According to him, the iron curtain is coming down again.

The former chief rabbi of Moscow, Pinchas Goldschmidt, called on Jews to leave Russia while they still can, before they are “made scapegoats for the hardships caused by the war in Ukraine.”

In an interview with The Guardian, Goldschmidt called leaving the best option for Russian Jews. According to him, there is an increase in anti-Semitism in the country, Russia itself is returning to a new type of the Soviet Union, and the iron curtain is being lowered step by step again.

“When we look back at Russian history, every time the political system was in danger, you saw how the government tried to redirect the anger and discontent of the masses to the Jewish community. We saw it during the tsarist times and at the end of the Stalinist regime,” he said. .

He also said that he resigned and left Russia after refusing to support a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“Community leaders were pressured to support the war, and I refused to do so. I resigned because continuing to work as the chief rabbi of Moscow would be a problem for the community due to the repressive measures taken against dissidents,” he added. Goldschmidt.

What preceded it

As reported, in the spring Russian Foreign Minister Serhii Lavrov compared Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Hitler. He publicly stated that Adolf Hitler had “Jewish blood” and that “the staunchest anti-Semites are, as a rule, Jews.”

After that, the Russians declared that the Israeli government was on a course “to support the ‘neo-Nazi regime’ in Kyiv.”

In the summer, information appeared in the mass media that Goldschmidt left Russia after the authorities demanded that he publicly support the war in Ukraine.

In July, it was reported that the Russian government demands to stop the work of the Jewish Agency on the territory of the Russian Federation, which deals with the repatriation of Jews to Israel.