Billionaire oligarch Roman Abramovich visited Chabad’s new charity center in Moscow.
It has been known for some time that the notoriously media-shy Abramovich was a major donor to the Chabad-controlled Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, but generally he has avoided such public displays of his stewardship.
Abramovich, described on an FJC Web site as a “key patron of this center,†toured the newly opened Shaarei Tsedek charity facility Tuesday alongside a chief rabbi of Russia, Berel Lazar, and FJC board chairman Alexander Boroda.
The 41-year-old Jewish businessman and owner of Chelsea Football Club has a personal fortune estimated at approximately $20 billion, much of which he carved out of the rush to privatization in the early 1990s that left the vast majority of Soviet state holdings in the hands of Kremlin-linked businessmen.
Abramovich reportedly met with recipients of the center’s charitable facilities. No independent media were invited to the event.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
