NEWS STORY: Russia’s economic woes fueling upsurge in Jewish emigration to Israel

c. 1998 Religion News Service MOSCOW _ After sticking it out here through the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the hungry winter of 1991-92 and through President Boris Yeltsin’s violent conflict with parliament in 1993, Larisa Tikhonova has had enough. She is going to Israel, leaving behind two sons, an apartment, a car, a […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

MOSCOW _ After sticking it out here through the collapse of the Soviet Union, through the hungry winter of 1991-92 and through President Boris Yeltsin’s violent conflict with parliament in 1993, Larisa Tikhonova has had enough. She is going to Israel, leaving behind two sons, an apartment, a car, a summer home and nearly six decades of memories.”It was a kind of line that was crossed and I decided I needed to do something,”said Tikhonova, 57, an unemployed electrical engineer, of the August devaluation of the ruble and subsequent economic anarchy in Russia.

On a recent Sunday, Tikhonova was sitting outside a classroom at Moscow’s”Ulpan”_ a center designed to prepare Jews for emigration _ watching students of all ages emerge from a packed lecture on Judaism given by Rabbi Chaim Belykov, Moscow’s one Reform rabbi. Tikhonova said she doesn’t know what kind of reception she’ll get in Israel as an atheist, especially one who is emigrating for purely economic reasons.”Religion is not at all the reason I’m going. It has absolutely nothing to do with it,”said Tikhonova, a self-assured woman who speaks in measured tones.”I need to change the shape of my life.” Tikhonova’s motives are not unusual at Moscow’s Ulpan, which has quadrupled in size to 966 students since August, according to the center’s educational director Anat Lifshitz, an Israeli citizen.”It is only the first step for them. They do not even understand the difference between the Reform Jews and the Hasidic Jews,”said Lifshitz, who herself emigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1966 at the age of 15.”They are far away from that. It is like a first grader not understanding or caring what happens in the fourth grade … Most of them don’t know what `kosher’ is. Most of them eat pork.” After peaking in the early 1990s, the number of Jews emigrating from Russia to Israel steadily declined. Some 15,700 people left last year as compared to 16,900 in 1996. The Jewish Agency, a quasi-governmental Israeli organization that facilitates emigration, estimates there are 500,000 people in Russia eligible to make the move.


Until Russia’s economic crisis broke on August 17, this year’s emigration numbers were running about 15 percent below last year’s, said Alla Levy, the Jewish Agency’s head in Russia. After that date, the number of Jews applying for consultations at its offices across Russia surged, overwhelming local staff and prompting Jerusalem to dispatch a rapid response team to help out.”We have never seen such a phenomenon,”said Levy.”These are people who have never been to the Jewish Agency or to any Jewish activities. The majority of them are in their 20s and 30s. There were people in banking, businessmen, owners of shops.” These are the very people who were to have been the sensible, hard-working, well-educated people forming the backbone of a stable, democratic Russia.

Now, they may leave for Israel.”We shouldn’t be too quick to translate it into a growing number of immigrants. We should all understand that this is a very emotional reaction,”Levy said.”The people who applied for consultation were very desperate, very sad. They looked very lost.” The economic pressures facing Jews are little different than those afflicting all Russians: rising inflation, skyrocketing prices, unpaid wages and mass layoffs. But in recent weeks, Jews have been singled out repeatedly as the cause of the crisis by an outspoken Communist member of Russia’s State Duma, or lower house of parliament.”Who is to blame? The executive branch, the bankers, and the mass media are to blame. Usury, deceit, corruption, and thievery are flourishing in the country. That is why I call the reformers Yids,”declared Duma deputy General Albert Makashov at a rally recorded on videotape. On other occasions, Makashov has called for the extermination of Russia’s Jews.

While outrageous and incendiary in a country with an anti-Semitic tradition as deep as Russia’s, Makashov’s statements are not as remarkable as the Communist-dominated Duma’s refusal to even mildly reprimand Makashov in a vote earlier this month (Nov. 4).

Makashov’s comments were condemned by the ailing Yeltsin, other top government officials and Patriarch Alexii II, leader of the 80 million-member Russian Orthodox Church, nationalist elements of which regularly attack non-Slavs and, especially, Jews.

Advocacy groups like the Washington-based Union of Councils for Soviet Jews raised an alarm this month over Makashov’s comments.”General Makashov’s statements reflect both the old-style Communist anti-Semitism and the new Jew-hatred of the neo-fascist nationalist right,”the UCSJ said in a statement.

Despite the furor surrounding Makashov’s statements, a random sampling of Jews at the Moscow Ulpan indicated economic reasons were still the No. 1 reason for leaving.

Marina, a 38-year-old English teacher who declined to give her last name, said anti-Semitism was nothing new for her. She added that she is more fearful of encountering Arab terrorists next spring when she moves to Israel than she is concerned about the anti-Semites with whom she lives in Moscow.


Part of Ulpan’s mission is to allay the concerns of Russian Jews, which range from anxiety over finding a job to worries about discrimination against Russian speakers to fears of being left to live in a desert war zone.

Typically, younger people like Marina and her 12-year-old daughter make the transition more easily, according to Nili Kadary, an Israeli teacher who has traveled throughout Russia working with potential immigrants.”Naturally, for youngsters it is easier. They can learn. They can choose a profession,”said Kadary during a cigarette break in the Ulpan’s hallways.”But if a person is say 50-, 45-, 55-years old and worked already 25 years or 30 years in a profession for which there is no demand in Israel it is much more difficult … The absorption is much more difficult.”

DEA END BROWN

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