Soviet Jewry

Herzog: Israel must do more for immigrants from the Former Soviet Union

The event, a salute to FJC’s network of schools, synagogues, and youth programs across the former Soviet space, featured personal testimony illustrating the stakes for families uprooted by conflict.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog at an event hosted by the Federation of Jewish Communities (FJC) of the Former Soviet Union in Jerusalem, November 8, 2025.
Dr Haim Ben Yaakov

Repatriation (Aliyah): From Soviet Underground to a Conflict-Free Double Loyalty

NEW YORK’S Jewish community marches beneath the banner ‘We shall not be silent’ during the Solidarity Sunday for Soviet Jewry demonstration in protest at the Soviet Union’s treatment of Jewish people, in New York City, in 1975.

Yom Kippur War: How the Book of Isaiah spurred world Jewry to back Israel, refusniks in 1973

Ilan Sinelnikov

25 ViZionaries: Ilan Sinelnikov - No. 25


Isi Leibler: Unsung hero of the Jewish people's finest hour

MIDDLE ISRAEL: Playing first violin in the struggle for Soviet Jewry.

Isi Leibler

Holocaust Remembrance Day: Israel to commemorate victims of Nazi genocide

Yad Vashem has designated the theme of this year’s events to be the commemoration of the onset of the mass murder of European Jewry by the Nazi regime after its invasion of the Soviet Union.

Educating the next generation about  the Holocaust in the Former Soviet Union

Yad Vashem opens exhibition 80 years since Operation Barbarossa

A new online exhibition tells unpublished accounts of Jewish families caught up in the horror of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union and the onset of the Holocaust.

The Bernstein Family from Ylakiai in Lithuania during the Holocaust.

New book explores Hillel's rebuilding Jewish life in former Soviet Union

Sprinkled throughout the book are many vignettes that illustrate Hillel’s approaches.

EX-SOVIET dissident and then-minister Natan Sharansky (left) meets in Moscow with mayor Yuri Luzhkov, 1997. The book covers Hillel’s efforts to build Jewish activism among Sharansky’s successors in the former USSR in the 1990s, subsequent to his making aliyah.

Isi Leibler reflects on a lifetime of leadership

“In my twilight years, I look back and say I’ve been privileged to live through one of the most tumultuous and rewarding periods in Jewish history."

Isi Leibler.

Deciding life or death: Polish Jews and the wartime Soviet Union dilemma

Become modified Soviet citizens (which effectively required them to leave the area) or retain Polish citizenship and return to the territory controlled by Germany?

THE SOLOVETSKY Monastery in northern Russia is known as the ‘mother of the Gulag,’ having been converted into a Soviet prison and labor camp and used as a model for other such camps during the Stalin era

The surprising story of Jewish revival in the Former Soviet Union

Russia itself and also included Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Uzbekistan and Georgia have seen an increase in Hillel centers.

Soviet Jews and Jewish traditions

70 Brooklyn yeshivas supported by laundered money - report

Since the early 2000s, two Miami businessmen have run a "commercial empire," as Radio Free Europe report puts it, answering to the Ukranian-Israeli billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyy.

Ihor Kolomoyskyy speaks during an interview in Dnipropetrovsk May 24, 2014.

George Shultz hailed by Jewish leaders for helping free Soviet Jews

“He felt a special bond to the American Jewish community. Everyone could sense his humility, his integrity, the sincerity of his views, and his commitment and support for Israel."

George Shultz, with book, at a 2017 Limmud FSU conference with, from left to right, Julius Berman, Natan Sharansky and Chaim Chesler.

Isi Leibler: A man with many missions

Leibler is arguably best known in Australia for championing the cause of Soviet Jewry.

AUSTRALIAN RELATIONS with the Soviets: Soviet ambassador Vitaly Loginov presents his credentials to the governor-general at Government House, Canberra, in 1963.