The Jewish Week - 08.22.2003

 

 

 

 

The Jewish Week

EU Anti-Semitism Seen Threat To Russian Jews

Leader of Russian Jewish Congress urges government to spurn Europe

Walter Ruby - Special To The Jewish Week

In what Russia watchers are citing as a first, one of the leaders of Russian Jewry has launched a diatribe against the European Union, claiming it is now a prime source of anti-Semitism threatening Jews in Russia today. 

Yevgeny Satanovsky, president of the Russian Jewish Congress, told The Jewish Week in an interview last week that the best hope of Russian Jewry — and of Russia itself — is to spurn Europe and to strengthen ties with the United States and Israel. 

“We have a new phenomenon these days — anti-Semitism exported to Russia from Western Europe with the help of money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf,” Satanovsky said. “Anti-Semitism is practically the official practice of the European Parliament, and is manifested in an ongoing anti-Zionist campaign and a so-called pluralistic view of Palestinians and Israelis.” 

“The European Parliament blames Israel for everything, forgetting that the respective role of the Israeli government and Yasir Arafat are that of policeman and gangster,” Satanovsky continued. “Both have guns, but use them for different aims.” 

David Harris, executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee, who has been active in promoting leadership training for Russian Jewish activists in New York, said, “This is the first time I have heard a leader of the Russian Jewish community say that Europe’s diplomatic approach to Israel and anti-Semitism is impacting negatively on Jews in the former Soviet Union. It is a strong charge that needs to be investigated carefully, but Dr. Satanovsky is a serious person and should be listened to carefully when he speaks.” 

Asked to provide specific evidence of anti-Semitism by the European Union, Satanovsky said, “There is the freezing of relations with Israeli universities in countries like France, Belgium and Austria, whose national police forces played roles during World War II that was not better than the SS. Now that these countries no longer feel danger from the Soviet Union and now that the U.S. Army is beginning to leave Western Europe [for bases in former Soviet bloc countries], the Europeans are going back to the policy of open anti-Semitism of the pre-World War II period. 

“The anti-Israel arguments of the Europeans,” Satanovsky continued, “are often cited favorably inside Russia by Communists, pro-Islamists and the party of [the anti-Semitic demagogue Vladimir] Zhirinovsky. They claim that if the Europeans are saying these things, they must not be anti-Semitic.” 

Asked if it wasn’t simplistic to equate the EU’s criticism of Israeli policies with out-and-out anti-Semitism? Satanovsky replied, “Not from the perspective of Russian Jews. Don’t forget we lived in the Soviet Union where Arafat was extolled as a great hero and Israel was compared to Nazis. The Palestinians were once allied with the Soviet Communist Party and the KGB and are now allied with the Europeans.” 

Satanovsky’s comments represent a striking reversal of the position he took during the run-up to the Iraq War last spring, when he made remarks decrying what he characterized as overreaching by the U.S. in the Middle East. 

The apparent shift by the politically savvy Satanovsky appears reflective of a perceived pro-U.S. tilt in Russian policy. Last March, Russia allied itself with France and Germany in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but lately has become noticeably friendlier to both the U.S. and Israel. 

This movement appears reflective of a strong feeling among the Russian political elite that the three countries face a common enemy — violent Islamic extremism — which manifested itself this month on Russian soil in the guise of a Chechen suicide bomber who blew up a Russian military hospital in the town of Mozdok, killing more than 50. 

In a wide-ranging interview at UJA-Federation headquarters in Midtown, Satanovsky, who became president of the RJC two years ago, also spoke of the ongoing battle for supremacy in the Russian Jewish community. It pits his own organization, formerly headed by multi-millionaire and media tycoon Vladimir Gusinsky, against the Federation of Jewish Organizations of Russia, which is dominated by the leader of Chabad of Russia, Rabbi Berel Lazar. 

The RJC dominated the Russian Jewish community during Gusinky’s heyday, but nearly fell apart three years ago after the oligarch was accused of massive corruption and driven out of the country by President Vladimir Putin. In an obvious slap at the RJC for its ties to Gusinsky, the Kremlin subsequently accorded official recognition to Lazar as chief rabbi of Russia, in place of the RJC-linked Rabbi Adolf Shayevich, spiritual leader of the Moscow Chorale Synagogue. 

In the three years since those events, Shayevich has insisted that he remains chief rabbi of Russia, while the RJC and FJOR have engaged in a struggle for supremacy of the overall Jewish community. FJOR, the Chabad-affiliated group, has considerably more funds at its disposal than does RJC and provides an extensive array of schools and social services. But the latter organization has improved its credibility by expanding a countrywide network of communal agencies and programs that reflect a sensibility that appears closer to that of mainly secular Russian Jews than does that of the Orthodox FJOR. 

Satanovsky praises the “unique historic role” of Gusinsky in building the Jewish community of Russia but stresses that the exiled oligarch has “no active role” in the RJC today. 

A portly 44-year-old with a full red beard, sharp wit and keen intellectual sensibility who is always ready with a “big picture” geopolitical analyses of Russia and the world, Satanovsky was an underground Jewish activist during the Soviet era who went on to start a successful business during the early 1990s, which helped to fund many activities of the Va’ad, the first nationwide Jewish umbrella body. 

The founder of the Institute for Israeli and Middle-Eastern Studies in Moscow, Satanovsky has entrée to top media, business and governmental circles in the Russian capital, as well as to policy makers in Washington and Jerusalem. Despite Putin’s continued recognition of Lazar as chief rabbi of Russia, the RJC president is outspokenly supportive of the Russian president, whom he credits for taking a much firmer stand against anti-Semitism in Russia than his predecessor as president, Boris Yeltsin. 

About perceived anti-Semitism in the EU, Satanovsky noted that Estonia, one of the former Soviet republics that will soon join the European Union, recently unveiled a memorial to anti-Soviet fighters during World War II, many of whom collaborated with the Nazis in atrocities against Jews. “The RJC jointly protested that memorial together with the Russian government,” Satanovsky said. “The Baltic countries appear to be fitting very nicely into Europe [in terms of their attitudes toward Jews]. They say openly what the western Euros say quietly.” 

Mark Levin, executive director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, who was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe Conference on Anti-Semitism in Vienna last June, observed, “The focus of the conference was the rise of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, and while European governments are more sensitive to the issue than they were a year ago, they still have some distance to go. 

“It seems to me that our Western European friends can learn much from the steps implemented in recent years by governments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to combat extremism, racism and anti-Semitism,” he added. 

Indeed, Satanovsky said that the level of anti-Semitism in Russia today is lower than ever before, but added, “The best way to prevent anti-Semitism from returning is to integrate Russia more fully into the western world economically and politically. 

“The stronger will be Russia’s association of Russia with Israel and America,” he said, “the farther we will be from anti-Semitic times.”