Published: 12 July 2018
Last updated: 4 March 2024
The Chabad websites and cultural centres write glowingly of Jewish newspapers and radio stations, Jewish studies courses and thriving organisations. On the back of its efforts, some large cities have even hosted a Limmud event and Jewish music festival. As for the Cup itself, Chabad ramped up its efforts to fever pitch, setting up two halls in Moscow to hold an expected 1,000 guests for each Shabbat meal.
But the old Soviet authoritarian streak dies hard, and my tour along Australia’s World Cup itinerary revealed a disturbing underbelly beneath the rejuvenations.
First, the good news. Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, where Australia played France, is a vibrant, handsome city of 1.3 million, about 800km east of Moscow. Kazan is a notable Chabad success story, especially since it is a Muslim majority city.
After half of its 8000 Jews left for Israel and the US following the advent of Gorbachev’s glasnost, “those who remained began to be more open about their Judaism,” wrote the Beit Hatfutzot website. “A youth choir was established, klezmer concerts began to attract crowds, and public Passover seders attracted hundreds of participants.”
In 1997, the city’s original synagogue - which had been closed since 1962 - was rededicated. By this stage Chabad had established an outreach presence in the city and by 2015, the community was in the tens of thousands, with a broad range of communal organisations, a Jewish newspaper and radio station, and a Centre for Jewish Studies at the university. In that year, the city even hosted a Limmud event.
Samara, some 350km south, where Australia played its second match against Denmark, also lost swathes of its 11,000 population to Israeli/US emigration after communism ended. Like Kazan, in the 1990s a Chabad centre helped rejuvenate the Samara community, and it now has a Jewish newspaper and Jewish National Centre of Samara catering to some 35,000 Jews living in greater Samara.
About 10,000 live in the city itself but during my visit, the most tangible sign of Jewish life was at the football stadium, when Israeli fans waving national flags turned up to watch Australia draw with Denmark.
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However, the dark side underneath this activity was revealed in Sochi, where Australia lost its final match against Peru, and perhaps the only Russian city outside Moscow and St Petersburg that needs no introduction. Although it hosted the Winter Olympics in 2014, Sochi rarely has any snow. All the events were held in mountains 30-40km away. In fact, Sochi is a Black Sea equivalent of the Riviera, a beach and boating mecca with all the glamour and crassness of Nice and Miami, only in Russian.
While old New York Jews have migrated to Miami to enjoy its warmth, Sochi has not exerted the same attraction over their Russian counterparts. The city has only 3,000 or so Jewish residents, according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA), but it does have an interesting story or two.
Sochi’s first resident Rabbi Ari Edelkopf, a Chabad emissary who arrived from Los Angeles about a decade ago, wrote on his website that historically, Sochi attracted Jews due to its multiculturalism. With its proximity to Georgia, the city was home to many ethnic Georgians, Armenians and people of other nationalities, and was a haven for Jewish men and women wishing to flee other areas of the Soviet Union where they were easily singled out as minority outsiders.
However, Edelkopf was noticeably silent on a more recent event: in February last year he and his family were ordered to leave Russia after authorities flagged him “as a threat to national security”, the JTA reported at the time.
“The de facto deportation order against the Edelkopfs (which included no explanation or concrete accusation) is to many Russian Jews a sign that despite the Kremlin’s generally favourable attitude to their community, they are not immune to the effects of living in an increasingly authoritarian state,” the JTA continued.
Edelkopf, who was well liked and respected, appealed the expulsion order, which remained a mystery. After his appeal was rejected, he looked for greener pastures to spread the Chabad spirit and by the end of the year had taken up a new post as rabbi of Podgorica in nearby Montenegro in the former Yugoslavia, which has just 400 Jews and at the time, no synagogue.
Which brings us to Ulyanvosk, half-way between Kazan and Samara, and birthplace of Russia’s most iconic figure, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution and architect of the Soviet Union.
Ulyanovsk is significant for several reasons. It is wall-to-wall Lenin, boasting a monumental museum of his political career, with a huge sculpture of him nearby, and two houses where he lived as a boy and then a student. From this cradle of his comfortable pre-revolution family life, Lenin “had always thought of Jews highly," according to a letter written by his sister and exhibited in Moscow in 2011.
Indeed, this letter by Lenin’s sister revealed, officially for the first time, that Lenin had Jewish heritage: their maternal grandfather was a Ukrainian Jew who converted to Christianity to gain access to higher education.
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In 1932 Lenin’s sister wrote a letter to Josef Stalin, who succeeded Lenin after his death in 1924, the Associated Press reported, asking him to make her brother’s Jewish heritage known to counter the rise of anti-Semitism. "I hear that in recent years anti-Semitism has been growing stronger again, even among Communists," she wrote. "It would be wrong to hide the fact from the masses.
Not for the first time in his brutal career, Stalin did the wrong thing, and ordered her to "keep absolute silence" about the letter.
This begs an obvious question for any Jewish visitor: with the fall of the Soviet Union and its history of anti-Semitism, would the new Russia allow this awkward fact about his life to be reflected in the Lenin museums and memorabilia that abound in the city?
Predictably there was no mention of Lenin’s Jewish background or views about Jews in any of the memorabilia dedicated to preserving his memory. But the bookend to this story is harder to fathom.
In February this year, Josef Marozof, a New York-born rabbi who began working 12 years ago for Chabad in Ulyanovsk, was expelled from Russia because the security service said he had been involved in unspecified “extremist behaviour,” the JTA reported.
That made it the eighth time this past decade that Russia had ordered a foreign Chabad rabbi to leave the country.
Like Edelkopf in Sochi, Marozof appealed the decision in a supreme court but his appeal was denied. He and his family left for the United States, leaving the Ulyanovsk Jewish community of 5000 without a rabbi.
Although Chabad of Russia enjoys friendly relations with President Vladimir Putin, according to the JTA story, it said a senior aide to Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar claimed the expulsions were an attempt by the government to limit the number of foreign clerics living in Russia – an effort that has led to expulsions not only of rabbis but also of imams and Protestant priests.
“It’s not targeting the Jews,” he said. Rather, Jews are “collateral damage” in this broader effort.
We’ve heard that one before.
Main image: Monument of Lenin in Lenin museum in Ulyanovsk (digital manipulation by Michael Visontay)
All photos: Michael Visontay
