The great Odessa

The great Odessa
By Avi Becker
26 Oct 2006

The three million Russian-speaking Jews in the world today can no longer be called the "Jews of Silence." The collapse of the Soviet Union released the safety catch of the energy that was contained inside it, a release that today, 16 years later, is causing far-reaching changes in Jewish demographics and communal life all over the world.

The Second International Conference that took place at Bar-Ilan University last week, under the title "Russian Jews in Global Perspective," addressed the tendencies that characterize this Jewry and the stereotypes from which it suffers: The discussions focused, among other things,

• on the Russian-speaking elite in Israel, which has still not attained the status it deserves;
  
• on Germany, where 80 percent of the 250,000 Jews are Russian speakers; and
  
• on the injustice of the distorted collective image created by the phenomenon of the oligarchs, and more.

One of the phenomena that is misunderstood and almost ignored by Israel and Jewish public opinion, according to conference chairman Dr. Ze'ev Hanin, is the growing influence and unique characteristics of the Russian-speaking Diaspora in North America.

• The 600,000 Russian Jews who live in the United States represent a unique model that is a far cry from the stereotype of Brighton Beach, Brooklyn ("Little Odessa"), where immigrants from the Soviet Union were concentrated in the 1970s and 1980s.
  

Most of the Jews from the former Soviet Union who live in New York still live in Brooklyn, but they also have a prominent presence in the other boroughs, as well as in about 10 leading Jewish communities in the United States, such as Los Angeles and Miami.

In the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, the voting patterns of Russian Jewry were the opposite of the traditional voting patterns of the U.S. Jewish community:

• Some 75 percent of them voted for George W. Bush. In New York, they almost caused an upset that would have prevented the re-election of Hillary Clinton to the Senate.

Contrary to the American Jewish community, one of whose collective identity traits is its religious affiliation, the Russian Jews, who did not receive a religious education, are united by a sense of ethnic partnership and active support of Israel as an expression of emotional solidarity and family ties with natives of the former Soviet Union in Israel. The strong organization that unites them is not their community association but the Russian Jews for Israel organization. Unlike the situation in the American Jewish community in general, among Russian speakers, there has been an increase in the collection of money for Israel - a trend that was reflected during the recent Lebanon war.

Oranim College's Dr. Ariel Borschevsky, who presented the findings of a study conducted over two years among Russians in the Jewish community in Boston and its environs, pointed out that as opposed to most American Jews, the Russians emphasize that Israel is their second homeland, and their presence is prominent at pro-Israel demonstrations.

In direct contrast to Russian Jews in Germany, the vast majority of whom arrived in Germany from the early 1990s and are still typical of first-generation immigrants who belong to a low socio-economic class, the participants in the conference who came from the United States, Dr. Sam Kliger and Boris Gorbis, were proud of the fact that the Russian Jews in America are already becoming part of the U.S. middle class. Although they expect the Jewish community to accept them with more warmth, for their part they are also participating in institutionalized community activity, in their own way and in direct contrast, for example, to the hundreds of thousands of Israelis in the United States.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin is very aware of the increasing strength of Russian Jewry in the U.S., and he has established a special Jewish organization in his office that is active among Russian Jews in general, but places a special emphasis on the Jewish Diaspora, via which he hopes to achieve influence in the U.S.
  

There are Russian Jews who complain about the absurdity of the activity of the American Jewish establishment, which continues to raise money in order to "build a Jewish life" in the former Soviet Union, while it has difficulty providing for the basic needs of immigrants who are arriving there. But this may also be one of the signs of the normalization of Jewish mobility among the Diasporas.