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Russia's Jews credit Yeltsin |
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Published by The Jerusalem Post
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Wednesday, 25 April 2007 |
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Russia's Jews credit Yeltsin with ending decades of state-sponsored anti-Semitism "Mikhail Chlenov, who established Russia's first legal Jewish group in the early years of Yeltsin's rule, said Jews should remember Yeltsin as a great man. "It was his great achievement that the new Russia came to life without that evil called state anti-Semitism," said Chlenov, president of the Va'ad of Russia. Others credit Yeltsin for allowing Jewish life to develop freely to an extent that was hard to imagine even under his predecessor, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. With American Jewish activists marking the 40th anniversary this year of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, it is notable that meaningful Jewish emigration began under Gorbachev, but it was Yeltsin who really opened the floodgates. "While Gorbachev made freedom of emigration a reality for Soviet Jews, it was Yeltsin who made possible an unprecedented freedom of Jewish life in the country," Gorin said. "Jewish schools and new synagogues were opened - it was he who made the impossible possible."..."
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Anti-Semitism