A complex legal dispute over the so-called Schneerson Library has turned into a full-scale diplomatic feud between the United States and Russia since a US court ruled that Russia must return about 12,000 books and 50,000 manuscripts from the collection to an Orthodox Jewish community in New York.

Putin in February suggested moving the Jewish archive from Moscow’s Lenin Library to the new museum.

“I hope that the transfer of the Schneerson collection, which undoubtedly is of great interest and value for the Jewish people and not just for Russian Jews in particular but also for Jewish believers residing in other parts of the world, will resolve this issue finally,” Putin said during a visit to the Jewish center.

Russia’s chief rabbi, Berel Lazar, who accompanied Putin during the visit, praised the Russian president’s decision as “a heroic deed,” calling it “a Solomon decision.”

About 500 digitized copies of manuscripts from the Schneerson Library were handed over to the Jewish museum on Thursday. They will be accessible online.

According to Viktor Vekselberg, head of the Jewish center’s board of trustees, the rest of the digitized Jewish books will be transferred to the museum by the end of the year.

The Schneerson Library is a collection of books and religious documents assembled by the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement over two centuries prior to World War II in Belarus. It is one of the main Jewish religious relics.

Part of the collection amassed by Lubavitcher Rebbe Yosef Yitzchok Schneerson was nationalized by the Bolsheviks in 1918. Later, about 25,000 pages of manuscripts fell into the hands of the Nazis, and were later seized by the Red Army and handed over to the Russian State Military Archive. This part of the Schneerson Library is now kept in the archive of Lenin’s Library in Moscow.

The other part was taken out of the Soviet Union by Schneerson, who emigrated in the 1930s.

Since 1991, the year of Schneerson’s death, leaders of the Brooklyn-based Orthodox Jewish movement have been trying to regain possession of the library, saying it was illegally held by the Soviet authorities after the war.

In 1991, a court in Moscow agreed to turn over the library to Chabad. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the ruling was ignored. The Russian government now says it wants to keep the archive for future scholars.

In 2010, a court in Washington confirmed the American Jewish community’s right to the library, but Russia called the court’s decision illegitimate. In late 2011, a US court ruled that Russia must return about 12,000 books and 50,000 manuscripts from the library.

Russia, which considers the collection as part of the country’s heritage, has refused to hand over the collection despite a $50,000 per-day fine imposed by the court.

VITEBSK, Belarus – The latest incarnation of Limmud FSU (former Soviet Union) took place for the first time in Belarus over the weekend, one of the most storied countries in Jewish history.

Once home to a thriving Jewish community decimated by World War II, Belarus produced nine Israeli presidents, two Nobel Prize laureates and dozens of world-class rabbis, intellectuals and artists. Notable among these figures are President Shimon Peres, former prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, former president Chaim Weizmann, the Soloveitchik rabbinical dynasty, and renowned artists Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine and Nahum Goldmann.

In Vitebsk, a four-hour drive outside the capital of Minsk, over 500 young Jewish men and women converged from Friday to Sunday to learn more about their shared history.

Even Peres’s daughter, celebrated linguist and author Prof. Tzvia Walden, flew in from Israel with her husband, Sheba Medical Center deputy director Prof. Raphael Walden, to speak at the historic conference and to honor her father’s childhood home outside of Minsk.

“I am honored to be here to represent my father,” said Walden when the Belarus government designated his modest childhood home a national monument last week. “I know he would have been so happy to be here with all of you.”

Still, Belarus’s tragic history – shrouded by the mass murder of 800,000 Jews who had lived there for centuries – was never far from the minds of the many participants who traveled from other FSU countries, America and Israel to attend the gathering.

“We must never forget the genocide that took place here,” said famed Belarus architect Leonid Levin, who is chairman of the Union of Belarusian Jewish Public Organizations and Communities, on Friday at a memorial site where 5,000 Jews were slaughtered. “This is our past. This is part of who we are.”

Prominent philanthropist and businessman Matthew Bronfman, who chairs Limmud FSU’s International Steering Committee, said he had traveled from New York to attend the conference in Vitebsk to help reconnect young Jews with a once-severed history.

“Our conferences embody the very spirit, energy and excitement of a new and young generation who are eager to reconnect with their own rich intellectual and religious heritage, from which they and their parents were cut off during 70 years of Communist rule,” he said.

He added that Limmud was “a revolutionary approach to questions of Jewish identity and education, and has become an inseparable part of the circle of Jewish life for young and not-so-young Russian-speaking adults.”

The volunteer-driven Limmud Jewish education conferences, first conceived in Britain 33 years ago, have since branched out internationally in nearly 10 countries, including Canada, Australia, the US, Switzerland, Turkey, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, and most recently Belarus.

Limmud FSU was founded in 2006 by Chaim Chelser, of Israel, co-founded by Sandra Cahn, of New York, and Mikhail Chlenov, of Russia, and Aaron Frenkel, of Monte Carlo, is the president. The organization presents 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, Jewish philosophy and Jewish-themed dance classes.

“We combined Limmud with Vitebsk, the capital of culture of the former Soviet Union – the country of Chagall and many other distinguished artists, as well as the former home to two great Israeli leaders and Nobel Prize winners, Shimon Peres and Menachem Begin,” said Chesler.

He praised the governments of Minsk and Brest, known to be politically restrictive, for having agreed to honor Peres’s childhood home and recognize Begin.

“It is a great achievement for Limmud to work on a joint effort of this kind with these governments, and shows that there is still a future for Jews in this part of the world,” he said.

Yana Osipova, an 18-yearold college student from Belarus, said Sunday that she was attending the conference to learn from world-class professionals.

“I belong to a Jewish club in my city and I live a Jewish life, so this project is interesting to me because many interesting people with different interests are here, and they’re willing to share their experience and knowledge with other people, and they do it with pleasure,” she said.

She added that there was “no problem being Jewish in Belarus.”

“There are some people who sometimes laugh at Jews, but that’s not a problem – especially when you meet and learn from people like this,” she said.

Participants certainly had a breadth of options, with speakers including senior Peres adviser Yoram Dori; Susan Goodman-Turnarkin, senior curator emeritus at the Jewish Museum of New York; Israeli Ambassador to Belarus Yosef Shagal; director, producer and screenwriter Boris Maftsir; and actor and director Shmuel Atzmon, founder of the Yiddishpiel Theater in Tel Aviv.

Vasilisa Smirnova, a cosmetics business developer from Moldova, said this was her seventh Limmud conference.

“I’ve become a Limmud addict,” she said over the weekend. “For me, this is important because I find Jewish culture very deep and very wise, and because I am young and looking for answers. I have found that Jewish culture helps me find answers to questions like, ‘Who I am in this world?’ and ‘What I should do?’” Kate Kozenkova, a 19-yearold college student, traveled four hours from Minsk to attend the conference, even though she is not Jewish.

“It’s a great opportunity to meet new people from all over the world, and I think it’s a good forum for promoting Belarus, which I love,” she said. “I think that the Jewish culture and community are great. I have never seen such close relationships between people who have never met before – they speak and connect with their hearts.”

While Kozenkova said she did not have any Jewish friends in Minsk, she noted enthusiastically that she had made several over the two days of the conference.

“For me, it’s your culture that I love – there are so many unbelievably interesting things about it that inspire me,” she said.

The people, she continued, “are so open and kind….

They smile at each other and are like a big family, and it doesn’t matter where I’m from or what I do…. It’s like an island paradise of Limmud.”

For Julia Davyelava, a musician and English teacher from Belarus, the Vitebsk event was her first Limmud conference.

“I wanted to learn what Limmud was all about because I’m a creative person and have interests in different spheres – philosophy, psychology, religion and literature,” she said. “I attended amazing lectures and now feel like I’m taking with me a little piece of gold from the beauty I saw here.”

While the vast majority of attendees said they were pleased with the lectures at the event, Anastasia Rosenberg, a Jewish Agency employee from Moscow who has attended five conferences, said she was disappointed by Vitebsk’s limited offerings on art history.

“I was an art history major, and I had hoped for more information about art in the sessions, since Chagall is from here, but I felt that the presenters were too broad in their presentations,” she said. “I just wish they offered more details about the art of great Jewish artists like him, and not general facts that I already knew.”

Despite her complaint, though, she said she was grateful for the program’s overall ability to educate her in a number of other areas of Jewish history and culture.

“Every Limmud is a step forward in life because you learn so much every time you attend,” she said. “This is why I keep coming.”

Natasha Lukyanava, a pianist and English translator from Minsk, said Limmud organizers had paid for her to attend the conference when health problems left her short of cash.

“I wasn’t able to pay to come because I was having trouble with my back and was unable to work,” she said. “But I wanted to come because I wanted knowledge – it’s just something from inside me. And Limmud let me come without paying.”

She said organizers had provided her with train and hotel fare so she could meet a friend at the conference, who helped her over the two days.

“I thought, if God wants me here, He will provide for me,” she said with a smile.

“And He did.”

She added that it was her dream to make aliya one day.

“I have been to Jerusalem a couple of times, and I really felt connected to it – like the saying, ‘If I forget Jerusalem, may my right arm wither away,’” she continued. “I felt like [Israelis] were my family, and I hope to come back to see them again soon. I feel like it is my country because the Old City’s Jewish Quarter has an atmosphere like Minsk.”

Meanwhile, Limmud FSU COO Roman Kogan, who has been instrumental in arranging all of the program’s conferences throughout the former Soviet Union, America and Israel, said he was delighted at how well Belarus’s first Limmud panned out.

“We are very proud to launch the Limmud FSU project in Belarus,” he said after the conference concluded.

“We worked very hard for many years to make this happen, and for the first conference here, it was brilliant in terms of the quality of the program.”

He thanked the numerous volunteers and presenters who had contributed.

“For Belarus it’s a huge project, because it gives the young generation of Belarus Jews an alternative platform for building their Jewish community and life, and I hope it will become a regular Limmud destination and continue to grow, because Belarus has a very rich Jewish history.”

Indeed, Kogan said he hoped Limmud would help reestablish a Jewish presence in a land where Jews once thrived and contributed to the world.

“We hope Limmud will contribute its own piece to this colorful mosaic for today’s Jews,” he said.

“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.

The synagogue and surrounding complex will be handed over to the Jewish Community of Tomsk after the municipality finds alternative housing for some 15 families who are currently living there, Mayor Nikolay Nikolaychuk said, according to Chabad.org.

The rabbi of Tomsk, Levi Kaminetsky, told JTA that the city will invest about $1 million in finding the families apartments.

The wooden synagogue, he said, was built 107 years ago by Jewish Cantonists, young children torn away from their homes to serve in the Czar’s army. It is in need of major renovation and may end up serving as Tomsk’s second synagogue, or a school for the children of the community of a few hundred Jews.

Also last week, a new Torah scroll was introduced into the city’s functioning synagogue, Or Avner, and the cornerstone was laid for the construction of a new Jewish community center.

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.”

Boris Slobodnyuk of Satanov received the forum’s 2013 Crystal Noah Tolerance Award on Tuesday at the Kiev Interfaith Forum for guarding the 500-year-old Stanovskaya synagogue in western Ukraine and initiating renovation work there.

For the past three years, the forum has brought together dozens of spiritual leaders from five faiths and 30 countries.

Oleksandr Feldman, a Ukrainian Jewish lawmaker who founded the forum in 2010, said Slobodnyuk, who is in his 50s, prevented area residents from taking apart the structure and last year secured funding from Jewish organizations to restore the ancient synagogue. He acted out of an inner sense of responsibility and for no pay, according to the committee that gave Slobodnyuk the prize.

With help from Arthur Friedman, a Jewish leader in the Khmelnitsky region, Slobodnyuk plans to help carry out renovation work next year on the rotten foundations of the structure, a former fortress and one of the largest synagogues in Ukraine. Interior repairs are scheduled to begin later.

There are hopes for a synagogue rededication in 2016.

“My message is, if you can’t help, at least don’t destroy,” Slobodnyuk told the crowd of 300-odd Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims and Buddhists who attended the two-day gathering on “Faith’s Role in State, Government and Politics.” The participants are scheduled to visit the Ukrainian parliament on Wednesday.

Slobodnyuk received the award, which was given out for the first time, along with philosopher Miroslav Popovich and radio journalist Sergey Korotaevskiy.

A few dozen Orthodox Christians picketed outside the riverside hotel hosting the conference.

“There is no hate among us, but we cannot make common council with Muslims and Jews, this is heresy,” protester Dmitri Kroiter told JTA.

Ordered by the Representation to Ukraine of the American Union of Councils for the Jews in the Former Soviet Union, sponsored by the US Ambassador’s Grant.

The program is to incrementally (step by step) restore the synagogue “Turei Zahav” (Gildene Royze), Mykva, Beis Midrash.

The remnants of the Great Synagogue (the other synagogue in the same Jewish Quarter) will be planned to thoroughly studied by the archaeologists, upon the results the artifacts will be preserved as pieces of the Archaeological theatre. The space will be also used to display the Judaic and other Jewish artifacts, might be also a Jewish social Conference Hall.

http://cja.huji.ac.il/Architecture/architecture-Presentation-Taz.html

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.”