https://www.commonsense.news/p/a-new-iron-curtain-descends-on-russias?utm_source=email&triedSigningIn=true
Vladimir Putin was supposed to be The Good Tsar—the Russian president who, his KGB past notwithstanding, was a friend of the Jews. In Putin’s Russia, we could be billionaires and presidential advisers. We could go to shul. We could come and go as we pleased.
My in-laws, Chief Rabbi Pinchas and Rebbetzin Dara Goldschmidt, were evidence of that. From 1993 until this year, my father-in-law was the chief rabbi of Moscow; my mother-in-law founded a Jewish school there.
Since the Soviet collapse, in 1991, synagogues, schools, youth groups, and Jewish-owned businesses in Moscow had flourished. In 2007, Putin famously donated a month’s salary to the glitzy Moscow Museum of Tolerance, and the FSB (formerly the KGB) offered its support to the museum by providing documents from its archives. In recent years, a Jew wearing a yarmulke would have felt more comfortable walking in Moscow than in Paris.
Perhaps most importantly, young Jews had been able to do what Jews in pretty much every generation before would have found unimaginable: They could move to Israel.
The symbol of this freedom of movement was a pale, yellow building on a little street called Bolshoy Spasoglinishchevskiy Pereulok, just across the street from Moscow’s famous Choral Synagogue. Inside was the Jewish Agency for Israel.
The Soviets didn’t allow the Jewish Agency—which has outposts all over the world and is tasked with helping Jews immigrate to Israel—to open in Russia until 1989, just two years before the communist regime collapsed. Its opening in the very center of Moscow was a sign of a great and long awaited moment in Russian society.
The Jewish Agency quickly became something of a magnet for young Russian Jews who would come to learn Hebrew, attend cultural events, and interview for a variety of programs that enabled them to go to Israel for high school or college.