Russia’s Jewish population is at about one million, says Alexander Boroda, President of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia.
Speaking on a Moscow radio program, he justified this figure despite a census that puts the number at around 270,000.
Communism has produced generations of Russian Jews who know little if anything, about Judaism and their heritage.
It is only in the last decade or so that they have begun to uncover their Jewish roots, so that the number of identifying Jews is not reflective of real numbers, he explained.
Before the revolution, he said, “there were normally 20 synagogues in a locality with a population of 5,000, now there are only six synagogues in Moscow, and I can’t say they are packed full.”
The FJC is working to change that. Today it has centers in 426 communities in the Former Soviet Union, with 139 Jewish day schools.
I have come across many people recently who say they are half Jewish. I ask, why do you say half Jewish? What is your mother? And they say my mother is Jewish, my dad is Russian. I think there are more Jews in Russia than we have thought.
What did the Rebbe say – that there were 1mlo Jews in the whole Soviet Union before emigration? That would make sense.
At most there are a few thousand hidden Jews left in Russia and another few thousand in the other former Soviet republics. The rest are accounted for.
as in poland which has thousands of hidden jews who are being discovered through agressive efforts to coax them out of the closet…….chabad in russia should do the same…..there are certainly more then a million jews in russia….many of which do not yet even know they are jews…where is the effort to correct this? we all know the rebbes sicho that there are many more millions of jews in russian then is assumed……there is much work to be done……now is the time!
those statements claiming 1 million only encourages the ‘sochnut’ to send more rep’s to bring more russian non-jews to israel
This is absolutely NOT true. There may be a million people in Russia who have some sort of Jewish ancestry, but one million “Jews” is absolutely preposterous.
I wonder if this is the same “million” that moved to Eretz Kodesh, of whom the Rabbinate only deems less than 200,000 as truly Jewish.