Using very liberal and inclusive estimates, there are roughly 700,000 Jews from the former Soviet Union living (FSU) in the United States, 1.2 million living in Israel, and 500,000 still living in the Russian Federation. This all adds up to a bunch of people who don’t really know what their identity is. This constant state of purgatory can be summed up in one catchy saying that I have heard all too often in my life: “To Jews you are Russian, to Russians you are Jews.” Interestingly enough, the exclusion of FSU Jews in both mainstream Jewish society and mainstream Russian society has enabled them to unite under a new ethnic identity.
The Jewish people that lived in the Soviet Union were never seen as being ethnically Russian. Simply by looking at racial distinctions, Russians come from the Slavic race, while Jews come from the Semitic race. This stark difference between the two peoples has fueled oppression and even attempts of genocide. In 1648, Bogdan Khmelnitsky led the Cossack rebellion, aimed at killing Jews and nobles. In the 1880s, Russian state-sponsored pogroms claimed the lives of many Jews who were falsely blamed for the assassination of Czar Alexander II. Finally, in the Soviet Union of the 1900s, Jews were marked with a Jewish nationality in their state passports, which led to many exclusions from studying in universities, to working in certain professions, to participating in government.
Mainstream global Jewry has been, and continues to be, connected through its practice of Judaism. Whether it is orthodox, conservative, or reformed, Jews all over the world practice their version of the age-old religion. The dilemma that arises for Jews from the FSU is that they don’t really practice Judaism, because religion was oppressed in the Soviet Union. Attending religious services, sending children to Hebrew school, and celebrating Jewish holidays- a strong unification amongst global Jewry- were not possibilities for the Jews of the FSU. Hebrew, the language that binds the Jewish people, was also lost in Soviet Jewry.
Jews of the FSU, then, have been excluded by both mainstream Jewry and mainstream Russian society. But there is still a unique connection among this unique minority which creates a new ethnic identity. FSU Jews and their descendants share a contemporary Jewish culture that is derived not from religion, but from our grandparents and great-grandparents who maintained their Jewish identity underground. We share a common language, Russian, that has also been passed down from generation to generation. And, finally, we have great pride. We resiliently survived hundreds of years of persecution, oppression, and extermination to create a thriving, inclusive, and new ethnic identity.
This post was written by a student enrolled in the Capstone Seminar course in the undergraduate program in public policy at Hunter College. Any opinions expressed here are solely those of the student.
