Editorials

Editorials and Letters to the Editor are posted and archived on JN Online:

WWW. detroitjewishnews.com

Why We Should Worry

he jailing of Russian billion-
aire Vladimir Goussinsky last
month may have been the act
of an honest prosecutor who
believed the media magnate had violat-
ed criminal laws in his business deal-
ings. But it seems far more likely that
the prosecution was sending a message
about the limits of political dissent in
President Vladimir Putin's Russia and
that the target for that message hap-
pened to be Jewish didn't hurt one little
bit.
We don't mean to be alarmist, to -see
antisemitism where it doesn't exist. But
given Russia's history of making Jews
the scapegoats for every economic fail-
ure, we think the concern is not mis-
placed. And we believe that while the
United States — including the White
House and the Congress — is preoccu-
pied with the Mideast peace process, the
lack of attention to rising Russian hos-
tility toward Jews is dangerously inex-
cusable.
When Communism toppled a decade
ago, Jews in Russia and in much of the
rest of the former Soviet Union
breathed an enormous sigh of relief.
They quickly went about creating new
lives for themselves. The efforts of West-
ern groups in the '70s and '80s to call
attention to the plight of Soviet Jewry
seemed to have borne fruit. While more
than a million Jews seized the opportu-
nity to emigrate, mostly to Israel but
also the United States, an estimated
600,000 remained in Russia. Those that
stayed have been emboldened to revive
their synagogues and social activities as
the nation seemed to be too busy
rebuilding itself to take time to engage
in antisemitism. These Jews are the peo-
ple now suddenly at risk.
As Russian President Boris Yeltsin's
leadership began to collapse, in the face of
rampant inflation and -the disastrous war
with the breakaway province of Chech-
nya, acts of both physical and verbal abuse
of Jews started sprouting up. One nation-
alist party staged an openly antisemitic
demonstration in Moscow, fueled by the
rhetoric of a virulent Jew-baiter in the
Russian parliament. As usual, "foreign
influences" — the Russian code words for
Jews — were blamed for the economic
collapse. A synagogue was firebombed and
a Jewish leader stabbed — all without an
official word of condemnation from the
Yeltsin government.

Related story: page 6

American Jewish leaders who met
with Putin last year, before he became
president, said they believed that he was
strongly opposed to the violence against
Jews. But, like Yeltsin, he is now
remaining silent. When Goussinsky was
arrested, Putin claimed that he hadn't
known the prosecutor's plans in advance.
No one believed that position, given that
Goussinsky's independent broadcasting
enterprise had been a vigorously outspo-
ken foe of Yeltsin and his hand-picked
successor, Putin. News accounts on the
state-controlled broadcast media repeated-
ly stress Goussinsky's dual Russian and
Israeli citizenship,
The official message these days seems
to be that Jews are by nature both
greedy and disloyal and that they should
hunker down or leave.
Sadly, the problem has been exacer-
bated in recent weeks by an internal
dispute that became a public dispute
when Chabad announced that it had
decided its top rabbi, Berel Lazar,
should be recognized as the chief
Russian rabbi — the title held for the
last five years by Adolph Shayevich.
Chabad, part of the Orthodox Cha-
sidic movement, has done much to
revive Judaism in the country. Its pro-
grams of education for the young and
of social services for the elderly are
models for all of eastern Europe, and
no one can doubt Chabad's passion
for making Torah a vibrant reality.
But in mounting a challenge to
Shayevich on the same day that
Goussinsky was seized, Chabad leaders
seemed to be trying -to cut a deal with
the Putin regime that could lead to the
sect gaining power at the expense of the
Russian Jewish Congress, a multi-
streamed umbrella organization that
Goussinsky founded and that has been
recognized as the effective voice of Sovi-
et Jewry.
We hope that the internal fight will
be quickly resolved. We are much less
sanguine about the broader issue of
whether antisemitism will grow again
under a Putin government that seems
unable to speak out about what it
should find intolerable.
We hope that American Jewry will
recognize the dangers and resume its
vigorous defense of its Russian cousins.
If we don't speak out, then what should
be only a rocky patch on the road of
Russian Jewish life could all too easily
become a return to a sad and bitter his-
tory. CI

IN FOCUS

'•:"r' z' • • "

•

'

Happy Birthday, Max

At the Max M. Fisher National Republican Leadership Award Dinner, held
July 11 in Detroit, Franklin's Max Fisher presented awards to Robert Mos-
bacher and Jay Van Andel. Texas Governor George W Bush attended to
help mark Fisher's 92nd birthday (fill coverage next week).

A Perversion

I

f a U.S. synagogue is attacked
by arsonists, Jews and non-Jews
alike respond with massive sup-
port. In Israel, where Jews
themselves are often suspected of such -
crimes, fingers are pointed and the
tragedy seems to become more of a -
political act than what it really is — a
perversion that stains the entire Jewish
people. Even worse is the utter inabili-
ty of all Jewish religious leaders to
forcefully, without equivocation or
nuance, stand together to condemn
these acts of hate.
Such was the case once again, on
July 1. Hours after the end of Shabbat
— the universal Jewish symbol of
peace — a low breed of humanity
torched Kehilat Ya'ar Ramot, a Con-
servative synagogue in Jerusalem. The
fire came within a few yards of the
Torah ark.
Of course, this is not the first
time that such violence has wracked
the Promised Land. The list of
Reform, Conservative and yes, hare-
di (fervently Orthodox) synagogues
that have been burned and vandal-
ized is not a short one.
The most recent was last week's
"night of broken glass" at the Reform
movement's Hebrew Union College in
Jerusalem, where door glass and win-
dowpanes were smashed. In this fifth
recent attack on a non-Orthodox

house of learning or prayer, the van-
dals hid behind the cloak of Satan,
whose name was spray-painted on the
ground in black letters.
Such acts are a gross corruption of
the spirit of Judaism. All people
involved — and all those who know
about it or remotely condone it —
pervert the Jewish way.
For now, we're as concerned about
what the reaction to all this says about
Jews as individuals and a community
as we are about the identity of the as-
yet-unknown perpetrators.
It is too easy to quickly say that
haredi young men were responsible for
the Kehilat Ya'ar Ramot torching or
the HUC damage. Better to let — to
insist — that the police bring the per-
petrators to justice.
We offer semi-applause to Israel's
Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir
Lau. He — who in the past has
remained primarily silent — con-
demned the arson. Still, he pathetically
couldn't call the building a "syna-
gogue," but referred to it as a "build-
ing specified for prayer by a stream."
The Talmud asks, "Who is wise?
The one who learns from every per-
son." Perhaps we should add this
modern parallel: "Who is a failure?
The one who cannot learn from and
protect those who sincerely seek
God's presence in different ways."

❑

I

7/14
2000

37