Jews Find New Life in Russia

[bemildred]

Today, in the rapidly gentrifying Jewish neighborhood around her shop, many of Chudnovskaya's customers are Israeli businessmen or people of various nationalities who teach at the nearby Jewish community center, or, like Chudnovskaya herself, Russians who lived for several years in Israel, came back and want to keep up their Hebrew.

The seven-story, $20-million Moscow Jewish Community Center complex behind her shop stretches across two city blocks, offering a kosher restaurant, fitness club, Jewish literature library, computer center and theater for Moscow's Jews — increasingly numerous and increasingly out.

Chudnovskaya, 38, was one of the estimated 1 million Jews who emigrated to Israel in the face of repression and discrimination in the Soviet Union during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.

Now she is among as many as 57,000 who have come back to Moscow. Their return is the most visible hallmark of a renaissance of Jewish life in a land that historically was among the most antagonistic in the world to Jewish religion and culture. Since 2000 alone, the number of distinct Jewish communities in Russia has swelled from 87 to more than 200.

LA Times

[Cocoa]

1. I see these weird infomercials about rescuing Jews from Russia

some Christian outfit that paints a really scary picture about conditions for Jews there, solicits money from impoverished middle-americans to relocate the embattled Russian Jews to Israel.

[Alpharetta]

2. I give Bush all the credit for this

Hey, he's getting credit for Syria's pullout of Lebanon. Plus he gave Putin a stern talking to. This diplomacy is hard work. it's hard. but he's really making things better.