19 Facts About Russian Jewish

Largest group among Russian Jews are Ashkenazi Jews, but the community includes a significant proportion of other non-Ashkenazi from other Jewish diaspora including Mountain Jews, Sephardi Jews, Crimean Karaites, Krymchaks, Bukharan Jews and Georgian Jews.

Russia's Russian Jewish population is still the third biggest in Europe, after France and United Kingdom.

Russian Jewish had extraordinary knowledge of foreign languages and served as the chief translator in the Russian Foreign Office, subsequently he began to accompany Tsar Peter on his international travels.

Russian Jewish people were restricted to residence within the Pale and were required to obtain special permission to immigrate into other parts of Russia.

Each year, the Russian Jewish community had to supply four recruits per thousand of the population.

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However, in practice, Russian Jewish children were often conscripted as young as eight or nine years old.

The official Russian policy was to encourage the conversion of Jewish cantonists to the state religion of Orthodox Christianity and Jewish boys were coerced to baptism.

Polish Catholic boys were subject to similar pressure to convert and assimilate as the Russian Jewish Empire was hostile to Catholicism and Polish nationalism.

Large-scale wave of anti-Russian Jewish pogroms swept Ukraine in 1881, after Jews were scapegoated for the assassination of Alexander II.

The restrictions placed on education, traditionally highly valued in Russian Jewish communities, resulted in ambition to excel over the peers and increased emigration rates.

Some leading Bolsheviks were Ethnic Jews, and Bolshevism supports a policy of promoting international proletarian revolution—most notably in the case of Leon Trotsky—many enemies of Bolshevism, as well as contemporary antisemites, draw a picture of Communism as a political slur at Jews and accuse Jews of pursuing Bolshevism to benefit Russian Jewish interests, reflected in the terms Russian Jewish Bolshevism or Judeo-Bolshevism.

All this leads historian Elissa Bemporad to conclude that this “very ordinary Russian Jewish city” was in the 1920s “one of the world capitals of Yiddish language and culture.

Besides, an unofficial Russian Jewish quota was introduced in the leading institutions of higher education by subjecting Russian Jewish applicants to harsher entrance examinations.

The central Russian Jewish organization is the Federation of Russian Jewish Communities of the CIS under the leadership of Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar.

EuroStars young adults program provides Russian Jewish learning and social activities in 32 cities across Russia.

Large Russian Jewish communities include Brighton Beach and Sheepshead Bay in the Brooklyn Borough of New York City; Fair Lawn and nearby areas in Bergen County, New Jersey; Bucks and Montgomery Counties near Philadelphia; Pikesville, Maryland, a predominantly-Jewish suburb of Baltimore; Washington Heights in the Sunny Isles Beach neighborhood of South Florida; Skokie and Buffalo Grove, suburbs of Chicago; and West Hollywood, California.

Notable Russian Jewish residents include judoka Mark Berger, ice hockey player Eliezer Sherbatov, voice actress Tara Strong, and the musical group Tasseomancy.

Hundreds of Russian Jews have moved to Finland since 1990 and have helped to stem the negative population growth of the Jewish community there.

The addition of Russian Jews have neutralized the negative Jewish population trends in some European countries like the Netherlands and Austria.