significantly less than in other countries of the former USSR. Therefore, one should hardly expect a critical reduction in the Jewish population in the main cultural, industrial, or business centers of the country or a complete collapse of local communities; unless, that is, the authorities decide to resort to open or informal instruments of political anti-Semitism for purposes of internal stabilization (a scenario that, at the time of writing, still seems unlikely). In fact, if the Russian Federation does not find itself behind a new “iron curtain”, we should expect a significant increase in the number of holders of Israeli citizenship permanently residing in that country. This can happen due to those representatives of the mass aliya wave who arrived in Israel in the first months after the start of the war in Ukraine on 24 February 2022 and, having received Israeli citizenship, almost immediately returned to the Russian Federation. (According to available data, about a third of the 5,600 repatriates who arrived in Israel from

270

Epilogue

Russia from late February to late April 2022 fell into this category at the time of writing), and due to those who have settled in Israel for the time being (or, having received Israeli citizenship, settled in Prague, Berlin, etc.) and who will be ready to return should the situation improve. As a result, at least some Jewish communities in the large Russian megacities may gradually acquire the features of “expat communities,” similar to those that exist today in Japan or the United Arab Emirates. It is possible that the departure of the leadership from some umbrella structures (as exampled by President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine Boris Lozhkin and its CEO Inna Ioffe, as well as Russian Jewish Congress President and CEO Yuriy Kanner and Anna Bokshitskaya) or the ceasing of their activities for the above-described reasons (as initiated by the presidents of KEROR, the United Jewish Community, and the Ukrainian Jewish Congress, Pinchas Goldshmidt, Igor Kolomoisky, and Vadym Rabinovich, resperctively) will create an organizational vacuum and push individual Jewish politicians to create alternative umbrella organizations. Such an attempt, for example, was made by Rabbi Liron Edri of Krivoy Rog, who in April 2022 announced the creation of the Association of Jewish Communities of Ukraine. Something similar could happen in Russia, perhaps not so much in the form of the creation of new associations but in the form of the emergence of new figures and a reshuffling of positions between representatives of “loyalist” and “autonomist” factions within existing structures. However, it is too early to draw conclusions – the real situation will become clearer after the end of the war.

The Jewish World and Post-Soviet Jewry: Conclusions and Tasks for the Future The results of our large-scale study show that the Jews of post-Soviet Eurasia and their families are a dynamic socio-cultural community with its own specific Jewish and quasi-Jewish identity. This identity is nourished from various internal and external sources and finds its material embodiment in Jewish community activities, which, as has been shown, define the framework of the local Jewish community and its transnational diaspora. The Jewish community, both in the socio-demographic and institutional sense, is a well-established and by all indications a long-term phenomenon of Jewish and general civil existence in the USSR successor staters. Although threats to this phenomenon persist, at this stage they are usually minor. And the only or one of the few truly serious threats to Jewish existence is the main problem of all Jewish communities outside of Israel with a few exceptions – the peaceful and voluntary demographic, social, and cultural assimilation of Jews into a non-Jewish environment.

The Jewish World and Post-Soviet Jewry: Conclusions and Tasks for the Future

271

With this phrase we intended to conclude this book when its first version was being prepared for publication. Yet the Russian military invasion of Ukraine and the impact that this first full-scale war in three quarters of a century in Europe had on the three largest Jewish communities of the former USSR – the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus – made us rethink the question of the Jewish future in the postSoviet region and the future of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora. Even though the development and long-term consequences of the phenomena mentioned in this concluding section are not yet obvious, we can draw a few main conclusions even now. First of all, almost all current demographic and culture identity developments in the Jewish communities of the former USSR, and especially in the two largest ones, Ukrainian and Russian, that took place after 24 February 2022, had their obvious roots in the previous period. At the same time, there is no doubt that this war will complete, at least in general terms, these processes, or at least take them to a new level. Secondly, one of the worst crises of Eastern European and Eurasian Jewry in the entire post-World War II era, which we are witnessing at the moment, is unlikely to cast doubt on the continued existence of the Russian-speaking Jewish subethnos. In fact, even considering the dramatic events of 2022, one should not expect any radical changes in the communal-regional structure of both the core and in the general extended Jewish population of the former USSR. On the other hand, one of the consequences of the demographic and political weakening of the three main Jewish communities of the former USSR, among others, may be the significant redistribution of weight and influence of the main centers of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora, primarily in favor of Israel and Europe. Thirdly, the current military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine – no matter how it ends – will require significant revision of a number of basic principles of the strategy of the Jewish world, and above all, of the transnational Jewish organizations and regional umbrella structures, such as the WJC and EAJC, in relation to post-Soviet Jewish communities. In addition to the current primary task of these structures – to facilitate the adaptation of immigrants into their localities and the return of those who desire to return to their native and other cities of the country of origin if and when the situation stabilizes – these organizations will be forced to find creative solutions to other problems. In particular, they will need to solve the problems of community development, including the restoration of the destroyed infrastructure of Jewish communities on a scale comparable to the tasks of the “formative” stage of the 1990s. That is, the period when organized Jewish life in the late USSR and post-Soviet states was created practically from a “clean slate.”

272

Epilogue

Fourthly, life shows that crises exacerbate the danger of finding the “guilty party,” which ethnic minorities often become in the eyes of certain parts of a society. Although at the moment, despite existing negative trends, Jews have not yet become the first candidate for such sentiments in Russia, Belarus or especially in Ukraine, it cannot be ruled out that this situation might contribute to the growth of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli rhetoric and corresponding public sentiments. Therefore, the organized Jewish world should be prepared for the exigency of promptly mobilizing its political, diplomatic, informational, and other lobbying resources to maintain the well-being and safety of the Jewish population of these countries and their community structures if need be. Fifthly, the above-mentioned socio-demographic weakening of the Eurasian segment of the transnational Russian-speaking Jewish diaspora in favor of its center in Israel and the EU will apparently require a revision of the “mandate” of the leading umbrella associations of Euro-Asia – first of all, organizatios such as the EAJC, the Russian Jewish Congress (REC), the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine, and others. In the current situation, they will probably have to move away from the purely regional and geographic focus of their activities and radically increase their focus on working with emigrant communities from the former USSR outside post-Soviet Eurasia. In this regard, special attention will have to be paid to Europe, where, as studies of different years show, an alternative to preserving the specific identity of Russian-speaking / post-Soviet Jewry among the first, 1.5, and often the second generation of immigrants with roots in the former USSR is the assimilation not so much of the “local Jewish” (i.e., Jewish-German, Jewish-Austrian, Jewish-Belgian, etc.) as the actual non-Jewish civil identification component (Glöckner 2019). Sixth, it is obvious that the situation will change rather quickly and, accordingly, will require regular finetuning of both strategy and operational policy in this matter. And this, in turn, will require regular monitoring of processes in these communities, the content and direction of which are difficult to predict today, in order to collect data and develop appropriate recommendations. This, in turn, will be a very difficult task without the availability of fundamental scientific research on this process. Therefore, the role of the scientific community and professional research structures capable of providing such academic and analytical services in this situation can hardly be overestimated. Our new series Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition, and the present volume that launches it, is an attempt to contribute to this urgent task.

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Vedenyapina, Daria. 2019. Russian-Speaking Jews in Modern France: Socializations and Identities (Русскоязычное еврейство в современной Франции: социализации и идентичности), Tirosh. Yearbook on Jewish, Slavic and Oriental Studies Yearbook. Issue 19, edited by M. Chlenov et al, 298–324. Moscow: Sefer Center for University Teaching of Jewish Civilization, Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Science. (Russian) Veidlinger, Jeffrey. 2013. In the Shadow of the Shtetl. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Verschik, Anna. 2007. “Jewish Russian and the Field of Ethnolect Study,” Language in Society 36.2: 213–232. Vesti-Yanet. 2022. “Jewish Victims of the War in Ukraine: Dozens of Killed, Hundreds of Wounded, Thousands of Homeless” (Еврейские жертвы войны в Украине: десятки погибших, сотни раненых, тысячи бездомных), Vesty-Ynet, 24/08/2022, https://www.vesty.co.il/main/article/ bkvhpt71j (accessed 24.08.2022) Viner, Boris. 2002. “Back to Predecessors’ Believe. Contemporary Ethnic-Confessional Identity Construction: the Case of St. Petersburg” (Возвращение к вере предков. Конструирование современной этноконфессиональной идентичности (на примере Санкт-Петербурга), Диаспоры/Diasporas 4: 202–223. (Russian) Volkov, Denis. 2019. “A Lost Decade: Public Attitudes in Russia are Back to 10 Years Ago” (Потерянное десятилетие: общественные настроения в России вернулись на 10 лет назад), Forbs, 30 December, https://www.forbes.ru/obshchestvo/390195-poteryannoe-desyatiletieobshchestvennye-nastroeniya-v-rossii-vernulis-na-10-let (accessed 1 June 2022). Weingrod, Alex and André Levy. 2006. “Social Thought and Commentary: Paradoxes of Homecoming: The Jews and Their Diasporas,” Anthropological Quarterly 79.4: 691–716. Winer, Stuart. 2015. “Missing Moldova Fortune Raises Fears of Anti-Semitic Attacks”, The Times of Israel, 19 May https://www.timesofisrael.com/missing-moldova-fortune-raises-fears-of-antisemitic-attacks/ (accessed 08 September 2022) Yukhnyova, Natalia. 1999. “Between Traditionalism and Assimilation (an Attempt to Explain the Phenomenon of Russian Jewry” (Между традиционализмом и ассимиляцией (попытка объяснения феномена русского еврейства), Диаспоры/Diasporas 1: 160–178. (Russian) Yukhnyova, Natalia. 2008. “Russian Jews in Russia and Israel” (Русские евреи в России и Израиле), Нева/Neva 9: 148–161. (Russian) Zabrodskaja, Anastassia and Martin Ehala. 2014. “Ethnic Processes in Post-Soviet space: Theoretical Background,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 35.1: 1–8. Zaprudsky, Sergey. 2019. “Alexander Chubik: Belorussian Society is Finally Ready for Reforms” («Александр Чубрик: Белорусское общество наконец готово к реформам»), Thinktanks.by, 4 November 2019, https://thinktanks.by/publication/2019/11/04/alexandr-chubrik-belorusskoeobschestvo-nak1ts-gotovo-k-reformam.html (accessed 1 June 2022). Zarembo, Kateryna. 2017. “Re-assessment of the Ukrainian Foreign Policy: Ukraine-Israel” (Аудит зовнішньої політики: Україна–Ізраїль), Institute of World Policy (Kyiv), 25–5–2017. (Ukrainian) Zissels, Joseph. 2002. “The Welfare Policy and Social Security in Post-Communist Jewish Communities: The Case of Ukraine,” Jewish Political Studies Review 14.1–2: 63–67. Zarembo, Kateryna 2022. “We Jews Know Where Putin’s Dehumanizing Language on Ukraine Leads,”, Ha’aretz, 6 March, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2022-03-06/ty-article-opinion/.pre mium/we-jews-know-where-putins-dehumanizing-language-on-ukraine-leads/0000017f-da7dd718-a5ff-fafdf5ab0000 (accessed 10 April 2022).

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Zhegulev, Ilya. 2018. “Yury Kanner: All Jewish Became Fashionable (Юрий Каннер: “Появилась мода на все еврейское),” Jewish Journal/Еврейский журнал, 1 September. https://jewishmagazine.ru/ articles/intervyu/jurij-kanner-pojavilas-moda-na-vse-evrejskoe/ (assessed 27 June 2022) 360 TV. 2022. “‘If Someone Comes to Kill You, Rise Up and Kill Him First’ Rabbi Shlomo Zlotsky on the Situation in Ukraine,” (“Тот, кто пришёл убить тебя, убей его первым”: раввин Шломо Злотский о ситуации на Украине, “360” TV, rutube.ru (accessed 10 December 2022).

Subject Index Adain Lo, Jewish Educational Center 25 AJC, American Jewish Committee 69, 191 Almaty 10, 11, 64, 139, 140, 183, 190, 200, 229 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee 180 Anti-Semitism 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 206, 211, 230, 269 Armenia 8 Azerbaijan 8, 171 Belarus 140 Berdichev, Friedrich Gorenstein’s olay 121 Birobidzhan 11, 27, 121, 122 Birobidzhan, almanac 118 BISAM, Central Asia Center 10 Bridges of Culture/Gesharim publishing house 120 Bukhara Jews 119, 132 Bukhari language 130 Caucasian Mineral Waters 23 CCJG, Central Council of Jews in Germany 241 Chabad movement 169 Chisinau 10, 11, 12, 153 Christianity 99, 101, 103, 105, 107, 113 City Upon Bira, electronic publication 119 Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities in Russia 174 COVID-19 epidemic 221 Crimea 23 CSB, Israeli Central Statistical Bureau 1, 6, 240 Dagestan 8, 20, 119 Demoskop 20 Detaly, electronic publication 94, 95, 242 Di Woh, Birobidzhan weekly 118 Dnepr (Dnipro) 172, 198, 199, 202, 258, 265 Duh i Litera publishing house 120 EAJC 8, 191, 222, 258, 264, 271, 272 EMRMG, Ukrainian Jewish Vaad 191, 192 Ethnic identity 235 Ethnic origin 184

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-015

Euro-Asian Jewish Congress 7, 8, 25, 169, 178, 191, 265 Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia 92, 93, 96, 170 Federation of Jewish National-Cultural Autonomies in Russia 178 FJCR Gagauz 224 Germany 216 GPG, Genesis Foundation 7, 21, 94, 186 Great Aliya 6, 253, 266 Hadashot, Kyiv newspaper 68, 117, 147, 199, 265 Halakhah 3, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 33, 40, 42, 69, 73, 164, 170 Hebrew 141, 142, 143 Heftzibah program 169 Hesed, charitable foundation 6, 23, 139, 142, 179, 186 Hillel-Ukraine organizations 264 Humanitarian University of Crimea 169 IEAJS -Institute of Euro-Asian Jewish Studies 10, 238 Institute for Jewish Policy Research 19 Irkutsk 11 Israeli Education Ministry 169 Israeli Ministry of Aliya and Integration 214 Israeli Ministry of Diaspora Affairs 198 JAFI, Jewish Agency for Israel 242 JAR, Jewish Autonomous Region 24, 26, 27 Jewish Agency 169 Jewish Agency for Israel 25, 192, 248 Jewish Confederation of Ukraine 178, 270, 272 Jewish Council of Ukraine 178 Jewish education 31, 133, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 189, 215, 266 Jewish Heritage 164 Jewish holidays 109, 111, 112, 115 Jewish identity 183

296

Subject Index

Jewish museums 123 Jewish Museums 123 Jewish Organizations 178 Jewish universities 169 Judeo-Christians 26 Kazakhstan 10, 52, 60, 64, 86, 101, 151, 201, 224, 233 Kazan 11, 79 KIIS – Kiev International Institute of Sociology 226 Klezmers 122 Knizhniki publishers 120 Krasnodar 6 Kremenchug 11 Kyiv (Kiev) 5, 12, 117, 153, 169, 186, 198, 202 Kyiv (Kiev), Karlin-Stolin community 265 Law of Return 1, 3, 9, 10, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 27, 35, 72, 73, 103, 135, 188, 216, 239 Lechaim, periodical 116, 120 Levada Analytical Center 8, 10, 47, 49, 84, 133, 135, 151, 155, 192, 193, 194, 213, 230, 231 Limmud educational platform 7 Martin Hoffmans’ Co 215 Ministry of Aliya and Integration 239 Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation 171 Minsk 5, 10, 11, 12, 21, 64, 139, 153, 154, 190, 227 Mixed marriages 158, 162 MJDA, Israel Ministry for the Jewish Diaspora 191, 192, 198 Ministry of Alyia and Integration, Israel (MOIA) 7, 12, 84, 145, 188, 215, 217, 218, 237, 238, 248, 249, 255, 259, 268 Moldova 57, 60, 234, 263, 264, 268 Moscow Choral Synagogue 217 Moscow Jewish Film Festival 122 Moscow Sefer Center 22 Moscow State University 23, 27 Mountain Jews 29, 118, 119, 132 National Conference of Soviet Jewry 215 Nativ Liaison Bureau 13, 133, 248 New Jewish School, St. Petersburg 169

North Caucasus 8 Novosibirsk 11, 181 Odessa 5, 10, 11, 22, 64, 134, 153, 169, 198, 202, 261 Ohr Avner, Chabad schools 169, 170, 171 Ohr Sameach movement 169 ORT 169, 170, 171 Penza 6 Perm 11 Pew Research Center 1, 29, 30, 69, 106, 156, 167 Poltava 11 PORI, Public Opinion Research Institute 6, 7, 12, 37, 40, 217, 219, 227, 230, 231, 249 Putin’s Aliya 7, 213, 217, 219, 221, 242, 252 Rating Sociology group 226 Reform Judaism 99 Russia-Georgia war 8 Russian Jewish Congress 27, 92, 93, 94, 95, 123, 128, 192, 230, 267, 270, 272 Samara 5, 39, 44 Shalom, Moscow theater 121 Shema Yisrael schools 169 Smolensk 6, 23 St. Petersburg European University 22 STEMGI-Mountain Jews Resource 171, 197 Taglit program 14, 25 TalDor Sociological Institute 7 Tatarstan 79 The People of the Book, St. Petersburg magazine 116 USDS monitoring agency 191 Vaad Ukraine 171 Vatan, weekly 119 Veliky Novgorod 6, 181 Vladimir 5 Voronezh 11, 95 World Jewish Congress (WJC) 178

Subject Index

Yehupets, almanach 117 Yiddish 4, 31, 35, 45, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 124, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143, 144

Yugnd-Ruf (Youth Call) 138 Zaporozhye (Zaporizhia) 5, 258 Zhitomir 11

297

Index of Persons Abramovich, Roman 267 Akselrud, Yosef (Osik) 22, 24, 27, 258, 259, 264 Al-Haj, Majid 59 Altman, Daniel 6, 30, 69, 106 Altshuler, Mordehay 33 Andreev, Evgeny 15 Arango, Marina 245 Arestovych, Oleksiy 79 Asman, Rabbi Moshe 26, 95, 264, 266 Aven, Peter 267 Avgustevich, Semen 115 Bagno-Moldavski, Olena 95 Baker, Gerard 191 Baksht, Shlomo 265 Bardach-Yalov, Elina 20, 188 Barkan, Elliott 59 Bar-Yosef, Yosef 121 Bashevis-Zinger, Isaac 121 Belinkis, Alexander 263 Bemporad, Elissa 29 Ben Yakov, Haim 265 Bennett, Naftali 212 Ben-Rafael, Eliezer 30, 59, 69, 168 Bleich, Rabbi Yakov-Dov 265 Bogrov, Dmitry 122 Bokshitskaya, Anna 95, 270 Boroda, Alexander 23, 92 Borodulin, Nikolai 121 Boyd, Jonathan 19 Brik, Yevgeny 196 Briman, Shimon 94 Brym, Robert 5, 6, 33, 69 Byalsky, Igor 119 Cantorovich, Irena and Nati 81 Charmé, Suart 97 Chernin, Velvl 4, 5, 9, 12, 30, 36, 44, 50, 88, 116, 119, 122, 128, 129, 131, 138, 158, 245 Chernov, Michail 24, 27 Chervyakov, Vladimir 5, 159, 163, 180, 181 Chlenov, Michael 4, 5, 20, 47, 98 Cohen, Menahem-Mendel 258 Cohen, Steven 155, 158, 168

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110791075-016

Collar, Anna 149 Crul, Maurice 166 Damyan, Victor 196 Della Pergola, Sergio 12, 15, 16, 17, 21, 29 Dietz, Barbara 149 Dolinsky, Eduard 24, 27 Duchovny, Rabbi Alex 264, 265 Dymshits, Valery 4, 22, 24, 36, 132, 138, 144, 181 Elias, Nelly 69, 70 Epstein, Alek 6, 37, 39, 44, 103, 113 Estraikh, Gennady 130 Faist, Tonas 59 Feigin, Rabbi Haim 261 Feldman, Eliezer (Albert) 24, 25, 26 Finberg, Leonid 120 Fishman, Barack 158 Freedman, Mikhail 267 Frenkel, Alexander 116 Friedman, Alexander 198, 199 Frug, Semyon 129 Genzeleva, Rita 121 Gershuni, Grigory 122 Gidon, Dina 122 Gidwitz, Betsy 5, 168 Gilboa, Yehoshua 1 Gitelman, Zvi 1, 5, 29, 30, 31, 33, 78, 98, 100, 159, 163, 164, 168, 179, 180, 181, 182 Gofshtein, David 120 Glöckner, Olaf 168 Gold, Mikhail 68, 117, 147, 186, 199, 261, 262, 265 Goldman, Denis 259 Goldschmit, Pinhas 95, 270 Goldstein, Sidney 15 Gordon, Samuil 121 Gorelik, Boris 58 Gorin, Boruch 20, 116, 120, 186 Gorodnitsky, Alexander 119 Gotisan, Victor 223 Gracheva, A.M. 157 Grebennikov, Marat 4

300

Index of Persons

Grinberg, Mikhail 53, 120 Gross, Juda Ari 213, 242 Gryvnyak, Natalie 258 Gudkov, Lev 155, 193, 211, 212 Gurevich, Leonid 55, 86, 225 Gurevich, Mikhail 128 Gur-Gurevitz, Baruch 168 Harman, Harriet 157 Horenczyk, Gabriel 155 Kadushin, Charles 157 Kaminetsky, Shmuel 265 Kanner, Yuri 23, 93, 95, 270 Kantor, Moshe 267 Kaplan, Rabbi Shalom 264, 266 Katz, Iosif 117, 118 Kazovsky 121 Khabensky, Konstantin 122 Kivisto, Peter 59 Kliger, Sam 37, 69, 78, 108 Knut, Dovid 129 Kolomoisky, Igor 267, 270 Korban, Hennady 267 Kordonsky, Semion 24, 27 Korkia, Viktor 119 Kornblatt, Judith 99 Korolenko, Psoy 122 Kosmin, Barry 15 Kovelman, Arkady. 23 Kuleba, Dmytro 212 Kupovetsky, Mark 20 Kurs, Dmitry 20 Kunaev, Dinmukhamed 56 Lavrov, Sergei 212 Lazar, Berel 96, 116 Leshem, Elazar 14, 33, 43, 245 Lev Ari, Lilakh 60 Levenbuk, Alexander 121 Lipshitz, Cnaan 196, 267 Levin, Hanoch 121 Levin, Zeev 195 Liebman, Charles 97 Lozhkin, Boris 270 Lukimson, Peter 155 Lunts, Lev 129

Lyalenkova, Tamara 155 Malis, Alexander 93 Mandelstam, Osip 129 Markowitz, Fran 50 Marynovich, Myroslav 92 Marshak, Samuil 129 Merzhievskaya, Elena 118 Meyers, Eytan 245 Mikhailov, Viktor 119 Mikhoels, Solomon 121 Militarev, Alxander 50 Mochalova, Victoria 22 Morgestern, Marina 69 Moskalets, Vladislava 135 Nakhmanovich, Vitaly 212 Nisanov, God 267 Nosenko-Stein, Elena 5, 6, 29, 35, 47, 48, 50, 51, 59, 70, 99, 115, 149, 155, 185 Osovtsov, Alexander 6, 29, 30, 100, 216 Pechersky, Alexander 123 Petrakova, Yulia 231 Petrovsky-Shtern, Yohanan 36, 44 Pham, Konstantin 123 Pinhasik, Zelik 21 Pinchevsky, Alexander 196 Pisarevskaya, Dina 2, 6, 33, 39, 44, 138, 142 Plahotniuc, Vladimir 195 Polian, Alexandra 120, 135 Popkov, Vyacheslav 216 Popkova, Yekaterina 216 Prokofiev, Dmitry 218 Propirny, Nikolai 25 Putin, Vladimir 7, 212, 217, 219, 221, 242, 244, 252 Rabinovich, Osip 129 Rabinovich, Vadim 267 Rebhun, Uzi 60 Remennik, Larissa 1, 59 Rozenberg, Victor 215 Rozovsky, Liza 212 Rutland, Suzanne 70, 149 Ruzer, Serge 99

Index of Persons

Ryvkina, Rosalina 5, 6, 30, 33, 35, 43, 100, 113, 158 Salzman, Rabbi Pinhas 263 Sandler, Boris 121 Sapritskaya, Marina 99, 245 Sarashevsky, Elena 121 Sarna,Jonatan 97 Satanovsky, Evgeny 27, 92, 94, 163 Secrieru, Stanislaw 196 Shakhbanova, Madina 4, 8 Shapiro, Vladimir 5, 6, 159, 163, 180, 181 Shayevich, Adolf 20, 174, 181 Sheffer, Gideon 59 Sheskin, Ira 6, 30, 69, 106, 157 Shevchenko, Taras 120 Shishigina, Maria 99 Shoikhet, Grigori 258 Sholom Aleichem 120 Shor, Ilan 195 Shoval, Judith 245 Shulman, Arkady 117 Sikorskaya, Oxana 135 Sinelnikov, Alexander 15, 158 Sobkin, Valery 157 Soldat-Jaffe, Tatjana 138 Staetsky, Daniel 16, 17, 29, 55 Stambler, Rabbi Meir 259 Sternberg, Yitzhak 168 Sukharev, Dmitry 119

Tarasov, Alexey 79 Tolts, Mark 1, 2, 15, 16, 17, 21, 132, 153, 159, 214 Trotsky 122 Umanovskaya, Gita 21 Urban, Darya 226 Ustinov, Sergei 123 Vedenyapina, Daria 187 Veidlinger, Jeffrey 45 Veinstein, Judith 168 Vekselberg, Viktor 267 Vershik, Anna 130 Viner, Boris 115 Vokov, Denis 226 Winer, Stuart 196 Yakimova 58 Yakovenko, Igor 6, 29, 30, 100, 216 Yukhnyova, Natalia 44, 47, 48 Zaprudsky, Sergei 227 Zarembo, Kateryna 79 Zelensky, Volodymyr 22, 211, 212, 267 Zhabotinsky, Vladimir 129 Zhuravel, Pavel 258 Zissels, Josef 21, 25, 95, 186 Zlotsky, Rabbi Shlomo 95

301