After 33 years of sweat and tears, Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt chooses exile over support for Putin’s war

Photos: Yisroel Tesser, Ari Holzer, Eli Itkin, Menachem Kozlovsky

A Painful Parting

IT was the night of February 23, and longtime Moscow chief rabbi Rav Pinchas Goldschmidt went to sleep at home; the next morning he woke up in a foreign country.

This wasn’t another long-haul trip for one of the most influential Jewish leaders in Europe, who has practiced diplomacy from the Gulf to America.

It was because the country he had known for 33 years — from the twilight of the Soviet Union to the heights of the Putin era — had disappeared overnight.

That morning, as Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine and Spetsnaz special forces tried to seize Kviv’s airport, the Kremlin moved decisively to end the last vestiges of freedom across Russia.

Thousands of anti-war protesters were rounded up, independent media outlets were shut down, and religious leaders were press-ganged into supporting the Kremlin’s aggression.

“It was like going to sleep in Moscow and waking up in Tehran,” says Rabbi Goldschmidt. “The old Russia had gone.”

So, two weeks later, the Goldschmidts — who’d arrived as an idealistic young couple back when Jewish life in Russia was still heavily circumscribed — locked their home for the last time, unloaded two suitcases at the airport, and headed for Eastern Europe to be with the Jewish refugees flooding out of Ukraine.

The next few weeks were spent visiting different groups of refugees, scrambling to raise funds for the tens of thousands of Jews suddenly left shell-shocked and homeless, while trying to gain a foothold in their new lives.

Even four months later and with Russia now more isolated than it’s been for a century, Rabbi Goldschmidt can’t move on from the place that he called home for so long. He now shuttles between his new home in Jerusalem,  Europe and America, trying to raise awareness for the plight of Russia’s Jews.

“Ukrainian Jews are receiving massive help — and rightly so,” he says. “But the far larger Russian Jewish community is in deep trouble. Sanctions on the oligarchs who supported the network of institutions have slashed funding, and there’s a sense of fear now.”

That’s why for the first time since he left, Rabbi Goldschmidt is telling his story — one that in some ways, is that of modern Russia itself.

As foreigners, the highs and lows of the Goldschmidts’ life in Moscow have been a bellwether of the government’s relationship with the outside world — warm under Yeltsin, fraught under the current government.

But even as the door closes on a life at the center of the post-Soviet Jewish renaissance, the Swiss-born rabbi is clear that the decision to come down on the side of the victims was the right one.