Rabbi Arthur Schneier, spiritual leader of Park East Synagogue and president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, warned here that any delay in naming a successor to the late Chief Rabbi Yehuda Leib Levin of Moscow could have “dire” consequences for Russian Jewry. Rabbi Schneier attended funeral services in Moscow on Nov. 21 for Rabbi Levin who died Nov. 17 at the age of 78.
At a press conference called by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation, Rabbi Schneier told reporters that Moscow’s Jewish community “cannot remain leaderless for long.” The death of Rabbi Levin, he said, meant the cessation of all religious functions requiring rabbinical guidance including marriage and divorce for the nearly half million Jews in the Soviet capital.
Rabbi Schneier said that candidates for the top post in Russian Jewry are “spectacularly” few. He said this was due to the dismantling of Jewish religious and cultural institutions including the closure of the Yeshiva rabbinic seminary in 1962. That, and the advance age of the few remaining rabbis contributes to the grave shortage of Jewish spiritual leaders in the USSR, he said.
LESS THAN 12 RABBIS IN USSR
Rabbi Schneier pointed out that there are less than a dozen rabbis in all of the Soviet Union, most of them aged. Three are Sephardic “chachamim” who speak Hebrew and Russian but not Yiddish, thus ruling them out, he said. Rabbi Lubanov of Leningrad, a renowned Talmudic scholar, is 91 and gravely ill, Kiev has been without a rabbi for at least four years and men such as Rabbi Schwarzblatt of Odessa and Rabbi Openstein, of Kubashov would leave their own communities leaderless if given the Moscow post, Rabbi Schneier observed.
He said the process of selecting a new chief rabbi was outlined to him in Moscow by Pyotr V. Makartsev, deputy chairman of the Council on Religious Affairs. “Since there is no central organization for Jews in the Soviet Union, the selection will be made by the 20 members of the governing council of Moscow Synagogue. The two smaller congregations in Moscow have no choice in the selection,” he said. Although known as Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Levin was only the rabbi of Moscow’s Choral Synagogue.
Rabbi Schneier said that in discussing the possibility of a successor from outside the Soviet Union, Makartsev told him that “the candidate would have to be a Soviet citizen.” An outsider or someone not in the Soviet orbit would have no chance, Rabbi Schneier said. He said the strongest possibility was the selection of a successor from among the four or five ordained rabbis in the Soviet Union who are not in the active rabbinate for one reason or another.
He said he had asked Makartsev to “make certain the new spiritual leader would be a man of stature and scholarship who could command the confidence of the Jewish community in Moscow and have the respect of Jews all over the world.” According to Rabbi Schneier, the Soviet official agreed that it was in the interests of all concerned to choose a person who would lend prestige to the office.
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