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Pinchas Goldschmidt (in May 2022)
Photo: Matthias Schrader/AP
For more than ten months, Russia has been at war in neighboring Ukraine.
First of all, Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin stated that he had to take action against the alleged fascist government in Kyiv.
Little is heard of the alibi reasons, the invasion is halting.
Now the former chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt, has called on the Jews in Russia to flee.
"We see growing anti-Semitism as Russia returns to a new kind of Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain gradually falls," Goldschmidt told Britain's Guardian.
"So I believe the best option for Russian Jews is to leave."
"The government tried to divert the anger and discontent of the masses to the Jewish community"
"If we look back at Russian history, whenever the political system was in danger, the government tried to channel the anger and discontent of the masses onto the Jewish community," Goldschmidt said.
"We saw that in tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist regime."
Goldschmidt is chairman of the European Rabbinical Conference and was chief rabbi in Moscow until the summer.
He left office in July and left Russia after refusing to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
"Pressure was put on community leaders to support the war, and I refused to do so," he says today.
"I resigned because it would be a problem for the community to continue as chief rabbi of Moscow because of the repressive measures against dissidents."
Goldschmidt is not the only one who fled.
Many Russian Jews emigrated to Israel as a result of the Ukraine war.
Then, in July, the Russian government shut down the Russian branch of the Jewish Agency, a non-profit organization that encourages immigration to Israel.
Goldschmidt estimates that since the war began, between a quarter and a third of Russian Jews have left or are planning to leave, even though flights from Moscow are few and the price of a flight to Tel Aviv has roughly quadrupled.
Russia's Jews have emigrated in the tens of thousands over the past 100 years, first to Europe and America and more recently to Israel.
According to the 1926 census, 2,672,000 Jews lived in the then Soviet Union, 59 percent of them in Ukraine.
Today, about 165,000 Jews live in the Russian Federation out of a total population of 145 million.
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