Rabbi of Moscow Synagogue on Two-week Visit to the U.S.

For the first time in nearly a decade, the rabbi of Moscow’s main synagogue is coming to the United States. He is scheduled to arrive in New York on Thursday, it was announced by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation.

Rabbi Adolph Shayevich of the Chorale Synagogue in Moscow will spend two weeks in the United States as part of an ecumenical delegation of religious dignitaries from the Soviet Union. Their visit will be hosted by the National Council of Churches.

Shayevich will be the special guest in New York of Rabbi Arthur Schneier, senior rabbi of Park East Synagogue in Manhattan and president of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation. The Foundation is a coalition of Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and Greek Orthodox religious and business leaders that works on behalf of religious freedom for believers of all faiths around the world.

The Moscow rabbi will preach at Sabbath services in Park East Synagogue Saturday, May 5 at 10:30 a.m. He will speak in Hebrew, with consecutive translation into English.

Shayevich will also attend a luncheon honoring the ecumenical delegation given by the Appeal of Conscience Foundation at noon Monday, May 7 in New York. Metropolitan Juvenaly of the Russian Orthodox Church heads the Soviet delegation.

A native of Birobidzhan, Shayevich is 48 years old. He was trained at the rabbinical assembly in Budapest (there is no Jewish seminary in the USSR) and ordained in 1980 under a 1974 agreement reached by Schneier with Soviet government authorities to alleviate the shortage of rabb is serving the Jewish community. Last year he succeeded the late Rabbi Yakov Fishman as spiritual leader of the Chorale Synagogue on Moscow’s Arkhipova Street. This is the larger of two left in Moscow. It is the center of Jewish religious life in the Soviet capital.

The last Soviet Jewish religious figure to visit the United States was Fishman, who came to New York as a guest of the Appeal of Conscience Foundation in 1976.