Moscow's exiled chief rabbi urges Jews to leave Russia while they can
Moscow's exiled chief rabbi says Jews should leave Russia while they can before they become scapegoats for the problems caused by the war in Ukraine, news.ro reports, with reference to The Guardian.
"When we look back at the history of Russia, whenever the political system was in danger, you saw the government trying to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses to the Jewish community," Pinchas Goldschmidt told the Guardian. "We saw this in tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist regime," he added.
“We are witnessing the rise of anti-Semitism as Russia returns to a new kind of Soviet Union and step by step the Iron Curtain is coming down again. This is why I believe that the best option for Russian Jews is to leave," stated Pinchas Goldschmidt.
Goldschmidt resigned from his post and left Russia in July after refusing to support the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Jews from Russia have emigrated by the tens of thousands over the past 100 years, first to Europe and the USA, and more recently to Israel. According to the 1926 census, there were 2,672,000 Jews in the then Soviet Union, 59% of them in Ukraine. Today, only about 165,000 Jews remain in the Russian Federation out of a total population of 145 million, according to the quoted source.
