Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Stunning Reality TV Star Wins ‘Miss Jewish Star’ Pageant

Linor Shefer, an Israeli-American reality television star who was born in Ukraine, won Moscow’s first “Miss Jewish Star” beauty pageant.

Shefer, a former contender in the Israeli version of the reality television show “Big Brother,” beat 19 other contestants to become Miss Jewish Star 2014 on Sunday in Moscow’s Metropol Hotel, according to the STMEGI association of Mountain Jews.

The pageant was sponsored by over a dozen companies and groups including the Russian branch of the Hillel Jewish network and was open to any unmarried woman under the age of 30 who is Jewish according to Halacha, the Jewish Orthodox law.

The second and third places went to Emma Tabachnikova from Ukraine and Marianne Golushkin from Uzbekistan, the Israeli Russian-language news site haifa.vibirai.ru reported.

Shefer, 29, moved with her family to Karmiel in Israel’s north when she was five from the city of Berdychiv in northern Ukraine. She moved to Los Angeles in 2006 to work in show business, using her U.S. citizenship. She also lived in New York and worked in real estate before moving back to Israel to be with her family. She served in the Israel Air Force.

In the United States, Shefer volunteered to strengthen inter-communal ties within U.S. Jewry by participating in the activities of the Russian American Jewish Experience.

Before entering Big Brother earlier this year, she began volunteering in Israel.

“I hope to complement my work for Jewish communities in Israel and in the United States with more work for Jews in Russia and elsewhere, to help Jewish values grow in young people today,” she said in a statement about the pageant.

Shefer was selected as the winner by a jury of four people, including Dorit Golender, Israeli ambassador to Russia, according to the pageant’s website.

Winners will receive prizes selected for them by the sponsors, the competition’s charter said, but it did not specify what they are.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.