JEWISH WORLD

8 JEWISH WORLD • AUGUST 11-17, 2023 By HILLELKUTTLER R abbi Pinchas Goldschmidt sat at the desk of his Jerusa- lem office on a scorcher of a July day. Wearing a suit and tie, his monogrammed shirt cuff peeking out, Goldschmidt seemed immune to the intense heat—a quality hinting at how, of the 33 years he served as Moscow’s chief rabbi, he might have weathered the last 22 during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. But everyone has a boiling point, and Goldschmidt reached his when Russian authorities pressured him and other religious leaders to sup- port Putin’s war on Ukraine that be- gan on Feb. 24, 2022. Goldschmidt publicly opposed the war, departed the country, re- signed his pulpit in Moscow’s Cho- ral Synagogue, and resettled in Isra- el, leaving behind Russia and his wife Dara’s work: regenerating the capital’s Jewish community follow- ing seven decades of Soviet repres- sion and building an orphanage, a school, and a kollel—an academy for Talmud study. Last summer, he urged Russia’s Jews to leave the country. This June, the country’s Justice Ministry la- beled him and several other visible opponents of the war “foreign agents,” affixing metaphorical tar- gets to their backs. Nearly a year-and-a-half into Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, Goldschmidt sees his condemning of the war and emigrating as correct. He’d been silenced “for all the years under Putin,” he said. “I wasn’t able to say a word.” Goldschmidt said he recognized the risk of opposing Putin. He cited Ecclesiastes 3:7: “A time to keep si- lent and a time to speak.” The time, he said, was right to speak. “The moment I knew that I’d be criticizing the war, that I’d be against the Russian government, I knew that I would have to leave my post as chief rabbi of the city, be- cause the government would use its clutches to get me out or to close down the community,” said Gold- schmidt. “It was a decision I knew would have to result in my resigna- tion in order not to endanger the community.” But leaving and urging others to follow didn’t come easily. Gold- schmidt said he spoke with friends, colleagues, and community leaders in Russia and abroad. He researched rabbis’ contemporaneous responses to anti-Jewish agitation, pogroms, and the Holocaust. He sought clarity for what gnawed at him: Was the sit- uation as dire as he thought? “I was questioning myself in the beginning if I did the right thing or not by leaving. But as the situation evolved, there was no other way,” he said. “I just feel that there’s a mo- ment when a communal leader has to tell his people that the future is not as bright as it was and we should think of other options.” As to what set his decision-mak- ing in motion, Goldschmidt recalled the events of 2022 this way: “I went to sleep in Moscow on Feb. 23 and woke up in the morning in Teh- ran—a different country with a dif- ferent political system. I realized that under this new political reality, it would be impossible to speak for a Jewish future. It became almost impossible for a Jewish community to function.” It was a stunning end to a lengthy tenure that began when a classmate from his native Switzerland told Goldschmidt—who, while living in Baltimore, had been ordained and earned a master’s degree in comput- er science—that Moscow’s Jewish community wished to hire a rabbi. When Goldschmidt, his wife, and their two small children—the couple would have seven; three now live in Israel and four in the United States— arrived in 1989, Russia was the be- hemoth of a Soviet Union at once disintegrating and evolving under the freedom-minded reforms begun by the glasnost and perestroika poli- cies of the USSR’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, and later extended by Russia’s president, Boris Yeltsin. By reversing Russia’s democrati- zation and, later, invading Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022, Putin has yanked the country back to its Soviet days, Goldschmidt said. That, he said, constitutes a physi- cal and demographic threat to Rus- sia’s Jews, whose numbers aren’t continued on page 26 “A communal leader has to tell his people that the future is not as bright as it was, and that we should think of other options.” Russian ag superimposed with a Mogen David. About 100,000 Jews now seek to leave Russia, in addition to 100,000 who have already left since the war began. Jews, Get Out Of Russia So says the former chief rabbi of Moscow, who ed to Israel COVER STORY