The Roots of Today’s Revival of Russian Judaism Lie Deep in the Soviet Past

I read with great interest Maxim Shrayer’s elegantly composed “The Prospect for Russia’s Jews.” Striking an especially strong chord with me were his memories of growing up as the child of refuseniks in the Soviet Union, since my parents, too, were refuseniks. (Our family finally won permission to leave in 1985.) Elsewhere in his essay, however, Shrayer exhibits a dismaying lack of familiarity with important historical aspects of the Russian Jewish scene, a constraint that colors his analysis of the situation today.

In particular, Shrayer presents the salient success of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in today’s Russia as a relatively recent phenomenon, one whose origins are traceable to the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s—which is also when Rabbi Berel Lazar, the head Chabad emissary in the region, arrived on the scene. Shrayer is not alone in this; others who write on the subject adhere to a similar narrative, tending to attribute much of Chabad’s success to the purportedly close relationship that Lazar enjoys with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Taking this narrative at face value, Shrayer adduces in confirmation a speech that he heard Lazar give in Moscow late last year.

In what follows I’ll try to offer a brief corrective to this misimpression; but first let me disclose my interest. A New York-based writer and editor at Chabad.org, the movement’s online presence, I speak neither for the website nor for the Chabad movement as a whole; moreover, the website itself has no formal connection with Chabad of Russia or with the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union. I have, however, devoted much time to researching and writing about Jews in the area, both their history and their current challenges, with a special interest in the role of Chabad. It is in the history of that role, I believe, where the real secret of the movement’s recent success is to be found.