The Russian Diaspora in Israel
By Sean at 18 June, 2006, 7:04 pm
According to my unscientific survey, the Russian diaspora in Israel is an under reported topic in blogs on Russia. I present excerpts from two articles from Haaretz in hopes of beginning a discussion. The first tells of Russian anti-Semitism toward Orthodox Jews in the form of neo-Nazis, while the second reports on the Israeli oppression of Russians because of their adherence to the Orthodox faith. Both point to the contradictions the post-Soviet aliyah to Israel that began in the 1990s. Excerpts are below.
“Fear and loathing in Petah Tikva / Neo-Nazi gangs assaulting ultra-Orthodox Jews”
By Moti Katz
Haaretz, May 11, 2006.
A week after the desecration of the Great Synagogue in Petah Tikva, nothing remains of the horror the worshipers encountered there last Thursday when they arrived for morning prayers. The walls, which had been sprayed with swastikas and blasphemy, have been newly painted, the floor polished and the curtain covering the holy ark replaced.
However, the danger is far from over. For the past two years the ultra-Orthodox community there, which includes some 5,000 families and 300 synagogues, has been subjected to incessant attacks by street gangs from the former Soviet Union (FSU). The gangs have been beating ultra-Orthodox men, hurling curses at them and desecrating synagogues.
“These youths feel out of place in the Russian community they belong to, but they are not accepted in Israeli society either,” says Bella Alexandrov, the director of the multi-disciplinary youth center in Petah Tikva. She distinguishes between two kinds of immigrants – punks and skinheads.
“The skinheads buy Russian videos about ‘white power’ that call for cleansing Russia of Jews. They don’t get it from home. It comes from not belonging and not finding answers to their distress.”
On Sukkot eve last year, a number of teens bearing knives burst into the big Lithuanian yeshiva Or Israel on Rothschild Street in the city center. They started beating pupils, and throwing prayer books and scriptures on the floor.
Yeshiva head Rabbi Yigal Rozen has no doubt that these incidents are anti-Semitic.
“Persecution only strengthens us”
By Lili Galili
Haaretz, June 6, 2006.
Vladimir Gridin, a professor of solid-state physics, is certain that the fact our meeting took place last Sunday, on Pentecost, the day believed to mark the birth of the Russian-Orthodox Church, was no coincidence. Nor did he believe that it was coincidence that the church where we met, at the end of Hagai Street in Migdal Haemek, was vandalized right before the sacred holiday. “Divine providence,” he says. Even if one can ascribe a degree of divine providence to the timing of our meeting, it’s doubtful the youths who desecrated the church and the adjacent priests’ graves a few days before the holiday were so attuned to the nuances of Russian Orthodoxy that they specifically picked that day to commit their act of vandalism.
“A pogrom in the church,” was the cry that echoed from the small community whose spiritual life is centered on the Church of St. Nikolai. What took place wasn’t quite a pogrom, but it was the latest in a series of attempts to damage a holy place. On Friday morning, when they arrived for services, the congregants found the church windows broken, the icons overturned, a cross uprooted from a priest’s grave and the edge of the grave ruined. A lot of effort went into shattering the windows, which were protected by a dense metal screen. A particularly malicious hand had to work hard to get in between the spaces to break the squares of thick glass one after the other. And yet, the police, whose local headquarters are very close to the church, insist the vandalism was just a prank by a bunch of 8- and 9-year-olds. “We’ve gone back to the early days of Christianity,” said Gridin sadly. “Christians are being persecuted again.”
A somewhat unusual group gathered this week at the door to the church. Unusual, both because of the way they’d broken with convention in the choices they’d made in their lives, and because they were all situated on the delicate seam between the Law of Return and the rules of halakha (Jewish law). This is the congregation of Father Romanus, a 46-year-old Arab Orthodox priest from Haifa, who is just as fluent in Russian as he is in Arabic and Hebrew. He learned the language while studying at a Russian theological seminary in the U.S., and founded his community here.
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I wasn’t aware of this problem. My god, the one place I thought Russian youth would actually be prospering! Regarding the vandalism directed at the Orthodox Jews: My first thought was that it must be a sad consequence of all the secular Jews who just wanted out of the FSU and emigrated to Israel, apparently with children who have no respect for the country they moved to (although that’s no excuse to become a thug). I did some poking around for more info, and I read that tens of thousands of these youth were denied citizenship due to insufficient claims to Jewish heritage (even though their parents were allowed in???). So they are marginalized, poor, and don’t have access to schools or insurance. The problem is not an inherent rise in neo-Nazism, it’s bad state policy toward providing for residents. I don’t have all the facts, but it seems Israel should find a way to get these kids into schools, even if it means they have to read revisionist history books.
SEAN: According to my scientific survey, there is no significant dialogue about race issues of any kind involving Russians on any Russia blog. You’ve routinely posted items about racism, I have done so, and so have others, yet there is no dialogue, and in fact the race killings occupy a back-burner position in the Western press, if they are mentioned at all. The sad result has been that the British Home Office has started denying asylum requests from dark-skinned refugees of Russia on the argument that in fact there is no significant race persectuion in Russia.
Above all, the voices of Russians are most markedly silent on this issue, and without them a dialogue is virtually meaningless. Slowly, the conclusion is crystalizing that Russia, as a nation, may be racist. One dares not imagine what may happen to unfavored racial, ethnic and religious groups should the economy turn sour, as it inevitably will.
Perhaps the biggest problem is that no charismatic leader, either a Slavic Russian or a dark-skinned foreigner or someone in between, has not stepped forward to focus attention on the issue. But this should perhaps not surprise us, since there is no such person opposing the wider issue of the rise of totalitarianism.
SEAN: Something just occurred to me. In fact, how is it possible that there is no blog specifically devoted to race issues invovling Russia? Or maybe you know of one?
One more thing perhaps of interest, as Moscow News reports:
Russia’s Supreme Court has overturned the verdict of Aleksandr Koptsev, who had attacked parishioners in a Moscow synagogue.
Alexander Koptsev burst into the synagogue on Bolshaya Bronnaya street in Moscow on January 11, 2006, and stabbed eight people with a hunting knife before being wrestled to the ground by the rabbi and his son. Four of those injured were in serious condition. Russia’s Chief Rabbi, Berl Lazar, announced he was cutting short a visit to Israel and returning to Moscow after the incident.
Koptsev was charged with racially-motivated attempted murder and humiliation of a religious group. He told investigators that he was jealous of Jews and their better living standards and was inspired to act by books and internet websites. He added that the main factor was his “desire to die” and he felt sorry for those he had injured. He has been described by Russian media as a skinhead. Russia’s chief rabbi stated that the attack was a symptom of the general climate of intolerance and xenophobia in Russia.
On March 27, 2006, Koptsev was sentenced to thirteen years in prison and mandatory psychiatric treatment after being found guilty of attempted murder.
A month later Koptsev’s lawyer, Vladimir Kirsanov, appealed to Russia’s Supreme Court to have his client’s sentence reduced, arguing he was mentally unstable, did not kill anyone, and did not cause any disabling injuries. Meanwhile, prosecution lawyers have also appealed to include the charge of inciting interethnic hatred, which was dropped by the court.
The resolution of the Supreme Court, as quoted by Gazeta.ru internet daily, states that a Moscow local court will now reexamine Koptesev’s case
I’ve returned to this post to see whether any “dialogue” occurred involving the race question in Russian, not surprised to see that none did. In cowardly manner, Russians and Russophiles avoid this issue like the plague. Hence, no progress despite reasonable invitations like Sean’s to make some.