8 | AUGUST 4 • 2022 

PURELY COMMENTARY

opinion

Is Russian Threat to the 
Jewish Agency a Return 
to Soviet Oppression?
I

f you’re old enough to 
remember the darkest 
days of the movement to 
free Soviet Jewry, the news 
a few weeks ago that the 
Russian Justice Ministry has 
asked a court 
to close down 
the operations 
of the Jewish 
Agency in Israel 
in that country 
seems ominously 
familiar. In the 
Soviet era, the 
Communist regime wasn’t just 
preventing Jews from leaving. 
It was, as had been the case 
since the Bolshevik coup in 
1917, openly antisemitic. 
Indeed, the Communists were 
even more oppressive than 
their czarist predecessors in 
terms of suppressing Jewish life 
and the practice of Judaism.
The Russian move against 
the Jewish Agency would 
make it much harder for 
those Jews who want to leave 
a country that has become 
an international pariah due 
to its invasion of Ukraine. It 
also could be a harbinger of a 
return to the Jew-hatred that 
was so much a feature of life in 
the Eastern European monolith 
prior to the breakup of the 
Soviet Union.
The reason for this seems 
to be an effort to get Israel to 
return to a stance of neutrality 
in the war Russia launched 
on Ukraine in late February. 
That’s a position the Jewish 
state changed after pressure 

from Ukrainian President 
Volodymyr Zelensky, the West 
and many Israeli citizens, who 
all thought that Israel needed 
to side with the victims.
These worries about Russia 
and antisemitism were 
supposed to be buried in the 
past.
After the collapse of the 
Soviet Union, those Jews who 
remained were in a country 
that embraced an authoritarian 
government led by Vladimir 
Putin, an ex-KGB agent. Putin 
was a thug determined to crush 
anyone who opposed him and 
his corrupt regime. He was also 
obsessed with reversing the 
verdict of history — whereby 
Russia had been demoted 
to the status of a second-
rate power — and sought to 
recreate the old Soviet and 
czarist empires. 
Yet, unlike the Communists 
and the czars, Putin was 
seemingly immune to the virus 

of antisemitism. Jewish life 
in his Russia was allowed to 
thrive with synagogues, schools 
and community centers, many 
of which opened and were built 
brand-new under his watch.
Equally important, Russia 
has generally good, albeit 
complicated, relations with 
the State of Israel. On the one 
hand, Putin was happy to 
cultivate Israeli leaders and 
to regard the vast number of 
Israelis with ties to Russia as 
part of his country’s diaspora, 
rather than despised émigrés. 
Though Putin’s Russia 
was not the engine driving 
anti-Zionism and anti-Israel 
terrorism in the Third World 
the way the Communist 
government had been, it also 
regarded some of the Jewish 
state’s worst enemies, such as 
Iran and Syria, as allies. His 
equivocal stance on the Iranian 
nuclear threat, which may have 
had more to do with his desire 

to annoy the United States 
whenever possible, was also 
problematic.
Russian intervention in the 
more than decade-long Syrian 
Civil War on behalf of the 
brutal Bashar Assad regime 
also turned Russia into one of 
Israel’s neighbors. The Russian 
military occupation of parts 
of Syria, and its close ties with 
Assad and Iran, became a 
crucial factor in Israeli defense 
policy.
There again, rather than 
aiding Iran’s efforts to wage 
a proxy war on Israel, Putin’s 
allowing Israel to attack Iranian 
and Hezbollah terrorists 
in Syria demonstrated that 
whatever his other grievous 
faults, he was not an implacable 
foe of Israel and the Jews.

THE RUSSIAN WAR 
ON UKRAINE
But his decision this year to 
launch a brutal invasion of 
Ukraine throws all previous 
assumptions about him into 
doubt.
To date, the justified horror 
of international opinion 
about the toll of suffering 
his ambitions regarding land 
grabs of Ukraine have exacted 
has isolated Russia. Contrary 
to expectations, it doesn’t 
seem to have put him or his 
regime in danger. Despite 
setbacks in the opening 
months of the war due to 
fierce Ukrainian resistance, 
the Russians are still holding 
onto occupied territory and 

Collage of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky with Russian 
President Vladimir Putin in the background.

ROKAS TENYS/SHUTTERSTOCK

Jonathan S. 

Tobin

