Pinchas Goldschmidt, in an interview with The Guardian, urged Russian Jews to leave Russia “while they still can” before the Kremlin’s failures in the war in Ukraine made them “scapegoats”. As an analogy, Goldschmidt cited the period of Stalin’s decline, when the Jews became the object of anger and discontent initiated by the authorities.
“Looking back at Russian history, we see that whenever the political system was threatened, the authorities tried to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses to the Jewish community, Goldschmidt said in an interview. - We saw this both in the days of tsarism and at the end of the Stalinist regime. We see the rise of anti-Semitism as Russia returns to a new kind of Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain is falling again, step by step. Therefore, I believe that the best option for Russian Jews is to leave.”
Goldschmidt, the former chief rabbi of Moscow since 1993, left Russia two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine began on February 24, 2022. This happened due to pressure from the Russian government, which demanded statements in support of the war. Now he lives in exile in Israel and declares that he does not intend to return to Russia. After a trip to Israel, he resigned from his post. According to him, the decision was also influenced by pressure on the leaders of the Jewish community in Russia to support the war.
I refused to do it. I resigned because it would be problematic for the community to remain the chief rabbi of Moscow because of the repressions against dissidents, he explained. - Vladimir Putin’s statements that neo-Nazis rule in Ukraine are meaningless.”
Recall that in the early days of a full-scale invasion, the Chief Rabbi of Kyiv and Ukraine, Moshe Reuven Asman, appealed to the Russians to stop the war.
Source: Fakty
