Russian president Vladimir Putin, left, with Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar (Photo by premier.gov.ru via Wikipedia)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Lazar\u2019s language was milder than Gorin\u2019s, and certainly than the language used by some Jewish leaders abroad \u2014 such as the rabbis from the Union for Reform Judaism who in a statement condemned what they termed \u201cPutin\u2019s seemingly insatiable desire to fulfill his vision of a new Russian empire.\u201d But it nonetheless set Lazar apart from other clergy in Russia, who are cheering on the Russian invasion and justifying it.<\/p>\n
The views expressed \u2014 and not expressed \u2014 by Chabad\u2019s leadership in Russia have drawn the attention of \u201cother faith representatives\u201d to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, Boroda said. He declined to specify who those representatives were.<\/p>\n
Multiple sources told Haaretz this week that the Kremlin is pressuring Jewish groups in Russia to support the war, including by threatening to shut down Jewish institutions if they do not. But Boroda said his group had not been pressured by the government to support the war, which in Russia is referred to as a \u201cspecial military operation\u201d by Putin\u2019s fiat.<\/p>\n
Still, he said, Chabad nonetheless had faced questions about its stance. \u201cThere are representatives from other faiths who want to come out with something general to support the military operation,\u201d Boroda said. \u201cWe declined and there was more or less understanding to our position. We weren\u2019t pressured and told we have no choice and had to pick sides here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Boroda drew criticism from abroad, including from a leading Chabad rabbi in Ukraine, after he spoke with the Interfax Russian news agency about the war in early March and the Jerusalem Post reported the contents of the interview.<\/p>\n
In the interview, Boroda was asked about the Ukrainian state\u2019s track record of celebrating the legacies of Nazi collaborators. Boroda condemned these activities, reiterating the position of his own group and many others, including the State of Israel and the World Jewish Congress. He also invoked the Holocaust while decrying vandalism of a Russian store in Germany, noting that Kristallnacht, the pogrom that is considered to be the beginning of the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, featured vandalism of stores.<\/p>\n
The Jerusalem Post interpreted Boroda\u2019s answers as support for the \u201cdenazification\u201d pretext offered by Putin himself for the invasion.
Boroda said his group is involved in sending humanitarian aid to Jewish communities in Ukraine, where Chabad is also the driving force of Jewish communal life. That aid is flowing through the world Chabad network, which transfers donations and supplies from Jewish communities in multiple countries, including Russia, and distributes those resources to Jewish communities in Ukraine, Boroda said.<\/p>\n
Even within Russia, some would like to see Chabad in Russia take a firmer position against the war.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey made a bunch of vague statements for peace, [but] they haven\u2019t really said what Russian Jews really think about this terrible war and the dictatorship responsible for it,\u201d said one Jewish person in Russia who for years has followed Chabad and Jewish community politics. The source, who said they were already taking a risk just speaking a Western journalist over the phone, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of being imprisoned under new laws proscribing criticism of the war.<\/p>\n
Putin has made clear his intolerance for criticism over the war beyond enacting laws punishing those who criticize it. In a speech on March 17, he said: \u201cThe Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and will simply spit them out like an insect in their mouth onto the pavement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not long after that, a pig\u2019s head with a blond wig was placed outside the home of a Russian-Jewish journalist deemed critical of the war. The perpetrators posted a piece of paper on the door of the apartment of the journalist, Alexey Venediktov, which featured a Ukrainian national symbol and the word \u201cJudensau,\u201d the German-language term for an antisemitic icon from the Middle Ages.<\/p>\n
Statements like Gorin\u2019s and Chabad\u2019s humanitarian efforts in Ukraine have not gone unnoticed in ultranationalist circles.
The criticism comes amid increasing pressure on Chabad\u2019s finances in Russia. Ever since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Chabad of Russia has relied on a mix of donations from Russian philanthropists, including the billionaires known as oligarchs whose wealth accumulated through relationships with the state, plus government assistance and gifts from Western donors.<\/p>\n
With those sources of funding, Chabad of Russia has built an array of buildings and institutions, including dozens of schools and ostentatious synagogues like the one headed by Boroda in Zhukovka, a wealthy suburb of Moscow. Chabad is opening synagogues and centers far beyond the capital, including in Arkhangelsk, home to the world\u2019s northernmost Jewish community center, and in Tomsk, where Siberia\u2019s largest Jewish community center recently opened.<\/p>\n
The group was also instrumental in the development and construction of the $50 million Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, which opened in Moscow in 2012 and was built with the support of the Russian government.<\/p>\n
But now, many of the Russian-Jewish oligarchs who used to fund Chabad activities in Russia are under crippling sanctions that have tied up their funds in the West. That could make support from outside Russia more essential, according to Roman Bronfman, an Israeli former lawmaker who was born in Ukraine and is the author of a book on Russian-speaking Jewry.<\/p>\n
\u201cChabad in Russia is between a rock and a hard place,\u201d Bronfman said. \u201cEspecially now they need to work on their ties to the west, which are substantial anyway. They need to take public opinion in the west into account.\u201d<\/p>\n
Russian Jews, including the ones belonging to Chabad, \u201calmost all have their origins in Ukraine, Moldova or Belarus,\u201d Bronfman noted. This is because those countries were part of the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were allowed to live during Czarist times.
To Bronfman, what is happening in Russia right now represents \u201cthe collapse of the model on which Chabad has operated so far in Russia, in which they stay out of politics in exchange for government support.\u201d This model, he said, restricts criticism by Chabad of the government but \u201cis preconditioned on the freedom not to openly support the government and cheer it on, either. The war has drastically reduced this freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reform Rabbi Misha Kapustin. (Facebook screenshot)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
dMisha Kapustin, a Reform rabbi who fled Crimea to Slovakia in 2014 after the Russian army annexed that part of Ukraine, also believes that Chabad of Russia has not spoken out against the war in any significant way.<\/p>\n
Moral fortitude requires clergy to speak out against the war in Ukraine, he said. But he said he understands why Russian Chabad rabbis have not done this with more force.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s easy for us to criticize but Russia is a dictatorship,\u201d said Kapustin, who has previously criticized Chabad of Russia for being too close to the government. \u201cSo what should they do? Walk away from the communities they build? Abandon Jews there?\u201d<\/p>\n
Russia\u2019s Chabad rabbis, Kapustin said, are \u201cfacing a very difficult choice.\u201d It\u2019s one that he doesn\u2019t need to imagine making, because he made it already.<\/p>\n
\u201cI left Crimea precisely because I didn\u2019t want to put myself in that position,\u201d Kapustin said.<\/p>\n
Chabad\u2019s rabbis in Russia may not have that flexibility. Emissaries in the movement are expected to remain in their communities through thick and thin; many who left Ukraine in the war\u2019s early days to usher their families and communities to safety have returned already.<\/p>\n
And whatever happens with the war and with Putin\u2019s leadership, there are potentially hundreds of thousands of Jews in Russia. While thousands of Russian Jews have departed for Israel and beyond since the war broke out, many of them fearing a return of the Iron Curtain, most have stayed.<\/p>\n
Many of those who left \u201cdid so out of an initial reaction of panic,\u201d Boroda said. He added, \u201cThey will return. It will not affect the revival of Jewish life in Russia, which we will continue to bring to new heights regardless of international politics.\u201d<\/p>\n
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