MOSCOW — Andrei Glotser tried to hide his concern about the future of Russian Jewish life with an uneasy smile.
“Our rebbe came today to the class downcast, and said: ‘Hard times are coming, boys. Goussinsky is out. No finance, no support,'” the 20-year-old Moscow university student said recently while he was visiting yeshiva classes at the Moscow Choral Synagogue.
Many Jewish activists in Moscow have shared this sense of impending doom as the Kremlin has cracked down on Vladimir Goussinsky, one of the largest financiers of Russian Jewish life, in the past year.
Last month, as if to demonstrate that rumors of its financial collapse are exaggerated, the Russian Jewish Congress put on a cross-country show.
The group flew a team a team of rabbis, officials, journalists plus a synagogue choir on a rented VIP plane with a military crew and sent them on a whirlwind trip across Russia that went from Kaliningrad in the extreme west to the eastern city of Novosibirsk in Siberia.
The mission’s stated goals were two-fold: to wish a happy Jewish New Year to Russian Jewish communities and to deliver to local rabbis Torah scrolls looted by the Soviet regime that were recently retrieved from the Russian state archives and restored.
In each of the five cities visited by the entourage, RJC officials greeted the local Jewish public in a big concert hall and the Moscow synagogue choir entertained the gathering.
But just as important, the group wanted to bolster the RJC’s forces in the city-to-city fight with the Chabad-dominated federation, as one Moscow Jewish activist put it.
“We have a struggle going on here,” said Boris Borovik, a young Jewish leader in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Ural region, which is home to a 15,000-strong and thriving Jewish community.
His organization has never been part of the RJC and he is hesitant about joining the umbrella group.
But, he says, he is worried that “Chabad will swallow the Jewish movement here.”
Goussinsky, a media mogul and the president of the RJC, is now living abroad after being briefly thrown in jail on charges of embezzlement.
At the same time, the RJC’s rival, the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, has seen its fortunes rise in the seesaw of Russian Jewish life.
In most cities, the RJC has a group of local businessmen who sacrifice part of their time and money for benefit of the Jewish community.
A local RJC group managed recently to collect enough money to build a brand new synagogue with only minor donations from Moscow.
The RJC also generally has a stronger relationship with local authorities, but local religious communities belonging to the RJC are generally weak or invisible.
The most vital communities belong to the Chabad-Lubavitch federation.
To develop a loyalty and counteract the growing Chabad influence, the RJC recently imported Rabbi Moshe Shteinberg, 25, from Israel to Yekaterinburg and says it will finance the building of a community center with a synagogue.
The Chabad movement, and its federation, has received several boosts from Russian President Vladimir Putin, most recently when Putin celebrated the gala opening of a multipurpose Jewish community center in Moscow.
This backing has frustrated RJC officials, who complain that Chabad is buying off congregation members and officials.
In the meantime, most Russian Jews don’t care which group is in control as long as they are given emotional, spiritual and material help.