Chicago Tribune - 06.02.2002

 

 

The Chicago Tribune / Johnson's Russia List

Anti-Semitism unchecked in Russia

Officials trumpet new tolerance, but hate crimes tell another story

By Colin McMahon, Tribune staff reporter. Olga Navashina contributed to this report

MOSCOW - During his trip late last month to St. Petersburg, President Bush praised Russia for leaving behind its long history of anti-Semitism. Russian officials portrayed their nation as far more tolerant than their European neighbors.

Then within days, two incidents exposed what many Jews say is the real truth about living in Russia: Anti-Semitism is hardly a thing of Russia's past, and extremism is tolerated today by authorities and society.

Anti-Jewish violence, including the wounding last Monday of a woman who tried to tear down a booby-trapped anti-Semitic sign, persists at levels that Jewish groups consider alarming.

The collapse of the Soviet police state freed Jews to pray, speak and celebrate as they wished, and Jews across Russia are asserting their identity with an authority unseen since the Bolshevik Revolution. They are building synagogues, schools and community centers. They are reclaiming their heritage.

Yet the lifting of state controls has also freed grass-roots anti-Semitism from its cage. Anti-Jewish rhetoric is tolerated in Russian public life as it never was in the Soviet Union. Over the past decade, Jews have become vulnerable to new kinds of confrontations and even violence.

"On the one hand, we are saying things now without hiding ourselves," said Rabbi Yitzhak Kogan of Moscow, whose son once found a bomb in their synagogue. "On the other hand, we see the teeth of hate."

Boris Stambler of Moscow, a leading member of an organization of Jews who were wounded fighting Nazi Germany in World War II, said everyday harassment has worsened along with violence.

"People get insulted on public transportation," Stambler said. "People are certainly afraid because one can expect anything to happen.

"This had to be anticipated," he said. "When law enforcement keeps silent, the fascist elements raise their voices."

Regular scapegoats

Average Russians and politicians openly blame Jews for the nation's many ills, though Chechens and other peoples from the Caucasus region have displaced Jews in some areas as national scapegoats. Conspiracy theories have grown along with anger among a people embittered by the theft, corruption and mismanagement that have fueled Russia's economic collapse.

No wonder that a Russian translation of a book by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has found an audience. Next to President Vladimir Putin's reminiscences about his life before the Kremlin, vendors in Moscow line up a Duke book promising to illuminate the "Jewish question."

"There's a popular saying in Russian," said John Mostoslavsky, 60, a magician turned museum curator in Yaroslavl. "If there is no water in your house, it means the Jews drank it all.

"My neighbor is like this," Mostoslavsky said, warming to the retelling. "As soon as there is a problem with the water, she calls me: `Hey, you Jewish mug, I have no water! I had no problems before you moved in.'"

Industrious Jew draws ire

Throughout a career in show business--interrupted by a stretch in the gulag for bribing a Soviet bureaucrat--Mostoslavsky collected bells, porcelain figurines, music boxes and other antiques. Later, he bought property along the Volga River in Yaroslavl, restored the dilapidated houses and opened a museum to exhibit his collection.

Mostoslavsky's deal with the city drew the ire of some residents, who wondered why prime property was falling into Jewish hands.

"I'm used to this situation, like a house pet gets used to bad food," Mostoslavsky said. "I'm used to the fact that they yell at me out the windows."

Rabbi Shimon Bergman of Nizhny Novgorod remembers the first time someone shouted an epithet at him as he walked down a city street. Having come from Jerusalem only recently, the rabbi could scarcely believe the hostility.

Then vandals defaced dozens of Jewish gravestones, the third incident of its kind in Nizhny Novgorod.

Yet Bergman insisted that more telling about Jewish life in Nizhny Novgorod is the success of his community's new kindergarten, its remodeled synagogue, and its good relations with the neighbors and the city government.

Jews say similar things in disparate places--in capitalist Moscow, in liberal St. Petersburg, in provincial Yaroslavl. They acknowledge the tension, even hostility, around them. But they celebrate their changing sense of community, even though for many religion plays a small role.

The downside for Russia's Jewish communities is that many who suddenly began to celebrate their Jewishness have done so hoping to migrate to Israel.

"The young and perhaps the ambitious and talented, and the most committed to being Jewish are precisely those who emigrate disproportionately," wrote Zvi Gitelman, a professor of political science and Judaic studies at the University of Michigan.

"This is part of a larger paradox," said Gitelman, who studied the issue for the New York-based Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. "Those active in the Jewish community are the most likely to leave it. Perhaps this is ideal from a Zionist point of view, but it raises serious questions for those who would build Jewish communities in the former Soviet Union."

Migration of Jews from Russia has declined steadily since 1999. Growing political and economic stability within Russia is one factor, officials say. Another is that Jews fear they would face danger in their new homes.

The deadly conflict with the Palestinians has dissuaded some Russian Jews from emigrating to Israel. Violence in Europe, such as the firebombing of French synagogues, makes those destinations less attractive.

"Emigration will not become large-scale because shameful anti-Semitism keeps growing not only in Russia but in other countries as well--that is in France, in Germany, in England," said Mark Krasnoselsky, a former Kremlin adviser on countering political extremism.

Yet thousands of Jews and their families still leave Russia each year, and the Jewish population continues to fall faster than the nation's as a whole.

Nearly 1 million Jews and their family members from Russia and other former Soviet republics have immigrated to Israel since the USSR broke up. Because Russia has not conducted a census since the Soviet collapse, and because the question of who is a Jew is particularly complicated in Russia, no official statistic exists for the country's current Jewish population. But at least 500,000 Russians consider themselves Jews, experts say, and perhaps as many as 900,000. Russia has 145 million people.

"The demographic factors are quite sinister," said Mikhail Chlenov, a professor of Judaic studies at Moscow's Maimonides Institute and a leading Jewish figure in Russia.

'A dangerous trend'

If stability has stemmed the flow of Jews out of Russia, a return of instability could fuel it again. Extremist groups have been pushed to the margin in the past few years, Chlenov pointed out, but the rise in anti-Semitism remains "a dangerous trend in social development."

Last Monday, Tatyana Sapunova, 28, was driving outside Moscow when she spotted a handwritten sign attacking Jews. When she tried to get rid of it, an explosive booby trap tore into her legs, hands and face. Sapunova has been hospitalized, and Jewish groups are raising money for her medical care abroad.

In another incident, the teenage son of a rabbi was attacked Tuesday morning in Moscow by skinheads. An American citizen whose father is working in central Russia, 16-year-old Yakov Vershubsky said it was the third time he had been targeted.

"A careless attitude toward apparently non-serious anti-Semitism--such as the drawing of swastikas on walls, certain publications and the defilement of cemeteries--creates a feeling of impunity among the extremists," said Alexander Axelrod, who directs the Anti-Defamation League's Moscow office.

"The people on the margin who organize the acts and profess nationalist hatred make up no more than 4 percent to 5 percent of the population," Axelrod said. "The problem is that the largest part of Russia's population doesn't see any shame in a xenophobic behavior and regards it as a norm. Society tolerates it."