Once, during a literature lesson in sixth or seventh grade, in around 1981, a note was passed to me from the back of the classroom. It was a sheet of paper ripped from a composition book. “To the Jew from the Russians” (“evreiu ot russkikh”) was scribbled in Russian on the front of the folded…
(JTA) — On the rooftop of a Soviet-era apartment block, a young man straps into climbing gear and rappels down the side as a small gathering of city workers and police officers watch from below. On the way down, the climber stops at a balcony and tears loose one of the thousands of banners hung…
Jewish staffers for the campaign of Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny have denied reports that he praised the Holocaust. “To my knowledge, he never made the statement attributed to him,” Maxim Katz, deputy director of the Navalny campaign for the September 8 mayoral election, told JTA Tuesday. Katz, a 29-year-old Moscovite local politician who had…
Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a years-long spat with the United States over thousands of Jewish religious writings should end now that some are on display in Moscow’s new Jewish museum. Russia has resisted calls to return the so-called Schneerson collection to the New York-based Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group, descendants of the last private owner…
Forward Looking Back brings you the stories that were making news in the Forward’s Yiddish paper 100, 75, and 50 years ago. Check back each week for a new set of illluminating, edifying and sometimes wacky clippings from the Jewish past. 100 Years Ago 1913 Morris Lustig, who was sent to death row at Sing…
Why does Chabad want the Schneerson Library back so badly? While researching this week’s story recounting the latest twists in Chabad’s decades-long struggle for the library, several people offered various explanations. Somehow, they seemed too speculative to include in the story — but interesting enough to raise here. Rabbi Berel Levin, the chief librarian of…
Tens of thousands of people, some denouncing President Vladimir Putin as a “child-killer”, marched through Moscow on Sunday to protest against a ban on Americans adopting Russian children. Wrapped in hats and coats against the bitter cold, the protesters shouted “Russia without Putin!” and “Putin is a child-killer!” as they streamed down the city’s Boulevard…
Lenin, his sister said, “always thought highly of the Jews” — and with good reason, since he apparently had Jewish ancestry. That, at least, is the claim being put forward at a recently opened exhibit at the State Historical Museum in Moscow, where the founding ruler of the Soviet Union is revealed to have had…
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