MOSCOW, Dec. 15 (JTA) The Russian government has returned to Jewish hands 10 Torah scrolls looted by the Nazis or confiscated by the state during the Soviet era, when thousands of Jewish congregations ceased to exist.
Tuesday’s transfer of the scrolls from the Russian State Archive far fewer than had been expected came in the wake of an acrimonious exchange between Jewish organizations in Russia relating to the Torah transfers
The ceremony transferring the Torahs was the highlight of the conference of the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations of Russia, an umbrella group of some 95 Orthodox and Reform congregations.
The group, known as KEROOR, had apparently reached an earlier agreement with the Russian government to receive 61 Torahs. About 200 Torahs are at the archive, though most are badly damaged, and many more exist “elsewhere,” according to a state archivist who asked not to be identified.
But last week, the archive said it would not deliver the Torahs to the group. The development came after the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, an umbrella group of some 80 communities across Russia, met here in late November to reconstitute itself as a legal entity.
That conference was attended by high-level government officials and a few days later, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin made an unprecedented show of support for the group when he met its leaders and promised full help and support in all of its activities, including the restitution of Jewish communal property.
The group itself and the government attention paid to it set off a feud with other Jewish organizations, escalating the turf battles in what is already a fractious community.
Leaders of the Federation sent a letter to Russia’s first deputy prime minister, asking that the Torahs be transferred to the Federation, which they said represented “the interests of the Jewish Diaspora in Russia.” The letter didn’t mention KEROOR at all.
The letter, coupled with the news that the Torah transfers were being suspended, hit leaders of KEROOR like a bombshell.
Within two days, Russia’s chief rabbi, Adolph Shayevich, who heads KEROOR, wrote a letter to Putin, accusing Lubavitch activists involved in the Federation of “being ideologically unable to participate in a dialogue, leading to peace and consent in Russia” and of working “to remove religious literature from Russian archives with an aim of transferring it to the USA.”
Shayevitch called this attempt “a provocation.”
Rabbi Berel Lazar, the Lubavitch movement’s chief emissary in Russia and the chief rabbi of the Federation of Jewish Communities, called the letter “a Soviet-style denunciation” and said he was deeply shocked by it.
Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the chief rabbi of Moscow and one of KEROOR’s leaders, said the conflict was part of a government effort to split the Jewish community on the eve of the parliamentary elections, which are slated for Sunday.
In the end, only 10 Torahs were transferred Tuesday and were sent to Jewish congregations around the country, including one to the city of Murmansk, which will apparently make it the Torah closest to the North Pole.
The fate of the rest of the Torahs is unclear. KEROOR officials said the delivery of the others was delayed due to “technical reasons.”
For his part, Lazar said he was glad some Torahs have been delivered.
“We never wanted to get their part of the scrolls,” he said. “We only wanted to get our part of the great number of these scrolls.”
Meanwhile, another highlight of the KEROOR conference was the dedication of the first Sephardi synagogue in Moscow. Israel’s chief Sephardi rabbi, Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, participated in Monday’s ceremony, which signified the growing size and influence of Jews from the Caucasus in Moscow.
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