Crime? and punishment

A cool response greeted the talk given by Dr. Alek Epstein, a young sociologist from the Institute for Zionist Strategies and the Open University. He spoke at a panel discussion on Israeli racism held last month in Ashdod during an annual symposium on immigration and immigrant absorption.

"There is no problem of racism in Israel against former residents of the Soviet Union. That is something that does not exist, and it is impossible to accuse Israeli society of something that does not exist," said the Moscow-born academic, who immigrated to Israel 20 years ago.

"On the contrary," he continued. "I think the racism among Russian immigrants against Israeli society, and particularly against the Mizrahim [Jews of Middle Eastern or North African origin], is far greater. People who vote for [Avigdor] Lieberman are more racist than those who vote for Tzipi Livni or Likud."

A slight stir was detectable within the audience, most of whom were from the former Soviet Union. After the symposium, some praised Epstein for his analysis, while others decried him for turning his back on his community of origin. "They said I was infuriating," Epstein said this week, "that I was harming the community I represent."

The indictment filed last November against Damian Karlik, who is charged with the October murder of the Oshrenko family in Rishon Letzion, quickly became the indictment of an entire community. The savage murder of the six family members - grandmother and grandfather, parents and two small children - in effect released the so-called ethnic genie from the bottle. Or, as popular journalist and Channel 2 television presenter Yair Lapid put it on the Friday night after the police declared the crime solved, the ethnic genie "burst out of a bottle of vodka."

Ethnic slurs against immigrants from the former Soviet Union were heard in living-room conversations on Friday nights and in public. Calls to change the Law of Return surfaced again, and the Jewish immigrants railed against those who are gentiles according to religious law.

The vicious campaign actually began a day after the murder, when the press speculated that the incident may have been a liquidation typical of Caucasus vendettas. In no time, terms such as "Caucasus mafia" and "Russian mafia" were being bandied about, intensified by the coverage of the murder, not long afterward, of businessman and former Russian spy Shabtai Kalmanovich in Moscow.

Adding fuel to the flames, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, former leader of the Shas party, asserted: "I warned that bringing the goys from Russia would cause serious problems. There are murderers here, there are anti-Semites who persecute Jews."

The news announcer character on the satirical television program "A Wonderful Country" stated that for the time being, there was a gag order on publishing the names of the murder suspects, "so all we can do is guess whether it's Boris or Vladimir."

Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver decried the "witch hunt" that had overtaken public discourse following the Oshrenko murders, and the Knesset's Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs and Education Committees met to discuss ways to stop the delegitimization of the immigrant community.

"Twenty years have passed," said MK Lia Shemtov (Yisrael Beiteinu), "but the immigrants remain immigrants."

In January, when the furor seemed to have abated and the public's attention was turned elsewhere, another murder sparked similar headlines: According to an indictment filed in the Petah Tikva District Court, Andrei Luschenkov, 25, of Yavneh, stabbed his good friend, Sergei Kolesnikov, 12 times after consuming alcohol, then locked the murdered man's mother the apartment and raped her over the course of a day.

As for the public mood in regard to this immigrant community, sociologist Epstein says: "Don't you think that the chain of murders in the past few months is a little more grim than the mood against the Russian public?"

Media inflation

Shortly after the police announced they had solved the Oshrenko murders, Channel 2 reported on a public-opinion survey conducted by the Geocartographia Institute, which found that 61 percent of respondents thought new immigrants from the FSU were more likely to be involved in serious crimes than people of other backgrounds; 70 percent agreed that the immigrants tend to consume alcohol, which leads to involvement in violent incidents. But in contrast to these perceptions and the prevailing atmosphere, other statistical data reveal a different picture about the involvement of these immigrants in crime.

At the Ashdod conference mentioned above, Maj.-Gen. Yohanan Danino, chief of the Southern District of the Israel Police, stated that the large wave of immigration from the FSU had not increased the scale of crime in the country. Danino noted that last year, of 160,000 criminal cases, 24,000 involved suspicions against new immigrants from the FSU or Ethiopia - which constitutes 15 percent of the total, and is similar to the proportion of new immigrants in the population.

Last March, a comprehensive study of crime statistics in Israel from 1980 to 2007 was concluded by Prof. Arye Rattner, from the University of Haifa's Center for the Study of Crime, Law and Society, and by Prof. Gideon Fishman, a sociologist and criminologist who is currently president of Western Galilee College. They found that the influx of new immigrants from the FSU has not increased violent crime in Israel in a way that is disproportionate to their ratio of the population. However, a different trend emerges from an examination of crimes committed by juveniles aged 12 to 18: Here, these immigrants are over-represented in terms of their proportion in the population.

"When we embarked on the study," Rattner said this week, "there was a background assumption which held, at least according to the public mood and perception, that the involvement of immigrants from the FSU would exceed their share of the population. We discovered that the real situation is almost the very opposite. We saw that from 1989 when the big wave of immigrants arrived, until 2007, their representation in violent crimes ranged between 14 and 16 percent for most of the period, when at the peak they constituted 20 percent of the population."

Among the young population, the situation is different: In 2001, for example, youngsters from the former Soviet Union constituted 11 percent of all the country's youth population, but were involved in 18 percent of the crimes committed by that age group.

"The picture we get," Rattner explains, "is that among the adult population, entry into Israeli society is normal. They undergo difficulties of integration, but most of them are sufficiently resilient to cope with the problems. On the other hand, among the youth the difficulties of integration cause them to drop out of school, abandon social circles and slide into crime."

The findings of the Rattner-Fishman study are consistent with those of the Anti-Drug Authority. Its latest study, for 2009, found worrisome data about the drinking and substance-abuse culture of Israeli youth in general and immigrant youth in particular: 16.5 percent of the latter, who attend school, use illegal drugs, as compared to 9 percent of Israeli-born youth. Moreover, 44.5 percent of immigrant youths reported being drunk in the past year - 10 percent more than their Israeli-born peers.

"We discovered from other questions as well that incidents of drinking to excess are more frequent among the immigrants," says Dr. Rachel Bar-Hamburger, chief scientist of the authority, who helped conduct research. "Another study found that one of the main reasons for heavy drinking among immigrant youth is identity related: whether they feel Israeli or not. That is very important for them. Those who did not feel integrated into the society tended toward more extreme behavior."

Alex Kogan, editor of the local Russian-language paper IzRus, noted the serious prejudice against the new-immigrant community acutely after the murder of the Oshrenko family, but also before.

"Six months ago," he related this week, "there was a wave of reports about a group of Russian hackers who entered computers illegally and stole money. One day, as I was on my way to work on the train, I opened my laptop and also spoke in Russian on my cellular phone. A woman sitting across from me started to shout: 'You Russians with your computers are all thieves.' She went on shouting and then moved to a different seat. I am 35 years old and able to cope with that kind of response, but I think older people would find it difficult."

Kogan points an accusing finger at the Israeli media: "All kinds of experts about Caucasus, Bukhara and Azerbaijan mafias have sprung up in the local press," he notes. "The headlines screamed that beheading is typical of Russian mafia methods. The newspapers made terrible mistakes. Did anyone stop to think about how this might affect someone with origins in the Caucasus, who was on the way to work that morning?"

But as a journalist, could you ignore the fact that the murderers and their victims came from the FSU?

Kogan: "A month ago, there was a shocking incident in which two pedophiles from Moshav Bnei Ayish - the Sudmi twins - murdered a boy. Did anyone take an interest in their ethnic origin? Their family history? Imagine what would happen if experts on Moroccan crime were brought in to analyze the phenomenon of the Abutbul [crime] family. All told, a bizarre situation has been created in which, even though the police statistics show there has been no increase in Russian crime, the media noise about it has increased."

"The phenomenon of excess violence among new immigrants is nonexistent," agrees Dr. Ze'ev Khanin, chief scientist of the Immigrant Absorption Ministry, who teaches political sociology at Bar-Ilan University. "What does exist is the stigmatization of the immigrant public. According to the stigma, these immigrants brought prostitution, alcoholism and crime, which were not previously known here."

Why has this stigma attached itself to the Russian-speaking population?

Khanin: "There were several criminal cases that shocked the country recently, but this was a coincidence. I think that instead of looking for the root of the problem in terms of the sociological aspects, people took the easy way out by blaming the Russian population. The Israeli public is influenced by various social crises - due to the Second Lebanon War, the war in Gaza, economic and political uncertainty, etc. Israeli society tends to search externally for the cause of problems, instead of looking for the reason internally. So, obviously, the accusing finger points to the last wave of immigration. It's a kind of semi-xenophobia."

Khanin also blames the media for inflating the subject beyond rational bounds: "After the murder of the Oshrenko family, one headline declared that the perpetrators were from the Caucasus mafia in Tajikistan. We didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Tajikistan is in Central Asia and not in the Caucasus. An entire article in a respectable newspaper was devoted to Russian-style methods of beheading people - from left to right or from right to left. It was absolutely appalling."

Codes and stigmas

Still the question remains: Is there so-called "Russian crime" in Israel? "We were all shocked by the cruelty," says Alex Kagansky, head of the Israel Police desk for the former Soviet Union.

"Those crimes - [allegedly] perpetrated by Karlik and by Luschenkov - are exceptional deviations even in the criminal world. It is impossible to say that such cruelty is a phenomenon, or something that characterizes criminals from the FSU. Regrettably, there is no shortage of cruel incidents that have nothing to do with these immigrants. We have more than 10 crime organizations in Israel, and to date we have not discerned any organization that is Russian or is managed according to different or more cruel codes. There are criminals from the FSU who belong to the organizations, but they have a junior rank."

Kagansky himself immigrated to Israel 20 years ago. "At that time," he relates, "I and dozens like me were recruited in order to eradicate all the byproducts of the wave of immigration. These days I'm also fighting stigmas."

Some lawyers who represent major criminals do see a difference between criminals from the FSU and the "local" breed, and their views are backed up by police investigators.

"I do believe that some crime reflects Russian cultural traits," says criminologist Gabi Orgal, who until 2003 was head of the Israel Police unit of investigative psychology. Under him, psychological elements were integrated in investigations and criminal profiles were created.

"These are older people, like Damian Karlik, who go on behaving here according to the criminal pattern they brought from there," Orgal says, adding that in the early 1990s, after the big wave of immigration from the FSU, he and his colleagues found themselves dealing with crime of a different type. "We were exposed to crime that we knew very little about. We tried to learn about and understand it."

Were there differences between the Israeli criminals you came into contact with and those from the former Soviet Union?

Orgal: "There was greater cruelty. The first case that rocked me was the murder of the grandmother and the grandson in Ramat Aviv, when the victims were beheaded [in May 1995]. Moreover, the murderer attended their funeral, just as in the Karlik case. Until then we were used to murderers fleeing the scene and not going to the funeral. At the time, I tried to get a handle on what caused this behavior there. Did the element of cruelty take root because of the harsh living conditions, the government's attitude, contempt for human life?

"Most of the horrific crimes we dealt with," he continues, "occurred within the Russian community; they did not use these methods against others. There were also the Satanic Cult gangs, most of whose members were new immigrants. In Haifa there was a series of murders of homeless people in 2005. The perpetrator, Nicolai Bonner, who was also homeless, would drink with someone and it would end in murder. I don't remember any case in which a homeless Israeli murdered other homeless Israelis. When Russian criminals did hook up with Israeli crime, they did not bring the cruelty with them, but accepted the behavior of the Israeli criminals.

"There is a large emotional element in Russian crime; a great deal of it involves honor. Once the goal - revenge, liquidation - has been 'achieved,' that's the end and it's followed by a confession to the police. As investigators, our expectation had been that those from the Russian regime would hold out in interrogations and not cooperate. To our surprise, most of them confessed. Most of the crimes were solved without any great sophistication and without complicated investigative methods."

Attorney Daniel Haklay represents Rastislav Boguslavsky, 20, who is accused of murdering two homeless people two years ago near his home in the Petah Tikva market, and also of killing hundreds of cats. Haklay also represents a minor who belongs to a neo-Nazi group.

Haklay: "Groups of neo-Nazi youth are a phenomenon that sprang up with the wave of immigration. The profiles of these youths, and of Boguslavsky, too, show that they were all rejected. They all underwent social abuse by sabras [native-born Israelis]. These are youths who are confused about their identity. The neo-Nazi group came into being here not because these kids think Hitler was a saint, but out of hatred for Israeli society, which rejected them."

Haklay also represents Angelica Yusupov, who was sentenced at age 18 to 18 years in prison for helping her terrorist boyfriend Zeid Kiliani plant bombs in Tel Aviv in 2001.

"Yusupov is another case in which we pushed a person to the margins," Haklay explains. "She is a normative girl, but her family had a very hard time here, and at 18 she fell in love with a Palestinian, a terrorist, and helped him plant bombs. Her feeling of being rejected was so powerful that she found herself helping a terrorist."

'Pioneering' group

Immigrants from the FSU are hardly the first newcomers to Israel who have suffered from negative stereotypes. Indeed, there is almost no immigrant group in the country that was not subjected to such prejudice, which is often tied to the criminal realm. Just ask an Israeli of Moroccan and Romanian origin.

"In every immigrant society, the last group to arrive is the object of the frustration of the previous immigrant groups," says sociology professor and Israel Prize laureate Moshe Lissak from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "Both the immigrants on the Mizrahi side and the Ashkenazi side were barraged with stereotypes beyond all proportion, and it is the same with the Russian immigration."

Unusually, however, the relatively small group of immigrants that arrived from the Soviet Union in the 1970s - a total of about 180,000 - was not victimized in that way. "That was a wave of immigration that succeeded in evading the stereotypes, and was even viewed with honor as a 'pioneering' group," Lissak adds. "The big immigration of the 1990s 'compensated' for that, and has been the butt of many negative stereotypes, especially in the past decade."

According to Lissak, the fact that under religious law some of the new arrivals are not Jews has contributed to their negative labeling: "Some people take a negative and stereotypical attitude toward non-Jews. This also fits in well with crime. When there is an event such as the murder of the Oshrenko family, the first reaction by the public is that they probably think the murderer is not a Jew."

So, a few serious criminal cases raise the bar of negative stereotyping toward an entire population group.

Lissak: "Yes, and there is also the whole mafia ethos and myth. Russia is a land of mafias. That is historically accurate, though not in the Jewish context, rather in the intra-Russian context. When people from Central Asia or from regions like Caucasus come here, there is confusion in the press and leaks and insinuations from all kinds of sources - and the result is a truly terrible stereotype."

Will the phenomenon abate?

"That is a function of time. There are some immigrant communities to which the stereotype remains for many years. With time, the stereotype declines - grows softer and more detached from reality - but it still exists. There is no comparing the intensity, the passion and the militancy of the stereotyping of the Moroccan community in the 1950s with [the way they are viewed] today. As the years pass, we deal more with the individual and not with sweeping generalizations. You know, if the case with the Sudmi twins had happened 20-30 years ago, everyone would have been wondering: 'What happened to the Yemenite community? How did such a nice immigrant population suddenly produce pedophiles?'"

Prof. Eli Leshem, from the Hebrew University and the social work department at the Ariel University Center of Samaria, has studied the social integration of immigrants from the FSU. In the 20 years since the big influx, he says, the Israeli public's attitude toward them has oscillated sharply.

"At the outset of the wave of immigration, in 1989 and 1990, the Israeli public showed a positive approach," Leshem says. "Whoever didn't come off the plane carrying a violin, people said, must be a pianist. But as the mass of arrivals became larger, Israelis felt more threatened. This wasn't just in the periphery, but among [educated] professionals, too: physicians, engineers. The quantities and qualities also posed a threat to the elites. We see that negative views of the immigrants appeared quite quickly.

"Another element that distinguishes the immigrants from the former Soviet Union," Leshem continues, "is the hostility toward them on the part of the national-religious public, a group that generally welcomes new immigrants. The reason is that about a third of the newcomers are not Jews under religious law. Surveys we conducted found particular hostility toward the immigrants on the part of the women in the national-religious public."

A decade later, the stigmatization started to abate. The big change for the better, Leshem observes, occurred in 2001, not long after the start of the second intifada. "A considerable portion of those killed [in the army] were sons of immigrants from the FSU ... soldiers in the Givati infantry brigade and in other combat units. In June 2001, we all grieved after the terrorist attack at the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv, in which 22 young people [most of them immigrants from the FSU] were killed - an event that evoked the term 'covenant of blood' between the immigrant community and the Israeli public. So, after 10 years, that public began to get a perspective, to become aware of the cultural, scientific and military contribution of the Russian immigration."

Leshem emphasizes that in public opinion surveys, despite the positive shift in the past decade, there is still much apprehension about the immigrants' influence in two spheres: crime and politics.

"When all is said and done," he says, "there will be more murders and the newspapers will always need headlines. When we look ahead, we see that the immigrants from the FSU have produced physicians, scientists, orchestras and one Anna Aronov [winner of this season's 'Dancing with the Stars' competition on Channel 2] ... The work must go on: We have to help those with potential, cultivate the gifted and establish social services for the weak population groups, and not look for headlines."

Does anyone have an interest in continuing to fuel hatred?

Leshem: "I think the panic is fed more by political interests and less by the actual situation. There are political groups that think it is very important not to take a definite position [so as not to upset] their constituency. Every so often, an issue has to be found that will give [Russian-language] Channel 9 and the Russian press something to talk about. If we try to maintain silence on the subject ... [eventually] the immigrants will vote like the rest of the Israelis."

Alek Epstein agrees. "We are all the same society here," he says. "Maybe education will help. Not education for a homogeneous society, though, because we are not a homogeneous society. The Russians should learn what the Arabs, the Moroccans and the Ethiopians contributed to humanity - and vice versa. Maybe something will come of it - instead of mutual accusations of racism."

Doesn't the casual talk that attributes alcoholism and disproportionate crime to the Russian public bother you?

Epstein: "All the perpetrators of those crimes are from the FSU. It is impossible to deny that. You can't tell journalists not to write that they are from there. You can't tell people in the street not to mention that Damian Karlik is a murderer from the Soviet Union. We are a large group and we have an extensive community infrastructure, and the community knows how to protect itself, though sometimes, I would say, too much." W