Meeting with Russian President Seen As Historic and Very Unusual

Rabbi Berel Lazar has met many times with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Until last week, however, all their meetings took place with others present and were linked to a particular event — such as last winter, when Lazar made the Kremlin kitchen kosher and then dined in a Kremlin palace with Putin, Israeli President Moshe Katsav and some other Jewish VIPs.

So the Feb. 7 meeting — during which a variety of issues, including the return of a synagogue building in the city of Kaluga and Russia’s possible graduation from long-standing U.S. trade restrictions linked to Jewish emigration — was unusual.

Some observers here are calling the one-on-one talks historic.

“It is the first time in the Russian history that the czar spent an hour with a rabbi tete-a-tete, just talking,” said Alexander Lokshin, a Moscow-based historian specializing in Russian Jewry.

When a group of rabbis elected Lazar as chief rabbi in the spring of 2000, he became the country’s second chief rabbi, sharing the title with Adolph Shayevich.

But the Putin meeting culminated a busy 18 months for Lazar, who has kept an active schedule, in contrast to Shayevich. In effect, Lazar has made himself the de facto chief rabbi for Russia’s 600,000 Jews.

These are just a few of Lazar’s actions:

He flew 10 time zones to the city of Khabarovsk in the Far East to open a Jewish community center and meet with the region’s governor;

He flew to the Volga city of Samara to hand over a new Torah scroll to the local community and meet with the regional governor to discuss ways to crack down on local anti-Semites.

After an August plane crash on the Black Sea killed 78 people, including 68 Jews, Lazar went to the region to work with relatives of the deceased.

Some still worry about Lazar’s ties to the Kremlin. Specifically, they worry that if Lazar’s patron — diamond tycoon Lev Levayev — loses influence with the Kremlin, it could spell trouble for the Jews.

Representatives of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Former Soviet Union downplay that idea.

“Some people think it is because of Levayev’s money and his connections in the Kremlin that the administration has chosen Rabbi Lazar as the representative of the Jews,” said Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, executive director of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the Former Soviet Union. “But the true reason is that the Kremlin people see that Lazar is a real leader who is running a vast working network.”

In fact, some observers see the meeting as a snub to Levayev, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come.

Levayev reportedly has close ties with Alexander Voloshin, the head of the Kremlin administration. Voloshin is a former business partner of Boris Berezovsky, a self-exiled Jewish media tycoon and one-time influential Kremlin insider.

All three members of this influential triangle reportedly are losing influence. The television channel owned by Berezovsky was recently shut down; there are persistent rumors of the imminent sacking of Voloshin; and some see signs that Levayev may be losing influence in the Kremlin.

According to a source in the Kremlin administration, Levayev wanted to take part in the Putin/Lazar meeting, but was not invited.

Efforts to reach Levayev were unsuccessful.