A Wave of Jews Returning to Russia

As the Iron Curtain began to fall, Igor Dzhadan left the Soviet Union with his family, bound for Israel and a longforbidden opportunity.

Dzhadan was luckier than most of the 11,000 Soviet doctors who rushed to Israel around the same time, 1990, under Israel's Law of Return. He was able to continue practice and research. Still, he returned to Russia in 2001 to become an editor at Moscow's Jewish News Agency.

"It was interesting for me to live in a Jewish state, but I feel more comfortable in Russia," Dzhadan said. "I knew from the experience of others that I could find work here and my life prospects wouldn't be worse than in Israel."

Dzhadan is part of a tide of emigrants who have returned to Russia from Israel over a litany of concerns: the second intifada, Israel's worsening economy, an inability to adapt to cultural and social realities. According to a study released this March, at least 50,000 emigrants returned from Israel from 2001 to 2003.

The exodus has stirred up a discussion in Israel, said Boruch Gorin, head of the public relations department at the Russian Federation of Jewish Communities, which commissioned the study. On the one hand, millions of Jews already live outside Israel. On the other hand, "living in Israel is an ideology, and tthat the people who sought a shelter in the country have been leaving is a blow to the ideology," he said.

Israel had two waves of Russian immigration that altogether boosted its population from 5 million to 6 million, according to Gorin. In the first wave, 200,000 Jews left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The second wave, which coincided with perestroika in 1986, brought 800,000 more Soviet Jews.

Under the Law of Return, anyone having at least one Jewish grandparent may seek citizenship.

Recently, however, Israel has seen its population growth subside, with citizens leaving not only for Russia, but also Europe and the United States. Only 20,000 to 30,000 immigrants entered Israel from 2001 to 2003, which was for the first time less than the outflow, Gorin said, citing the study.

According to the Israeli Embassy in Moscow, up to 100,000 Jews left Russia annually in the 1990s; last year the number was down to 10,000.

At first, emigrants, mostly businessmen, began venturing back to Russia in 1995 in small numbers, Gorin said. Russia beckoned them then with greater economic potential and relative political and economic stability, Gorin said.

One such businessman was Anton Nossik, who came back in 1997 because, he said, his ambitions had outgrown the Israeli market. He left Russia in 1990 after graduating from college as a surgeon. He could not land a job in medicine and began working as a journalist.

His big success came in 1996, when he started a web design company and won orders to create web sites for the Museum and the Central Bank of Israel and the Eastern European department of the Foreign Ministry.

"In principle, everything was great and successful," Nossik said. "I won as many tenders as were available. But confining your business to a small and remote country is like hobbling a horse."

Nossik, 38, has created many high-profile Internet news sites in Russia, where, he said, the number of Internet users is 14.6 million, compared to just 2.2 million in Israel. His most successful news portals are Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru and Newsru.com.

The second tide of returns began in 2000, as the Russian economy developed sufficiently for returnees to find jobs with greater ease, sometimes within companies created by Jewish businessmen who returned in the late '90s.

At the same time, the start of the second intifada, in 2000, damaged security in Israel and, along with it, the investment and employment climate.

Although Dzhadan, 40, did not lose his job, he had to face military service. He was twice called to serve in heavy fighting areas, in Bethlehem and Hebron.

"I had to wait during operations to see whether there would be any wounded that I would have to treat," he said. "I saw dead bodies."

The 23-day conscriptions caused Dzhadan to lose his salary at work, and state compensation was hard to receive, he said, due to a tangled bureaucracy.

Another reason for returning was what Dzhadan called the "sectarian" structure of the society. In order to rent an apartment or find a job, a person has to operate through members of his party or immigrants from the same country or area.

"I didn't like it," he said. "I'm used to operating in an open society where people don't ask you to what community you belong."

Gorin named several other reasons that prompt Soviet and Russian Jews to come back. One of them is that most highly educated immigrants have to take blue-collar jobs in Israel. "Doctors, physicians and mathematicians were cleaning the streets," Gorin said.

Also, immigrants from Russia largely lacked a Jewish identity, while at the same time they longed for the Russian culture they left behind. They fled the Soviet Union because of its state policy of discrimination against Jews and felt they could then return once that policy had seen its end.

The Jews that have come back find many signs that they can feel more at home in Russia than before, one of them being the appointment of Mikhail Fradkov, whose father is Jewish, to the post of prime minister.

According to Gorin, the Jewish Community Center in Moscow, with a wide range of sports facilities, an Internet cafe and a library, is one of the best in Europe. Moscow is also home to four Jewish universities, 10 schools, three newspapers and one online news agency, Gorin said.

Anti-Semitism remains a problem, certainly, but it "isn't the main form of xenophobia in the country" and looks less frightening than elsewhere in Europe, according to a 2003 Moscow Human Rights Bureau report. "Russia has been spared the surge in anti-Semitism that has disturbed the whole Western world in the past three years," the report said.

Nossik said he feels fairly safe as a Jew, and is more scared by random street crime. He said he walks around in traditional Jewish headwear, a kippah, but the only time he was attacked in the street was when Russia lost to Japan during the 2002 soccer World Cup. He happened to be in the way of an infuriated drunken crowd of fans.

"I don't see anti-Semitism," he said. "I don't see a position that a Jew can't occupy, especially after Fradkov's latest appointment." Russia's capitalist economy "allows you to exist regardless of your religious beliefs."

Most Jews -- including Nossik and Dzhadan -- that come back to live and work in Russia retain Israeli citizenship and travel to Israel on a steady basis, Gorin said. Dzhadan said he plans to visit friends in Israel, but would never return there for good because he belongs to Russian "civilization."

Nossik did not rule out living in Israel in the future. "When I drop out of business for age or health reasons, I could go to Israel to enjoy the cuisine and the nature," Nossik said. "It's a very beautiful and pleasant country."

I am starting to realize why the "Putin for Dictator" crowd is so passionate. Most of them are linked to the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). According to ROC doctrine, the Czar is supposed to head the Church. As such, all true ROC members, both inside and outside Russia, long for a return of the Czar. Then it should come as no surprise that these same people want to imput Czar-like qualities to Putin. Putin, for his part, is playing these unsuspecting ROC believers like a finely tuned fiddle. End Result?...Putin can do no wrong.

Message to ROC members...Putin is not the Czar.

Having lived and worked in Israel I can attest to a near complete lack of assimilation of Russian Jews. They retained their Russian identities and lived, socialized and congragated in Russian speaking enclaves. Most grew up in the Soviet era and were not practicing Jews and I never met one who was kosher.

I posted this to another thread dealing with the same subject, so I thought I'd post it here to.

A European friend of mine who has traveled and studied the Soviet Union and Russia extensively recently sent an email to me. Here is an excerpt of his remarks:

"In Soviet era, that was even more bureaucratic, but today, it might be easier for some people to emigrate than to move from their home town to Moscow, if only they would get a visa from a foreign country. That is why Israel has been flooded by more and less genuinely Jewish Russian immigrants."

There is no doubt that many Russian Jews made Aliya for genuine reasons. However, many of the Jews who immigrated from Russia to Israel weren't even Jews at all. Still others, with a residual connection to their Jewish heritage, were not committed to Zionism or Israel. I know, because I interviewed many of them during my stay there. Plus, you can bet, the Russians were sure to mix-in plenty of FSB agents (to spy on Israel) for good measure. In short, many of the people we see going back to Russia were never committed to Eretz Israel (as the article makes abundantly clear) and therefore never belonged there in the first place IMHO.

There is no doubt that many Russian Jews made Aliya for genuine reasons.

Many of them went to Israel against their will. In 1989 Israeli leaders persuaded USA and other Western countries to restrict admittion of Jewish emmigrants from Russia. As a result a great number of them was redirected to Israel:

"Until 1989 Soviet Jews, who could leave the Soviet Union only if they had Israeli visas, were free to head for the United States after stopping over in Vienna. They did so under an American refugee program designed to help victims of repression who had no other place to go. Israel hoped to stanch the flow of immigrants elsewhere by providing direct flights from Moscow to Tel Aviv or by having immigrants stop in Bucharest, where they could be better controlled. To limit the Jews' options, Israel persuaded the United States to cap the number of Soviet refugees. The Soviet quota was set at 50,000, about 90 percent of whom have been Jewish. Germany also virtually ended Jewish immigration after being pressured to do so by Israel in early 1991. Before then more than 100 Soviet Jews were registering each day for entry into Germany.(18)"
(Let the Soviet Jews Come to America)

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