JTA:
MOSCOW (JTA) -- This spring, Howard Flower and his assistants plan to go to Russia’s westernmost region, Kaliningrad, on a fishing expedition: They’re fishing for Jews.
Flower, the aliyah director of the Russian office of the International Christian Embassy, a pro-Israel evangelical group, plans to look through telephone directories for Jewish-sounding names and meet with local leaders in an attempt to find far-flung Jews -- some of whom might not even realize they’re Jewish -- and talk to them about moving to Israel.
As elsewhere in the world, determining who is Jewish in Russia is more an art than a science.
In the 2002 Russian census, the country’s most recent, 233,000 Russians self-identified as Jews. Jewish leaders here and abroad consider the figure an underestimate, but they can’t agree on the actual figure or how to determine it.
“Anyone who works in Jewish organizations knows that the real number of Jews is higher than records show because many people do not receive any services and thus are not registered anywhere,” said Rabbi Yosef Hersonski, head of the Khamovniki community in Moscow. “Probably they are not interested. But if their mother was Jewish, we consider them Jews.”
One of Russia’s chief rabbis, Berel Lazar, estimates the number of Jews in Russia at 1 million to 2 million; he considers as Jews all those with a Jewish mother. NCSJ, a U.S.-based advocacy group for Russian-speaking Jews, estimates that Russia has 400,000 to 700,000 Jews, and 1 million to 1.5 million in the former Soviet Union as a whole.
A representative for the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the largest Jewish aid group active in Russia, declined to speculate on a figure.
“We have not yet found reliable data based on sound methodology about the number of Jews in Russia,” JDC representative Rina Edelshtein said. [Read more]
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