Russian city’s Jewish community confronts a hostile environment

MOSCOW, Nov. 17 (JTA) — The Russian city of Orel’s small Jewish community is facing uneasy times. The trial of a neo-Nazi leader and the difficulties in recovering the city’s synagogue are among the events that have highlighted the unpleasant atmosphere for the 3,000 Jews in Orel. “Local officials are secretly backing ultranationalists who are very visible in our town,” Semyon Livshitz, leader of the Orel Jewish community, said in a recent interview. In the trial, Vladimir Gusev, a Russian Orthodox priest in Orel, lashed out at Jews and Judaism in his recent testimony on behalf of Igor Semyonov, the head of the local chapter of the Russian National Unity group. Gusev, who referred to Judaism as an “aggressive” and “destructive” religion, repeated the infamous blood libel charge, saying that Chasidic Jews “kill children, gather blood” and use it to make matzah. Semyonov was arrested a year and a half ago on suspicion of murder. He is being tried for allegedly arranging the murder of an elderly woman in Orel so that his relative could get her apartment. He also was charged with inciting racial and ethnic hatred. After his arrest, police found a list of hundreds of Jews and their addresses at his home in Orel, which is located 150 miles south of Moscow. Gusev has not been the only witness to make anti-Semitic statements in the trial, which began in September. A local communist leader claimed that the 1941 mass killings at Babi Yar on the outskirts of Kiev, Ukraine, never happened. According to Emmanuel Mendelevich, a human rights activist in Orel, all of the anti-Semitic remarks were allowed by the judge without objection. Meanwhile, local authorities have impeded the Jewish community’s efforts to reclaim the city’s only synagogue. While authorities have agreed to return the building, which was built in 1912 and confiscated by the Bolsheviks in 1922, they are demanding that the Jewish community help pay for the construction of a new building to house a technical college that now occupies the former synagogue. “The sum is $1.8 million,” said Livshitz, adding that the community would be unable to raise even one-tenth of that amount. All other faiths “were given back the property formerly belonging to them with no compensation for the city.” Jewish leaders have been told by city officials
that the sum could be easily collected if the community “turned to the world Jewry,” said Livshitz. Earlier this month, the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and Organizations, an umbrella group for Orthodox and Reform synagogues in Russia, sent a letter to Orel Governor Egor Stroev urging him to return the synagogue. Stroev is also chairman of the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian Parliament.