Jewish life in Russia is not as easy to judge up close as it is from far away.
That’s one of the lessons that a delegation of 43 Jewish federation officials from North America learned during a trip here this week.
One member of the delegation said the word he heard most from his Jewish colleagues during the trip was “paradox.”
“People leave on aliyah and yet the [Jewish] population seems to rise,” said Bruce Yudewitz, director of planning and budget with the Greater Miami Jewish Federation.
The goal of the three-day mission, the first major North American Jewish trip to Russia since the country’s economic crisis began in August 1998, was to develop professional ties with Russian Jewish organizations.
They met with organizations that provide social services, including welfare programs, school and youth activities, and emigration services.
They also discussed the recent surge in anti-Semitism with members of the Russian Parliament.
This was the first visit to the former Soviet Union for most members of the delegation, and many said they felt personally involved in the activities they saw in Moscow.
“There is a very clear connection,” said Carol Koransky, director of planning and allocations department for the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. “Ninety-five percent of the funds to provide the services that we were seeing come from the money that we direct.”
A percentage of money that local federations raise in concert with the United Jewish Appeal goes to overseas needs, including those in the former Soviet Union.
Members of the delegation said they were amazed to see the complexity of life and Jewish activities in Moscow after hearing so many alarming news reports from Russia about the country’s economic crisis during the past six months.
Indeed, one member of the delegation said she were surprised to see so many people shopping in the city’s stores.
Although the trip was too short to yield any concrete outcomes, the delegation said the contacts they have established with Russian colleagues may lead to an increased number of Russian-North American partnerships in the future.
One of them, according to Koransky, is the possibility of working together to build community projects. For example, the North American professionals could help their Russian colleagues identify the services needed by their community.
“Many of us are involved with projects in Israel in communities where there are large numbers of Russian olim,” said Yudewitz, using the Hebrew term for immigrants. “Now we’re figuring out ways that we can have triangular relationships between our communities, the Partnership 2000 communities [in Israel] and the Russian communities.”
During the visit, the group of planners met with representatives of the Russian Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Moscow Hillel group and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
The delegation’s agenda also included visits to Moscow synagogues, a Jewish day school and the new Memorial Synagogue and Holocaust Museum inside the city’s World War II Memorial Park.
Though most of the services the group saw are supported by funds from North American federations, professionals spoke favorably of the potential for the Russian community to develop local funding.
The Russian Jewish Congress, created in 1996 by a group of wealthy Russian Jews, is now raising several million dollars a year to support communal projects
“It’s very impressive what this community has been able to do in a relatively short period of time,” Yudewitz said.
The fund-raising campaign in Moscow is comparable to the campaigns in a number of U.S. communities, he added. “And it comes in a society that is just getting used to the idea that it is publicly OK to affiliate oneself with the community.”
The Russian Jewish community is “creating the very kinds of structures that we have that support the work that they are doing,” Koransky says. “The creation of the Russian Jewish Congress is so typical of our federations in the U.S.”
With their visit to the Parliament, the delegation has already helped their Jewish counterparts, said Yudewitz.
At the meeting, a prominent Russian lawmaker told the delegation that the recent anti-Semitic statements by some politicians were the “costs of the process of democratization” of Russia.
“But those statements by no means reflect the policy of the state or its weakness to fight prejudices and hatred,” said Vladimir Platonov, the first deputy speaker of the Russian Parliament’s upper house and the chairman of the city of Moscow’s legislative assembly.
Viktor Sheinis, a Jewish member of the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian Parliament, told the delegation: “The problem of Jews in Russia is part of the problem of Russia’s transition from totalitarianism to democracy.”
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