Émigrés to Israel Return to FSU
News coverage:
2005
Jews Return to Russia, Anti-Semitism
Russian Jewish Youth on Anti-Semitism
Times (UK): Jews Are Returning to Russia
LA Times: Jews Find New Life in Russia
Ha'aretz: Reverse Immigration Drops 20%
2004
BBC: Israel faces Russian brain drain
JTA: Jews returned from Israel help galvanize Jewish life
JTA: Jews in FSU ask: should I stay or should I go?
Moscow Times: "A Wave of Jews Returning to Russia"
Newsweek International: "Return of the Jews"
Times of London
Once desperate to leave, now Jews are returning to Russia, land of opportunity
From Jeremy Page in Moscow
LOOKING out from his sixteenth-floor office in a Moscow skyscraper, Arsen Revazov can hardly believe that this is a country where it was once illegal to learn Hebrew or celebrate Passover.
He emigrated to Israel 15 years ago — one of a million Jews who fled the Soviet Union to escape institutionalised anti-Semitism and economic stagnation. But today he is back in Moscow — with his wife and two children — living an openly Jewish life and running an advertising business.
“I just realised that there were so many more opportunities in Russia than in Israel. It is like the difference between New York and Arizona,” Mr Revazov, 38, told The Times. “Almost all my friends in Israel have come back, too.”
An estimated 100,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past few years, sparking a dramatic renaissance of Jewish life in a country with a long history of anti-Semitism.
President Putin will cement Russia’s new relationship with its Jewish community today when he begins the first visit to Israel by a Soviet or Russian leader.
“This sends a message to the world that the Moscow-Arab coalition is over,” Berl Lazar, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, said. “It’s eerie that it is happening at Passover. Here, during our holiday, the Russian President is visiting the Holy Land.”
The Soviet Union was one of the first states to recognise Israel in 1948, but later severed ties and backed Arab regimes to balance US support for Jerusalem.
Relations were reopened in 1987, when President Gorbachev allowed Soviet Jews to emigrate. Roughly one in four Israelis is now of Russian origin.
Five years ago, Rabbi Lazar opened a seven-storey, $20 million (£10.5 million) Jewish centre with a synagogue, swimming pool and kosher restaurant, built mostly with donations from abroad. Last year, work started on a bigger, $100 million complex, including a school, a medical centre and Russia’s first Jewish museum, using funds mostly raised in Russia. The land was given by Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, in the clearest sign yet of government support.
“At first people were afraid to give their names to the centre. They had had enough trouble in the past,” Rabbi Lazar said. “Today, being Jewish here is like anywhere else in the world.”
In the past year anti-Semitism has again bubbled to the surface. Many Russians still blame the Soviet Union’s collapse on a Zionist conspiracy and accuse Jewish businessmen of stealing state assets in 1990s privatisations.
In January, a rabbi was assaulted by skinheads in Moscow in one of a string of racist attacks on Jews. The same month, 19 Duma deputies wrote an open letter calling for a ban on Jewish organisations. In March, several Russian cultural figures wrote a similar letter. But Russian Jews say that these cases pale compared with the state-sponsored anti-Semitism of the Soviet era and the ultra-nationalist attacks in the lawless 1990s, when synagogues were bombed and burnt.
Mr Putin has spoken out against anti-Semitism and introduced new legislation against racism. “For us, the struggle against anti-Semitism, as well as any other kind of nationalism and chauvinism, is the core of our domestic policy,” he told Israeli television this week.
For now Arsen Revazov believes his two children are as safe here as in Israel. These days Russian racism is more often directed at Asians or Caucasians, he says. But he is not quite ready to swap Israeli citizenship for Russian.
“That way, if something happens, I’ve always got my Israeli passport,” he said.
Ha'aretz
Reverse immigration to Russia falls by 20%
By Ina Shapiro
Recent data indicate a 20 percent drop in reverse immigration to Russia in 2004 compared to 2003, according to Dr. Mark Tolts, a demographer at the Hebrew University's Institute of Contemporary Jewry.
Emigration from Russia also dropped last year, but to a smaller degree - only 15 percent lower than the previous year.
The trends can be explained by the early signs of economic recovery and the improvement of the security situation. "The data contradict the myth of massive return of immigrants to Russia, which has been circulated by Jewish community leaders in Russia," Tolts said.
It is difficult to estimate the exact number of immigrants who have returned to Russia, but according to various Jewish organizations, the number of returnees who live and work in Moscow alone is around 35,000, and this number has been increasing over the last few years. At a Knesset Immigration and Absorption Committee meeting initiated at the end of last year, participants expressed concern over the growing trend.
Tolts, relying on data from the statistical bureau of the Russian Federation, said less than 14,000 immigrants have returned to Russia and registered as permanent residents from 1997 until the peak of the trend in 2003. Although the figures do not allow for estimating the real number of returnees, since not all of them register, there have been signs of a downward trend.
Currently 243,000 "nuclear" Jews, those who define themselves as Jews and generally have two Jewish parents, live in Russia. The expanded nucleus, which includes the "nuclear" Jews and their expanded families, is twice this number. Meanwhile, the number eligible to immigrate to Israel according to the Law of Return is said to be 800,000, Tolts said.
Slightly more than half of all Russian Jews live in Moscow and St. Petersburg, while half live in the periphery, where standards of living are lower than in Israel, making the country an attractive destination for immigration. In addition, a potential drop in fuel prices may harm the Russian economy in the near future, bringing about a political crisis. "If this scenario materializes, we will witness another wave of immigration," Tolts said.
Recent restrictions on the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union to the United States and Germany makes Israel nearly the only option available to Russian Jews. Today, of some 1,600,000 Russian-speaking Jews in the world, constituting 12 percent of world Jewry, more than two-thirds live in Israel. Israel is unequivocally the center of Russian Jewry today.
BBC Radio 4
Israel faces Russian brain drain
BBC Radio 4's Crossing Continents
By Lucy Ash
One million Russians have arrived in Israel since 1990, making them the country's largest group of immigrants, but poor employment prospects and the fear of terrorism has led to many deciding to return home.
Sitting in her Tel Aviv flat, Irena flicked through photographs of dancers wearing brightly coloured costumes. "I made all these," she said.
"But nobody here cares about your professional skills. Israelis just see Russians as people who have come over to clean their houses, look after old people or sweep the streets."
They promised us a beautiful future, but life here is pretty tough
Irena, Russian immigrant
These days Irena mends clothes for a living but she was once chief designer at the Palace of Culture in Sochi, Russia's most famous Black Sea resort.
The town was badly affected by the rouble crash in 1998 so Irena went to Israel with 16 members of her family.
Now, 12 of them, including her husband, have already returned home.
Sochi is enjoying a revival with 6 million tourists each summer, and Irena's husband has already opened his second restaurant there.
Disillusioned
By contrast Israel faces high unemployment and a stagnant economy.
Irena is also nervous about suicide bomb attacks, and worries about her son in the army. When he finishes his military service she plans to go back to Russia.
"I do not know why the government encouraged us to emigrate in the first place," she said.
"They promised us a beautiful future, but life here is pretty tough, and they should have warned us about that."
They are finding that Russia offers better opportunities for them
Vita Martinova, journalist (right)
Vita Martinova, a journalist for the Russian language weekly Novosti Nedeli, said: "Russians want to be more prosperous. They want more money, better cars and good jobs.
"Now they are finding that Russia offers better opportunities for them."
A study released this year says that at least 50,000 Russians returned from Israel from 2001 to 2003.
According to Eliezer Feldman, a sociologist in Tel Aviv, there are three distinct categories of new Israeli citizens returning to Russia and the former Soviet Union.
In the first group there are people like Irena who had great expectations but were disappointed.
If they were lucky enough to find work, their larger earnings in Israel were wiped out by the higher costs of living there.
So they return to the relative security of a low-rent apartment in a provincial town in Russia or one of the ex-Soviet republics.
Global potential
The second group said Feldman is made up of people who saw Israel as a stepping-stone to a third country.
Refused access to America, Canada or other Western countries and unable to adjust to life in Israel, these people often end up back home.
Sasha Danilov, who has been successful in Israel, belongs to the third group of people leaving the country.
He arrived aged 18 from St Petersburg with nothing but a guitar and one small suitcase. At first he worked nights in the airport as a porter and studied during the day.
Seven years later he had his own hi-tech consultancy firm. Now though he has closed his Tel Aviv office because he and his girlfriend are off to Novosibirsk.
Sasha sees Siberia as his exit strategy from Israel's economic crisis. "There is huge potential there and I am hoping to sell Israeli technology to new markets. I want to act as a bridge between the two countries."
Positive discrimination
Sasha is just one of a new breed of Russian speaking Israelis with Western know-how and a globalised outlook who are in high demand across the former Soviet Union.
Anton Nosik is another. He said he simply outgrew the Israeli market and went back to Moscow in 1997 to open several internet news sites.
"In Russia there are more than 14 million internet users compared to just 2.2 million in Israel.
"Israel is a beautiful country but it feels parochial. And if you have not gone to the right school or university it is hard to get promoted beyond a certain level," he said.
I am deeply unhappy with this trend because I think we are losing some of our best and brightest people
Yuri Shtern, Israeli MP
Yuri Shtern, one of the 12 Russian members of the Knesset, recognises the problem and said Russians are under represented in Israel's public sector.
He wants to bring in a positive discrimination law to put more Russians in the top jobs.
"I am deeply unhappy with this trend because I think we are losing some of our best and brightest people," he said.
People from the former Soviet Union are still coming to Israel but they tend to be far less educated than the Russians who are leaving.
Moreover only one third of the latest wave of immigrants is Jewish according to religious law. Under the Law of Return anyone with a Jewish grandparent may seek Israeli citizenship.
Anti-Semitism
Some worry that aggressive recruitment drives by the Jewish Agency, responsible for bringing immigrants to Israel, is persuading the wrong kinds of people to emigrate.
Zalman Gilichensky, a teacher from Jerusalem, claimed that people with very distant Jewish roots and even anti-Semites are being encouraged to move to Israel.
He said he has evidence of more than 500 outbreaks of anti-Semitism over the past year and he has set up a website to monitor them.
The incidents include swastika graffiti on the walls of synagogues, and verbal and physical abuse.
"The only way to stop these attacks is to change our immigration policy," Mr Gilichensky said. "It does not bother me that some non Jews come here.
The government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet
Zalman Gilichensky, teacher
"But I cannot see why we are importing people who hate our guts. Would-be immigrants should have to prove they know something of our history and respect our customs.
"But the government has done its best to sweep all this anti-Semitism under the carpet because these attacks are so damaging to the image of Israel."
Nevertheless the Israeli Attorney General launched a criminal investigation into a neo-Nazi website which called itself the White Israeli Union, after pictures appeared of a man in an Israeli army uniform with his arm raised in a "Heil Hitler" salute.
But since then, other Russian language websites with similar content have appeared, with tasteless jokes about Jewish people and Holocaust denials.
Yuri Shtern admitted it is a "terrible paradox that such attacks take place" but he said they involve only a tiny minority of Russians in Israel.
"This is not really conscious anti-Semitism, it is mainly teenagers from the lower social classes playing a stupid and very insensitive game."
Michael Jankelowitz of the Jewish Agency said there are no plans to change the Law of Return:
"When Hitler was hunting for Jews to kill he looked for anybody with a Jewish grandparent, so tampering with the Law of Return would dishonour the memory of the six million who went to the Holocaust.
"It is a law of the Jewish people not a law of religion."
Russian Jews returned from Israel help galvanize Jewish community life
By Sue Fishkoff
KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) -- Dasha Milevsky was 14 in 1998 when she left Kiev for Israel.
Although her mother is not Jewish, she enrolled in a religious high school in the city of Tiberias, where she converted to Judaism.
Milevsky finished high school, did her national service and planned to go on to medical school in Israel, but didn't have the money.
So early this year she returned to Kiev.
"When I came back, I was sure I'd return to Israel," says Milevsky, now 20 and a regular at Kiev's thriving Hillel, where she runs a program to teach Jewish identity through Hebrew song. "Now I'm not so sure. There's a lot of work I can do here. People need a Jewish education here more than in Israel."
More than a million Jews have left the former Soviet Union since 1989, most of them for Israel.
By the early 1990s, some of them began to trickle back home, mainly elderly people who couldn't fit into a new society, and young go-getters eager to make it in the newly booming business environments of Moscow and Kiev.
In 1998 the ruble crashed. Political unrest grew, crime increased and the economy grew worse.
None of that seemed to decrease the tide of returnees -- it remained a quiet, steady flow.
Last year, Baruch Gur, of the Prime Minister's Department of Connection with the Jews of the Former USSR, told Ha'aretz that more than 120,000 repatriates had returned from Israel to the former Soviet Union.
What Jewish leaders in the former Soviet Union are beginning to notice, however, is that increasing numbers of those who are returning from Israel bring with them a heightened sense of Jewish and Zionist identity that they want to preserve. They're putting their children in Jewish schools so they won't lose their knowledge of Hebrew.
They're affiliating with their local Jewish communities, showing up for holiday celebrations, joining Hillel, or even taking jobs with Jewish organizations where they are able to put their first-hand knowledge of Israel and Hebrew to good use.
In fact, they're acting a lot like American Jews who make aliyah and decide to return to the United States. They keep ties to Israel, they travel back and forth a lot, and they keep Israel consciousness high in their homes and their communities, local Jewish leaders say.
Dani Gechtman, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee's director in Kiev, estimates that about 9,000 Jews have returned from Israel to Ukraine, most of them to Kiev.
While he believes most have come back for economic reasons, they are nevertheless infusing local Jewish life with a strong dose of Zionist energy.
"Many of those returnees bring a renewed sense of Judaism and Jewish identity back with them from Israel that works to strengthen the local Jewish community," he says. "They come back more Zionistic than when they left. They put their kids in Jewish schools, they want them to learn Hebrew. It enriches the entire community."
Dasha Milevsky isn't making excuses when she says she feels more useful to the Jewish community in Kiev than she would in Jerusalem. She, and other Ukrainian and Russian Jews who have spent serious time in Israel, say that although they love Israel, they were often made to feel like second-class citizens there.
One young repatriate returned recently to a major city in the former Soviet Union after seven years in Israel. He declined to give his name because he works for a Jewish organization and fears jeopardizing his job.
He says he feels more at home in Ukraine as an ex-Israeli, than he did in Israel as an ex-Ukrainian.
But the years he spent in Israel, plus the fact that his parents still live there, has given him a strong Jewish and Israeli identity.
"I'm an Israeli and I feel very Israeli," he says. "I listen to Israel Radio every day, I enjoy Israeli music and film, I talk to people here about what's going on in Israel. But I also know all the new Russian music. I don't feel like a foreigner here."
He says he did not choose his profession by accident. "All the work I do is connected to my knowledge of Hebrew and Israel. I feel like a bridge between the two countries, and I enjoy being useful in this way. I feel I've found my place."
Alex Rosen, the JDC's director in Odessa, Ukraine, a city with a strong Jewish history and a current Jewish population of about 35,000, notes that emigration from his city has slowed down.
Jews are returning from Israel, he acknowledges, but he insists that most of them maintain their dual citizenship so they can open businesses in Odessa and go back and forth to Israel.
"The more that Ukraine gains economic independence, the more this will increase," he predicts. "It's very easy to do business here when you have Israeli citizenship. Israel is close, it only takes two days to bring a container to Odessa port."
David Friedman, 31, left Odessa in 1996 and spent five years in an Israeli yeshiva. He's back in Odessa now, heading the local Chabad yeshiva.
Friedman says that in the mid-1990s, when he first started attending synagogue in Odessa, he'd take off his yarmulke as soon as he exited the shul. Today's Odessan Jews exhibit their Jewishness in public, he says, particularly those who have come back from Israel.
"In Israel they learned not to be afraid," he says. "They want Jewish schools, they want synagogues, even if for ten years in Israel they didn't do anything" Jewish.
"Once they leave Israel, they want it."
It's not too difficult to understand why someone might return from Israel to Moscow, Kiev or even Odessa. But former olim are also returning to smaller towns in Russia and Ukraine, albeit in fewer numbers.
Pyatigorsk is a former spa town southern Russia. An hour's drive from both Chechnya and Dagestan, it is plagued by spillover ethnic violence from across the border. Chechen suicide bombers blew up commuter trains just outside Pyatigorsk twice last winter, killing more than 100 college students on their way to classes.
More than a million Chechen and Dagestani refugees have poured into the North Caucasus region since 1992. Thousands of them were Jews. Many headed for the central town of Pyatigorsk, which became a way station for Jewish refugees on their way out of the country.
But some of them have come back. Pyatigorsk's Geula Jewish day school, with 232 students, is filled with children who speak fluent Hebrew, the result of years spent in Israel.
In one class of 15 students, five are returnees from Israel. Oleg Israilo, 15, was born in Dagestan, made aliyah with his family, and is now back in Pyatigorsk. Sixteen-year-old Anna Pesachava was born in Pyatigorsk to Chechen refugee parents who returned from Israel after seven years in Holon. She thinks she'll remain in Russia, although her friend Sofia Cohen, 16, who lived in Holon for eight years, insists she'll go back to Israel after high school.
The pattern repeats in every classroom. Asked to stand up in front of their classmates, the children who have returned from Israel are neither reluctant nor proud to be so identified. It's simply one more piece of their very complicated biographies. Some of them say their parents "were tired of the violence in Israel," according to one child -- an ironic explanation, given the constant terrorist threat in Pyatigorsk.
All these children are equally at home in Hebrew and Russian. Principal Ruth Shalumova says they inspire the others to learn Hebrew, too.
A far cry from these former refugees is Vyacheslav Dadashev, 47, one of the wealthiest men in Pyatigorsk. A major partner with his brother Oleg, 43, in the Slavyanovskaya Mineral Waters bottling company, he also owns a nearby spa resort and the Dadashev art gallery, which is named in all the guidebooks.
Vyacheslav spent three years in Israel, and holds dual citizenship. His former wife and son live in Haifa, in a house he bought for them. But his other children live in Russia, and Oleg's son is in university in Germany. It's the new Russian Jewish reality, says the elder Dadashev.
"We Russian Jews look at Israel the same way as American Jews," he says. "It's where our heart is, and we will always support her, but we don't feel we have to live there."
This article is part of a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
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In former Soviet Union, Jews ask: Should I stay or should I go?
By Sue Fishkoff
PYATIGORSK, Russia (JTA) -- Reuven Margulis is not only head of the Jewish Agency for Israel in Pyatigorsk, he's the only Jewish Agency official in town.
Just 320 Jews made aliyah last year from the entire North Caucasus region, including Dagestan. And despite growing terrorist threats, increased crime and a miserable economy, he expects this year's numbers to be the same. How many immigrated to Israel last year from the rest of southern Russia, an area with 66,000 Jews?
"I prefer not to know," Margulis admits. "But each year it falls by 40 percent."
The reasons are simple, he explains. First, there are fewer Jews in the region today; about half the Jewish population has already emigrated. Second, those left behind have heard stories of financial hardship and fruitless job searches from earlier immigrants. Finally, life in the larger cities in Russia is steadily improving.
"There's almost no aliyah at all from Pyatigorsk," he remarks.
Indeed, Jewish Agency figures show that just 2,703 Jews made aliyah from the entire former Soviet Union in the first four months of 2004.
Head east 45 minutes from Pyatigorsk, and you'll hit Kislovodsk, another 19th-century spa town that has fallen on hard times since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Viktoria Lanovaya, president of the Kislovodsk Jewish community and Jewish Agency coordinator for the town, says there are just 200 Jews in her town.
Those few local Jews who are considering moving to Israel can be found every Wednesday afternoon studying Hebrew in Kislovodsk's Jewish Agency-sponsored ulpan. One recent Wednesday, 15 students are in class, ranging in age from their early 20s to retirees. All say they "might" make aliyah, and are eager to glean useful information from a visitor who knows both Israel and the United States.
"What do you advise?" asks one woman, with a worried expression on her face. Another woman says her 33-year-old son lives in Tiberias. "He says it's terribly hot. Do you think I'll be able to stand it?"
"Which is better, Israel or America?" wonders an older man.
A 40-year-old woman who says she's a journalist follows the visitor out of the room and confronts her privately in the hallway. She wants to know which Israeli city she should go to: Will she be able to find work, will she be lonely, is she too old?
"I love Russia, but I have personal reasons for leaving," she confides darkly. She asks whether the U.S. government gives financial help to new immigrants, and is disappointed, but not surprised, to find out it doesn't. "So, Israel is the place I should go," she decides.
Reuven Margulis doesn't think Israel is the place for every Russian Jew.
"It depends," he muses. "As a Zionist, who believes Israel needs more Jews, I look at it through Israeli eyes. But the age that can help Israel is not old people who can only take from the system. There are those who send grandma off to Israel for a better pension, and they stay behind. This is what we are trying to avoid."
He feels strongly, however, that there is no Jewish future in Russia for young Jews.
"I say, go now, don't wait until you're 50. Don't think it will 'get better some day.' "
As the communication and transportation channels between Israel and the former Soviet Union have become more fluid, attitudes toward the Jewish homeland have become more casual, more familiar.
Jews of the former Soviet Union now feel comfortable joking about aliyah, without worrying, as many did 10 years ago, that they might come across as not sufficiently pro-Zionist.
One restaurant owner in Cherkassy, a gray Ukrainian industrial city two hours outside Kiev with about 300,000 residents and 4,000-5,000 Jews, says his parents live in Beersheba.
He visits them twice a year, but laughs at the suggestion that he might consider moving to Israel himself.
"I was just there for a month, and it was more than enough," he chuckles, waving his hand at the absurdity of the idea. "We have a saying: If you're a bricklayer, you'll do better in Israel. But if you want to build a business, you'd better stay here."
This article is part of a series of pieces on Jewish life in the former Soviet Union. This series was made possible, in part, by support from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, the Joseph and Harvey Meyerhoff Family Charitable Funds and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
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Moscow Times
A Wave of Jews Returning to Russia
By Anatoly Medetsky, Staff Writer
As the Iron Curtain began to fall, Igor Dzhadan left the Soviet Union with his family, bound for Israel and a longforbidden opportunity.
Dzhadan was luckier than most of the 11,000 Soviet doctors who rushed to Israel around the same time, 1990, under Israel's Law of Return. He was able to continue practice and research. Still, he returned to Russia in 2001 to become an editor at Moscow's Jewish News Agency.
"It was interesting for me to live in a Jewish state, but I feel more comfortable in Russia," Dzhadan said. "I knew from the experience of others that I could find work here and my life prospects wouldn't be worse than in Israel."
Dzhadan is part of a tide of emigrants who have returned to Russia from Israel over a litany of concerns: the second intifada, Israel's worsening economy, an inability to adapt to cultural and social realities. According to a study released this March, at least 50,000 emigrants returned from Israel from 2001 to 2003.
The exodus has stirred up a discussion in Israel, said Boruch Gorin, head of the public relations department at the Russian Federation of Jewish Communities, which commissioned the study. On the one hand, millions of Jews already live outside Israel. On the other hand, "living in Israel is an ideology, and tthat the people who sought a shelter in the country have been leaving is a blow to the ideology," he said.
Israel had two waves of Russian immigration that altogether boosted its population from 5 million to 6 million, according to Gorin. In the first wave, 200,000 Jews left the Soviet Union in the 1970s. The second wave, which coincided with perestroika in 1986, brought 800,000 more Soviet Jews.
Under the Law of Return, anyone having at least one Jewish grandparent may seek citizenship.
Recently, however, Israel has seen its population growth subside, with citizens leaving not only for Russia, but also Europe and the United States. Only 20,000 to 30,000 immigrants entered Israel from 2001 to 2003, which was for the first time less than the outflow, Gorin said, citing the study.
According to the Israeli Embassy in Moscow, up to 100,000 Jews left Russia annually in the 1990s; last year the number was down to 10,000.
At first, emigrants, mostly businessmen, began venturing back to Russia in 1995 in small numbers, Gorin said. Russia beckoned them then with greater economic potential and relative political and economic stability, Gorin said.
One such businessman was Anton Nossik, who came back in 1997 because, he said, his ambitions had outgrown the Israeli market. He left Russia in 1990 after graduating from college as a surgeon. He could not land a job in medicine and began working as a journalist.
His big success came in 1996, when he started a web design company and won orders to create web sites for the Museum and the Central Bank of Israel and the Eastern European department of the Foreign Ministry.
"In principle, everything was great and successful," Nossik said. "I won as many tenders as were available. But confining your business to a small and remote country is like hobbling a horse."
Nossik, 38, has created many high-profile Internet news sites in Russia, where, he said, the number of Internet users is 14.6 million, compared to just 2.2 million in Israel. His most successful news portals are Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru and Newsru.com.
The second tide of returns began in 2000, as the Russian economy developed sufficiently for returnees to find jobs with greater ease, sometimes within companies created by Jewish businessmen who returned in the late '90s.
At the same time, the start of the second intifada, in 2000, damaged security in Israel and, along with it, the investment and employment climate.
Although Dzhadan, 40, did not lose his job, he had to face military service. He was twice called to serve in heavy fighting areas, in Bethlehem and Hebron.
"I had to wait during operations to see whether there would be any wounded that I would have to treat," he said. "I saw dead bodies."
The 23-day conscriptions caused Dzhadan to lose his salary at work, and state compensation was hard to receive, he said, due to a tangled bureaucracy.
Another reason for returning was what Dzhadan called the "sectarian" structure of the society. In order to rent an apartment or find a job, a person has to operate through members of his party or immigrants from the same country or area.
"I didn't like it," he said. "I'm used to operating in an open society where people don't ask you to what community you belong."
Gorin named several other reasons that prompt Soviet and Russian Jews to come back. One of them is that most highly educated immigrants have to take blue-collar jobs in Israel. "Doctors, physicians and mathematicians were cleaning the streets," Gorin said.
Also, immigrants from Russia largely lacked a Jewish identity, while at the same time they longed for the Russian culture they left behind. They fled the Soviet Union because of its state policy of discrimination against Jews and felt they could then return once that policy had seen its end.
The Jews that have come back find many signs that they can feel more at home in Russia than before, one of them being the appointment of Mikhail Fradkov, whose father is Jewish, to the post of prime minister.
According to Gorin, the Jewish Community Center in Moscow, with a wide range of sports facilities, an Internet cafe and a library, is one of the best in Europe. Moscow is also home to four Jewish universities, 10 schools, three newspapers and one online news agency, Gorin said.
Anti-Semitism remains a problem, certainly, but it "isn't the main form of xenophobia in the country" and looks less frightening than elsewhere in Europe, according to a 2003 Moscow Human Rights Bureau report. "Russia has been spared the surge in anti-Semitism that has disturbed the whole Western world in the past three years," the report said.
Nossik said he feels fairly safe as a Jew, and is more scared by random street crime. He said he walks around in traditional Jewish headwear, a kippah, but the only time he was attacked in the street was when Russia lost to Japan during the 2002 soccer World Cup. He happened to be in the way of an infuriated drunken crowd of fans.
"I don't see anti-Semitism," he said. "I don't see a position that a Jew can't occupy, especially after Fradkov's latest appointment." Russia's capitalist economy "allows you to exist regardless of your religious beliefs."
Most Jews -- including Nossik and Dzhadan -- that come back to live and work in Russia retain Israeli citizenship and travel to Israel on a steady basis, Gorin said. Dzhadan said he plans to visit friends in Israel, but would never return there for good because he belongs to Russian "civilization."
Nossik did not rule out living in Israel in the future. "When I drop out of business for age or health reasons, I could go to Israel to enjoy the cuisine and the nature," Nossik said. "It's a very beautiful and pleasant country."
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Newsweek International - 08.09.2004
Newsweek International/David Johnson's List
Return of the Jews
For decades the story of Russia's Jews has been one of fear and flight to Israel. Now many are coming home.
By Frank Brown
It's not easy being Jewish in Russia, original home of the pogrom. But sometimes it's even harder to be Jewish in Israel. That's why an estimated 50,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past five years. They come mostly to booming Moscow – but also to godforsaken places like Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, a swampy Siberian area larger than Israel that is plagued by mosquitoes in summer and minus-35-degree temperatures in winter. Viktor Dubinin is among the 200 or so Israeli Jews who have returned to this region along the Chinese border in recent years. "No one likes Russians there," says Dubinin, who emigrated to Israel in 1999 and came back last year. Part of the reason, he says, is that under President Vladimir Putin, life for the Jews of Russia has changed. "It's a lot better," he says. "There's work. Russia is rising again."
The contrast is indeed stark, at least by some measures. In Russia oil prices are setting new highs. Economic growth is set to surpass 7 percent in 2004, as it has in most recent years. In Israel the economy is a mess. Unemployment tops 10 percent, and the intifada is in its fifth year. Even the Jewish Autonomous Region – created in the 1930s by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to lure Jews from western Russia to a new Siberian "homeland" – is enjoying a modest boom. As Dubinin puts it, "You can make a good living."
All this defies expectations. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Jews were free to leave, demographers predicted that the region would quickly lose its Jewish identity. Instead, a steady 5 percent of the population – about 8,500 people – remains Jewish. That's mainly because local officials are strongly supportive, funding the construction of a new synagogue, helping purchase land for a Jewish school, giving the rabbi a weekly radio show and publishing the regional newspaper partly in Yiddish. In Moscow, too, officials appreciate the returns as evidence of Russia's normalization. "Jews in Russia are as free as they are anywhere else in the world," declares Rabbi Berel Lazar, a top Jewish leader who has forged unusually good relations with the Kremlin – partly on the strength of the fact that Putin himself, Lazar says, happily shared an apartment with a Jewish family when growing up as a boy in St. Petersburg.
Such optimism sits uneasily with Western Jewish activists, who point to a growing skinhead movement and a steady string of anti-Semitic attacks, most recently a suspicious fire last week in an Irkutsk synagogue. The notion that Russia is a Jewish-friendly place also makes it more difficult to justify U.S. immigration law that still grants refugee status to Russian Jews (and certain other religious minorities) who can show they fear persecution. Russia "still does not have basic democratic protections for religious and ethnic minorities," says Leonard Glickman, head of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society in New York.
Still, the change in climate is undeniable. There was a moment – sometime in the mid-1990s, say Moscow Jews – when "people stopped being ashamed of being Jewish," notes Oleg Ananev, the manager of the new Chagal restaurant, one of three kosher eateries opening in Moscow this year to serve the city's half-million Jews. A group of non-Jewish businessmen last year launched another large Jewish restaurant, Tzimes, ornately decorated to resemble a tavern in a 19th-century Russian shtetl. Muscovites, Jewish or not, pack the place to eat gefilte fish served by waiters in yarmulkes and listen to klezmerized versions of Russian pop tunes.
Nor can the financial incentives be ignored. Moscow headhunters say young repatriates with Western M.B.A.s can command up to twice the salaries they'd get in the West or Israel to work in the far more dynamic Russian market. One of them, Anton Nosik, sold his founding stake in Jerusalem's Sharat Communications, an Internet design firm, to become an executive at Russia's Rambler portal. The decision was easy. The number of Russian Internet users is three times as large as Israel's entire population, says Nosik, who can't see returning to Israel "until retirement." Despite his once being beaten in central Moscow by skinheads, he says, "it is still safer on the street in Moscow than in Israel." Though hardly an unvarnished endorsement, that's good news indeed for Russia's Jewish community.
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