Category Archives: Russian diaspora

With Labor set to go down in flames in next month’s parliamentary elections in Israel, what is a beleaguered Ehud Brarak to do to pump up his tough image among crucial Russian voters?  Why, “Putinize” himself, of course. As Lily Galili reports in Haaretz:

In a bid to gain the vote of the Russian immigrants in the elections, Labor leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak will quote Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s statement about killing Chechen terrorists “on the toilet.”

“As you people say, they should be whacked when they’re on the toilet,” Barak will say in a radio election broadcast intended for Russian speakers. Labor, which is launching its campaign among the Russian speakers this afternoon, will ask them to support him, as they did when he last ran for prime minister 10 years ago.

Galili goes on to explain that Barak’s Putin plagiarism is his way of “fashioning his image after ..read more

Meet Don Kozlents. This octogenarian medal of valor holder is one of the millions of Red Army veterans of WWII. Like so many others, most of his family perished at the hands of the Nazis. He fought in the Battle of Kursk, where he was wounded when he crawled out of a pit to reconnect the wires of his primitive radio. A shell hit him, shattering his arms. Ironically, the very faulty radio equipment that brought him out of his hole was the very thing that protected him from the shell’s fatal blow. To this day shrapnel from the shell float in his body. As Kozlents spreads his metals out on his kitchen table in his apartment in Rishon Letrzion in Israel, he tells Haaretz‘s Lily Galili, “I did good work as a soldier. I was there for Russia, but as a Jew for ..read more

Russia and Israel have a rather interesting relationship.  Political relations between the countries have been cool for decades, but the increase of Russian immigration and travel to the Jewish nation has inevitably complicated the two nation’s cultural and social ties.  It’s estimated that well over a million Russians have immigrated to Israel since the collapse of Communism.  The reasons have been economic and cultural.  Many Russian Jews fled the collapsing economy of the 1990s.  Some were pulled to Israel out of Zionist dreams. Fewer left Russia out of fear of antisemitism.  Many more were pulled by Israeli policies that expanded the Right of Return, a move from the Israeli perspective was a means to offset the its demographic imbalance with the Palestinians as well as replace Arab cheap labor with Russian immigrant cheap labor.

However, the Russian diaspora in Israel has increasingly found it difficult to integrate into Israeli society.  They ..read more

Russian youth’s embrace of Nazism doesn’t just happen in Russia. It’s also happens where one might not initially expect: Israel. Haaretz reports that Israel’s Interior Ministry arrested eight members, all aged 16 to 21, of a Nazi gang in Petah Tikva, a suburb outside of Tel Aviv. The arrests are the result of a year long investigation into street attacks and vandalism of the suburb’s Great Synagogue. The group, who is responsible for attacks on religious Jews, immigrants, homosexuals, homeless, and drug addicts, which they filmed, was found in possession of Nazi literature and posters, five kilos of explosives, a pistol, and an M-16. The M-16 was acquired when one of the youths was drafted into the IDF. He has since fled Israel back to Russia, leaving the rifle with his comrades. The Israelis plan to seek his extradition. Six of ..read more

“We’re punks!” declare immigrant teens mostly from the CIS who hang out at Petah Tikva’s Gan Yehonatan club in Israel. They are also skinheads. But skins come a various types. You have anti-racist skins, Nazi skins (or boneheads as anti-racists call them), and apparently a new type, one that fits well in Israel: “radical right wing Islamophobes who believe in the working class,” according to one youth who talked to Moti Katz for his article, “We’re Not Nazis, We’re Punk-Anarchists” in Haaretz.

One might be surprised, even shocked, to learn that there are neo-Nazi youths in the Jewish state. But events over the last year, one of which included vandalizing a synagogue with swastikas, show that not all Russian immigrants experience a Jewish rebirth upon arrival to the homeland. Many don’t even identify themselves as Jews. Others, who ..read more

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 ..read more