What "vindictive little man?" You and others here are very good at changing the subject.
A Rabbi of long standing in the community translates a seminal Jewish text, gets called by Moscow prosecutors to defend it against spurious charges, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev says, ""To take a traditional Jewish text and try to ban it reminds us of the official state-sponsored anti-Semitism that we saw in czarist Russia," and you attribute it to occupational jealousy?
What distortion is this?
The text in question is fundamental to Orthodox Judaism and needs no defense. The Chabad in Russia should be uniting against this attack on Judaism. I hope the Shulchan Aruch is greater than petty squabbling over secular positions.
What's amazing is the degrees some go to and with whom they get in bed just to bad mouth a country.
The text in question is a Reformed rewriting of the text that is offensive to the Orthodox Jews.
MOSCOW, Russia - Looking out from his sixteenth-floor office in a Moscow skyscraper, Arsen Revazov can hardly believe that this is a country where it was once illegal to learn Hebrew or celebrate Passover.
He emigrated to Israel 15 years ago — one of a million Jews who fled the Soviet Union to escape institutionalised anti-Semitism and economic stagnation. But today he is back in Moscow — with his wife and two children — living an openly Jewish life and running an advertising business. “I just realised that there were so many more opportunities in Russia than in Israel. It is like the difference between New York and Arizona,” Mr Revazov, 38, told The Times. “Almost all my friends in Israel have come back, too.”
An estimated 100,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past few years, sparking a dramatic renaissance of Jewish life in a country with a long history of anti-Semitism.
President Putin will cement Russia’s new relationship with its Jewish community today when he begins the first visit to Israel by a Soviet or Russian leader.
“This sends a message to the world that the Moscow-Arab coalition is over,” Berl Lazar, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, said. “It’s eerie that it is happening at Passover. Here, during our holiday, the Russian President is visiting the Holy Land.”
The Soviet Union was one of the first states to recognise Israel in 1948, but later severed ties and backed Arab regimes to balance US support for Jerusalem.
Relations were reopened in 1987, when President Gorbachev allowed Soviet Jews to emigrate. Roughly one in four Israelis is now of Russian origin.
Five years ago, Rabbi Lazar opened a seven-storey, $20 million (?10.5 million) Jewish centre with a synagogue, swimming pool and kosher restaurant, built mostly with donations from abroad. Last year, work started on a bigger, $100 million complex, including a school, a medical centre and Russia’s first Jewish museum, using funds mostly raised in Russia. The land was given by Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, in the clearest sign yet of government support.
“At first people were afraid to give their names to the centre. They had had enough trouble in the past,” Rabbi Lazar said. “Today, being Jewish here is like anywhere else in the world.”