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The Russians are coming - for real
By Raphael Ahren

One panel planned for this year's UJC General Assembly, in Washington, D.C., is titled "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming ... Wait, They're Here!" That begs the questions: Are they really? Where are they hiding? Russian Jews have changed the face of every societythey immigrated to in significant numbers, like Israel and Germany. Yet they seem to be utterly absent from the higher echelons of the Jewish community in America.

"The expectations Americans had of Jews from the former Soviet Union - and the expectations the immigrants had of the communities they were coming to - were quite mismatched," says Misha Galperin, executive vice president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, and the only native Russian-speaker at the helm of a major North American Jewish organization. Concerted efforts to involve them in communal life were only successful in places with large concentrations of Russian Jews, like New York, he added.
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"The Russians were more interested in integrating, and in ensuring their families were well provided for," Galperin adds. "Their Jewish identities, in a variety of ways, were quite different from those of [native] Americans or what Americans had expected they were going to be like."

Nobody knows exactly how many Russian-born Jewish live in the U.S. today. Estimates range from less than 500,000 to over 750,000. Out of the two million Jews who left the Soviet Union, about a million came to Israel, while the rest settled in the U.S., Germany and elsewhere, according to Sam Kliger, the American Jewish Committee's director of Russian-Jewish community affairs.

Russians are underrepresented in American-Jewish philanthropic projects because they fear the money will not go to the right cause, says Kliger. "They don't trust the establishment." Eventually this will change, he adds, but veteran American Jews have to do their part. "Russians are giving. They are giving less than the American Jews, and they are giving to those whom they trust, and that's a problem. The American-Jewish establishment should build the trust and then they will get the money."

It is just a matter of a decade or two before Russian Jews begin taking over leadership roles, several American-Jewish officials told Haaretz. Rabbi Marc Schneier, who recently hosted a Limmud event for Russian-speakers, estimates it might take 25 years until Russian Americans will be as involved in communal affairs as their Israeli counterparts are already. "As Jewish a city as New York is," he suggests about the delay, "there are ways of disconnecting from the Jewish community. In Israel, you can't escape being Jewish, so you are immediately consumed [by a desire to be involved] It is the new generation - those who were born in the U.S. - that will break out and assume leadership roles and positions."

The first signs of change can already been seen, observers say. "The second generation is still identifying as Russian Jews - even though their first language is English - and they are beginning to make a lot of impact in a lot of places," Galperin says. Two recent examples are Alec Brook-Krasny, who in 2006 became the first Russian Jew elected to the New York State Assembly, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who a few weeks ago donated $1 million to the Jewish organization that helped his family escape to the U.S.
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