Reuters - 03.02.2001

 

Johnson's Russia List

New Russian Jewish leader vows to heal rifts

MOSCOW, March 2 (Reuters) - A top oil executive has replaced media baron Vladimir Gusinsky at the head of the Russian Jewish Congress and hopes to heal rifts within the country's million-strong community, a Jewish leader said on Friday.

Leonid Nevzlin, deputy chairman of the board of the YUKOS company, was elected acting Congress President on Thursday after Gusinsky stepped down. He said he would stand for election at a meeting to be held later in the year.

Gusinsky, who is trying to fend off a hostile takeover of his independent NTV television channel, is under house arrest in Spain pending extradition hearings in a Russian fraud case. He remains the Congress's honorary president.

Alexander Osovtsov, the Congress's Vice-President, said Nevzlin would undertake to end differences within the community. "Our Congress is a secular organisation and the differences are generally of a religious nature, but he has pledged to try to unite all the groups," Osovtsov said by telephone. "His first job will be try to hold talks."

Osovtsov said Nevzlin, 41, would stick to his pledge to quit his job at YUKOS to devote himself to the Congress's work. Gusinsky left Russia last July after being briefly jailed in connection with a fraud probe at his Media-Most group. He refuses to return on grounds that he would face persecution.

Gusinsky has been seeking Western investment to stop a branch of gas giant Gazprom from securing control over NTV. Liberals and Western politicians see the fraud investigation and attempted takeover as a test of President Vladimir Putin's commitment to post-Soviet press freedoms.

Russia's Jewish community, depleted by mass emigration to Israel, still has to cope with a degree of anti-Semitism -- a legacy of tsarist pogroms and communist-era discrimination.

Jews, generally non-practising, are split into two main groups, each with a cleric claiming to be Russia's chief rabbi. The Russian Jewish Congress recognises Russian-born Adolf Shaeyevich as chief rabbi -- a post he has held for a decade.

But the Kremlin has offered support to a rival group organised by the ultra-religious Lubavitch movement. Its chief rabbi, Berl Lazar, is Italian-born.