“The [restoration] project is an important part of the effort to both preserve and restore Vilnius’ Jewish heritage, and I think that President Peres could bring valuable guidance and insight to our project,” Vilnius Mayor Arturas Zuokas said, according to the Baltic Review news site.

The comprehensive restoration and construction project could be completed as early as 2017, according to Tuesday’s report.

The offer came during a visit to Israel this week by Zuokas and Lithuanian Minister of Foreign Affairs Linas Linkevicius in which they met with Peres.

If Peres agrees, he would join Lithuania’s former President Valdas Adamkus, current Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius and the prominent architect Daniel Liebeskind, who are all members of the board.

The Great Synagogue in Vilnius was an icon of Lithuanian and Eastern European Jewish culture before it was ruined during World War II and demolished in the 1950s. From the 16th through the 20th centuries, it was among the best-known synagogues in Central Europe.

As a part of Vilnius’ Jewish quarter, the Great Synagogue also was surrounded by other important centers of Jewish culture, such as the home of the Gaon of Vilnius, the honorific title accorded to influential Jewish sage and philosopher Rabbi Eliah Ben-Salomon.

With Syria mired in open revolt, several other Middle Eastern and North African countries still reeling from the Arab Spring, and Iran at loggerheads with the United States over its nuclear program, it was astounding to hear Israel’s president refer to a Muslim country this week not as a problem but as part of the solution.

Yet there was Shimon Perez in Jerusalem on Monday praising Azerbaijan for taking “a clear stand” against war and terrorism and for making the world a bit more safe and predictable.
The occasion was a visit to Israel by Azerbaijani Foreign Minister Elmar Mammadyarov, accompanied by a large delegation of Azerbaijani Jews, including a Jewish member of the parliament. While Mr. Mammadyarov’s trip this week was historic — it marked the first visit to Israel by an Azerbaijani foreign minister — the rhetoric was not. Azerbaijan’s long-standing friendship with Israel — and its support for the two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — have been policy for years. Israel has even asked Azerbaijan to help broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Unbeknownst to many, Azerbaijan, a secular country with a predominantly Muslim population that sits on the United Nations Security Council, has had a close relationship with Israel since the beginning of its independence from the Soviet Union a generation ago. Indeed, it might surprise many to know that Azerbaijan, with a Shiite-majority population and a shared border with Iran, supplies some 40 percent of Israel’s oil. A subsidiary of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic is aiding Israel’s quest for energy security by drilling off the Israeli coast in the Mediterranean. The countries also have a close partnership in the defense sector.

During a period when old grudges and prejudices color nearly every global event, Mr. Mammadyarov’s visit to Israel is a hopeful sign. It’s refreshing when two countries with diverse cultural backgrounds make common cause and become friends, rather than hew to tired stereotypes that seem to define every facet of the modern world order.

The strategic relationship between Azerbaijan and Israel is held together by a human story. Azerbaijan is home to a thriving Jewish community of about 30,000, which has lived there in peace for at least 2,000 years. When, over the centuries, Jews in the surrounding regions found themselves persecuted, they found Azerbaijan a haven. During World War II, many European Jews escaping Nazi persecutions found shelter in Azerbaijan.

Over the years since independence, Azerbaijan also has proved to be a staunch and reliable ally of the United States and Europe. The Caspian region is increasingly important to the West as the strategic juncture between the Middle East and Central Asia, and Baku has become a strong regional partner at this critical intersection.

My country has long been dedicated to promoting stability and security in its neighborhood. Azerbaijan has played a vital role in supporting the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan and has been providing valuable overflight, refueling and landing rights to 40 percent of the material that coalition forces use. Azerbaijan has suffered repeatedly from terrorism. Therefore, we clearly understand the need to counter extremism in whatever form it may exist.

It is not easy to pursue an independent path, especially for a young country in a complex and challenging region. Attempts to divert us from this path abound, but they all have failed. Azerbaijan’s resolve to preserve and strengthen its hard-won freedom and independence has never been stronger.

The world’s largest and most expensive Jewish Museum opened to great fanfare in Russia late last year. And although it has only been open for less than six months, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow has become a must-see for any visitors to the Russian capital.

A high profile project, its construction cost around $50 million, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin donated a month’s wages. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who was born in what is now Belarus, flew to Moscow for the museum’s opening in November 2012.

There the 89-year-old Israeli leader told reporters that, “My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart.”

The history of the Jews in Russia is as complex and emotional as any childhood memories.

This large and engaging museum—which was primarily funded by oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin—is dedicated to the ambivalent history of Jews in Russia, land that has been the site of both immense Jewish achievement and suffering.

“We tried to make our museum not about how bad or how good it was to be a Jew in Russia, but simply about how it was,” said Borukh Gorin, the chairman of the museum, according to the Los Angeles Times.

To tell the tale, the museum has adopted a very modern approach. It employs interactive displays with personal testimony and archival footage in both Russian and English.

New York based designer Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the United States Holocaust Museum, created a museum that the Russian online television channel Dozhd described as a “Jewish Disneyland.”

As befits a major museum, it occupies a vast space—some 5,000 square feet. Across this floor space the museum offers visitors an array of interactive exhibits. Films in 3-D, interactive maps and touch screens all chronicle Jewish life in what was once the Russian Empire.

A visitor can touch a screen at one exhibit and appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a merchant, or a Russian-Jewish intellectual. If you touch a Torah in a virtual synagogue, the cantor’s voice fills the air.

The exhibitions are presented in chronological order. As visitors progress through the museum, they follow in the path of centuries of Russian Jewry, travelling across medieval Europe to the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and then onto Russian cities.

The Jewish presence in Russia grew as a result of Russia, Prussia and Austria’s division of Poland at the end of the 1700s. Along with the Polish territory it gained, the Russian Empire inherited approximately 1 million Jews. Most of the Jewish population was densely concentrated in rural areas in the north and west of the Russian Empire. Later Tsarist decrees forbade Jews from settling outside of a prescribed area, known as the Pale of Settlement.

Individual Jews had to apply for permission to live outside of the Pale (from where we get the expression, “beyond the pale”), applications which were almost always denied. As the Russian Empire expanded, especially south into the area known as New Russia (southern Ukraine), Jews were permitted to settle in this new terrain, which included the city of Odessa. The Ukrainian port soon became the center of flourishing Jewish life, one of the major Jewish centers of the world.

Visitors to the museum can sit down at a café in Odessa and interact with a virtual, dead Jewish writer, a representative member of the city’s intelligentsia.

In addition to conversation with long-dead authors, a visitor can partake in other interactive role-play at the Odessa café. By touching the table, the visitor is posed a question that was all-too pertinent for many Jewish residents of Odessa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“If your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do?”

The question is a good one, not merely hypothetical. Odessa was the site of pogroms in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905. Visitors can choose from one of four responses:

“A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.”

As it happens, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a resident of the city on the Black Sea, chose option C. In the midst of the anti-Jewish violence, Jabotinsky created the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group whose purpose was to safeguard Jews from attack in Odessa and throughout the Russian Empire.

Jabotinsky became convinced that the only ways for Jews to be free from the threat of violence was to be armed— “better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” he said—or, better yet, to live in their own country, the state of Israel.

Jabotinsky became a prominent Zionist, changed his name from Vladimir to Ze’ev, and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement. Jabotinksy died in New York in 1940, before his dream of a Jewish homeland was realized, but after the establishment of the Jewish State, his remains were transferred to Israel.

In addition to contributing to the development of Zionism, the bloody pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the mass emigration of Russian Jews to the West—the United States, primarily, but also France, the United Kingdom and Germany—and to pre-State Palestine. Then in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution granted equal rights to all minority groups in Russia, including Jews, while it also precipitated more anti-Jewish violence.

The museum outlines these periods, as well as the Holocaust. While the Shoah is by no means the primary focus of the museum, exhibitions detail some of the horrors in which over 2.5 million Russian Jews were murdered. Yet while many Russian Jews perished at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators, Russian Jews fighting in the Soviet Army also helped to liberate concentration camps. Once again, Jewish suffering and success are starkly juxtaposed.

The museum chronicles the Jewish contribution to Russia’s war effort during World War II. It houses a copy of a T-34 tank, which was made in a plant run by a Jewish man in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil and served as the Russian army’s primary tank during the war. The museum also honors Russia’s only female Jewish air force pilot, who received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, with a reproduction of the plane she flew during the war.

Exhibitions also address the post-War period, exploring what it meant to be a Soviet Jew. This section of the museum might be of particular interest to the many Russian-speaking Jews who left the former Soviet Union. There are now hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Russian-speaking Jews and their families who live in Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere outside of Russia.

While many Russian Jews desperately fought to leave the Soviet Union, hoping to immigrate to Israel for ideological reasons—part of the refusenik movement—or to the West, the museum also profiles the many and varied contributions of Russian Jews to the development of the Soviet Union in the fields of politics, literature, engineering, mathematics, literature and the arts.

At the start of the 20th century, Russia was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, perhaps as many as 5 million souls. But anti-Jewish violence and legislation led to mass emigration from Russia—to primarily to the United States, pre-State Israel and Western Europe. Then the Nazi genocide further decimated Jewish communities. After the defeat of the Nazis, Soviet authorities repressed Jewish religious and cultural life, as well as other religions. In the wake of the break down of the Soviet Union, yet more Russian Jews left the country for Israel and the West. These events radically cut the size of Russia’s Jewish population, which currently numbers approximately 200,000.

Although there may be fewer Jews in Russia than at any point in over 200 years, Moscow is now home to an impressive museum—earlier this month, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center received the “Museum of the Year” award from the Russia edition of the prestigious The Art Newspaper, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.

So many of the world’s Jews, from Nobel laureate and Israeli President Shimon Peres down, can trace their families’ histories to Russia. It is fitting that this major museum honors the heritage of a huge proportion of the world’s Jews and the inextricably intertwined modern histories of Jewish people and Russian lands.

At the appointed moment, they remove their windbreakers to reveal white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the kikes.” Their jackets carry the name of Svoboda, the ultranationalist Ukrainian political party.

A small riot quickly ensues. Angry protestors rip at the T-shirts, but the Svoboda-labeled men give as good as they get. One of the men beats Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist, so savagely that he is rendered barely recognizable.

In the days after this April 6 melee, Svoboda denied that the provocateurs at the rally were their men. Yuriy Syrotiuk, a Svoboda parliamentarian, called the men criminals and complained that police were not responding to an act of incitement, Interfax reported. Some suggested the men were anti-Svoboda activists seeking to tarnish its image.

But denials notwithstanding, the incident has raised anxieties among Ukrainian Jews fearful of rising xenophobia and racially motivated violence they say is inspired by Svoboda, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a penchant for thuggery.

“Svoboda lifted the lid from the sewer of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and it’s spilling out,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament.

A U.S. State Department report this month singled out Ukraine, along with Hungary and Greece, as places of “concern” because of growing anti-Semitic parties. But open anti-Semitism is still rare in Ukraine. Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry documented just 15 cases of anti-Semitic violence in 2012. In France, the number was 200.

But the behavior of some Svoboda politicians risks changing that, some Ukrainian Jews worry.

Founded in 2004, Svoboda (“freedom” in Ukrainian) is the latest incarnation of the Social-National Party, a far-right movement ideologically aligned with Nazism. But while the Social-National Party never enjoyed any electoral success, Svoboda garnered more than 10 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections, becoming the country’s fourth-largest party.

“Svoboda is perhaps the biggest challenge facing Ukrainian Jewry today,” Ukrainian Jewish Committee President Oleksandr Feldman told JTA. “It has no structure and operates in a political vacuum and turmoil which allow it to run rampant.”

Svoboda’s unstructured nature also makes it difficult to pigeonhole. Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok has praised supporters for being the “worst fear of the Jewish-Russian mafia” and has called Jews “kikes.”

Yet the party also speaks admiringly of Israel, and Tyahnybok has made a point of advertising his meeting last December with Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine. Alexander Aronets, Svoboda’s press secretary, has praised Israel on his Facebook page as ”one of the most nationalistic countries in the world.”

Good relations with Israel may be desirable to Svoboda as a defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, a tactic employed by other European nationalist movements that have made overtures in Israel’s direction.

“They know anti-Semitism is preventing the good relations they seek,” said Moshe Azman, Ukraine’s Chabad-affiliated chief rabbi. “But Svoboda is not a uniform entity and I’m not sure the leaders control the rank and file.”

Feldman, an energetic businessman, lawmaker and founder of the Kyiv Interfaith Forum, says Svoboda has helped erode the shame associated with open expressions of anti-Semitism and other ethnic hatreds. His interfaith forum, which each year brings together hundreds of clerics from five faiths, was marred for the first time this year by a minor assault on a Muslim participant outside the conference.

“Svoboda is very frightening to Ukrainian Jews and other minorities because it is an ultra-Jobbik that evolved quickly,” Feldman said, referring to the anti-Semitic and Iran-friendly Hungarian party that also has enjoyed recent electoral success.

“We had hoped Svoboda would tone it down once it’s in parliament, but the opposite has happened,” said Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Ukrainian researcher with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. “The electoral gains have emboldened Svoboda lawmakers to incorporate thuggery as a modus operandi, a very dangerous development.”

One example came in February, when party member Igor Miroshnichenko shimmied up the towering statue of Vladimir Lenin in the town of Akhtyrka, threw a rope around the communist leader’s head, tied the other end to a truck and brought down the monument.

In December, the same man said Mila Kunis, a Ukrainian-American Jewish actress, was “no Ukrainian, but a kike.” Asked by a newspaper if Miroshnichenko could be prosecuted for making a racial insult, a Justice Ministry official said the word he used — “zhydovka,” a feminized version of kike — was permissible and part of the official vocabulary.

“This was another Svoboda success in poisoning the public sphere,” Likhachev says.

Svoboda officials declined several JTA requests for comment for this story.

In February, Likhachev signed a letter along with several other Jewish Ukrainians asking the Jewish Agency for Israel to cancel plans to hold its board of governors meeting in Kiev in June. The letter, which several Jewish leaders dismissed as overblown, said that poor democratic standards and Svoboda’s ascent made Kiev an ill-suited choice.

“Svoboda are riffraff — nothing comparable to Jobbik, which has its own militia and coherent policy,” said Yaakov Bleich, a Ukrainian chief rabbi.

“Svoboda is troubling as a symptom of the main challenges facing Ukrainian Jewry: the economic recession and political uncertainty,” Bleich said. Still, he added, “because Svoboda is a mob, it’s less predictable than Jobbik. Svoboda’s leaders may be unable to control anti-Semitic displays.”

Despite the disagreements, many Jewish leaders seem to agree that Svoboda’s success owes more to frustration with the establishment than to its anti-Semitic statements. Likhachev pointed specifically to the discontent that emerged in the wake of the Orange Revolution, the protests following the 2004 election that brought former president Viktor Yushchenko to power on a platform of greater government accountability.

Bickering and disunity cost Yushchenko the presidency in 2010. He was succeeded by Viktor Yanukovych, the man whom protestors accused five years earlier of election fraud. That development strengthened Svoboda in two ways, Likhachev says.

“First, it radicalized disgruntled voters,” Likhachev says. “Second, the opposition allies learned they needed to stay united to win. So they are willing to overlook Svoboda’s anti-Semitism — to the detriment of Ukrainian society and its Jewish population.”

MOSCOW – Just 40 km. outside the Russian capital at a hotel in a forested suburb, over 1,200 young Russian-Jewish professionals gathered Thursday to attend the latest Limmud FSU conference and learn more about their shared history and to socialize with fellow Jews.

Limmud Jewish education conferences are a volunteer driven enterprise first conceived in the United Kingdom 32 years ago. Limmud has since branched out, now holding events in nearly 10 countries, including Canada, Australia, the United States, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel, Ukraine and most recently, Russia. This year’s conference concluded late Saturday night.

The lectures at Limmud conferences are presented by world-class Jewish scholars and professionals on topics including Diaspora Jews in the 21st century, Jewish art history, Torah and business, Israeli society, science and the soul, yoga and meditation, Jewish philosophy and even hip-hop dance classes.

“The Moscow conference is a reflection of our Limmud structure,” said Limmud FSU founder Chaim Chesler.

“We started it here in 2006 and now it’s our largest event, attracting over 1,200 participants mainly from Moscow, but also people from Israel and the US.”

Chesler added that the conference goes beyond imparting Jewish identity, and is an excellent networking opportunity.

“It’s a great event for not just learning about Jewish identity, but for forming business contacts within Russia’s Jewish community,” he said. “Our participants are the cream of the crop of young Jewish professionals living in Russia.”

Chesler highlighted the significance and symbolism of this Limmud conference nearly coinciding with Israel’s Independence Day.

“I feel like it is very special that this Limmud is happening near Israel’s Independence Day because I believe that the attendees here represent Russia’s future Jewish leadership and the freedom to be Jews in a once restrictive country,” he said.

“Like Israel, Limmud is an independent entity – it’s like an ‘intellectual kibbutz,’ where the commerce is knowledge,” Chesler said.

“We don’t have any agenda other than to recreate Jewish life in Russia, based on equality, volunteerism and pluralism.”

Anna Kandaurova, 26, a Moscow-based musician and journalist, said that this is her second Limmud conference.

“My first conference was in Jerusalem two years ago,” she said. “To me, it’s a fascinating opportunity to hang around people who I have a better chance of relating to than those living in Moscow in general.”

Kandaurova said that due to the lack of religious persecution in Russia today, she actually feels less connected to Judaism.

“As disgusting as the persecution of Jews was, it contributed to empowering our collective identity as Jews in the Diaspora,” she said. “I think that the Russian-Jewish Diaspora was shaped by the Soviet era, which is now a bygone [time]. Now we need to redefine who we are because of the necessity to remain a close-knit and recognizable community.”

Kandaurova said the “old way” of being a Jew in Russia is no longer viable because the Soviet Union no longer exists, and therefore “we need to redefine the set of values we share as Russian-Diaspora Jews. We need to redefine what a ‘young Jew’ is.”

Kandaurova added that Israel’s Independence Day serves as a powerful metaphor for her identity as a Russian Jew.

“The memory of how the Jewish people developed is a chapter that defines who I am and I have this wonderful feeling that I have a motherland that’s always there for me like a real ‘mother,’” she said. “And no matter what trouble I have here, I know Israel will always be there to say, ‘I love you.’” Vadim Golovin, a financial manager in his 30s who lived in Israel for a three-year stint, said Jewish life in Moscow is better than in many other parts of Europe, but he still questioned the sustainability of Jewish culture and identity here.

“I think it’s better to be a Jew [in Moscow] than in Western Europe because you don’t see anti-Semitism as much,” he said. “However, I don’t think there is any real Jewish future here because even though the government now views Jewish life more favorably, that could change in the blink of an eye.”

“I wouldn’t call the Jewish community here strong.

There’s a good choice of [Jewish] organizations, but not a strong sense of communal life,” Golovin continued.

The near-confluence of this Limmud with Israel’s Independence Day, he stressed, is a source of pride.

“Israel’s independence makes me feel proud – proud of what it has achieved since then, and proud to be part of Israel’s story, if even just a little bit,” he said.

Michael Gilichinski, an Israeli jeweler who traveled to the conference from Ramat Gam to lecture on jewish art history, said he enjoys coming to Limmud to share knowledge that Russian participants are largely unaware of.

“I came here to tell the Russian- Jewish community about Jewish art because many Jews in Russia don’t know about this important relationship,” he said.

“It’s different in Russia than in the US or Israel because for 70 years Jewish identity was oppressed by Communism. So as an Israeli, I bring them an important element of our shared culture.”

Limmud FSU COO Roman Kogan said the Moscow conference was an enormous success because it is contributing to the rebirth of Jewish identity in a once anti-Semitic land.

“These talented young professionals are not only proud Jews who are seeking out their past, but they represent our future in this part of the world,” he said.

“I believe they will be a powerful force in recreating Jewish life in a country once stripped of it.”

Senator Vitaly Malkin, 60, handed in his resignation on Tuesday amid accusations that he has failed to give up his Israeli citizenship as Russian lawmakers are legally bound to do, according to the Moskovski Komsomoletz daily.

Senator Boris Shpigel, who is also the president of the World Congress of Russian Jewry, resigned because of his new role as the leader of an anti-Fascist organization in France.

The Federation Council voted to strip both men of their senatorial status on Wednesday. Malkin’s resignation came after claims appeared in media and blogs that Malkin, 60, has an Israeli passport under the name Avihur Ben Bar. Malkin said he gave up his citizenship in 2007 but has not presented any documents to support this, the Moskovski Komsomoletz wrote.

Shpigel, meanwhile, asked to step down after becoming president of World without Nazism, a nongovernmental organization dedicated to fighting xenophobia which is based in Strasbourg, France. Before leaving, Shpigel introduced a bill on combating xenophobia.

“The problem of Nazism in the world, especially in Europe, is very serious,” Shpigel wrote. ”I  intend to make every effort to counter manifestations of Nazism in the world and, in particular, in E.U. countries and the Baltic states.”

Miroshnichenko stated, “She is not Ukrainian, she is a Jewess by birth,” using the term “zhydovka” which roughly translates to “dirty Jewess,” instead of the accepted word “ievreïska.”

He added, “She is proud of this and the Star of David. [S]he says nothing and expresses nothing positive about the country in which she was born. I can’t bring myself to say she is Ukrainian. Let her love America or Israel, people must not attach her to the Ukraine!”

Despite protests from Ukrainian Jews regarding the slur, the Ukrainian Justice Ministry determined that this term is not objectionable because it appears in the official dictionary of the Ukrainian language as an archaic term for a Jewish person.

“The last time this term was used in any official way was during the Nazi occupation, when the Jews or ‘Zhyds’ of Kiev were ordered to convene in preparation for their mass murder at Babi Yar,” Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, told JTA. “The Justice Ministry and politicians should adjust their definitions and language according to what Ukrainian Jews consider offensive, and we find the word ‘zhyd’ to be just that.” 

Miroschnichenko is part of the anti-Semitic Svoboda Party that recently won 12% of the national vote in Ukraine’s October elections. They won less than 1% of the vote in the previous 2007 election.

At the ceremony, Peres stated “This is a very moving moment — for my people, for my country and for me.”

Peres later met with President Putin to discuss bilateral relations between their countries.

During his visit, Peres also plans to attend a community meeting where he will meet with hundreds of Russian Jewish leaders, rabbis and youth.

Based on reporting by AFP and JTA.

The dedication ceremony included Jewish leaders from Ukraine, Russia, other former states of the Soviet Union and many Israeli officials. The president of the Jewish Communities of the Commonwealth of Independent States was also present.

The Menorah Jewish Community Center will open to the public on October 21st.