WASHINGTON (AP)
A federal judge ordered Russia on Thursday to preserve sacred religious documents that members of a Hasidic Jewish movement fear could be headed to the black market.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a restraining order telling Russia to protect the documents and return any that may already have been removed from the Russian State Military Archives.
The order comes in a lawsuit filed by members of Chabad-Lubavitch, which follows the teachings of Eastern European rabbis and emphasizes the study of the Torah. The group is suing Russia in U.S. court to recover thousands of manuscripts, prayers, lectures and philosophical discourses by leading rabbis dating back to the 18th century.
An attorney for the movement, Nathan Lewin, told the judge Thursday that during a visit to Israel last month he learned that pages from the handwritten archive were shown to an expert in Jerusalem. The expert, a former university librarian, had been asked to confirm the documents' authenticity and was led to believe that they were going to be offered for sale.
The entire collection, which Chabad says totals 12,000 books and 50,000 rare documents, is being held in the Russian State Military Archives. Lewin said Chabad fears the documents are not being properly cared for and could end up missing.
The collection was formerly held by Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, a leader of Chabad-Lubavitch who was born in Russia but forced by the Soviets to leave in 1927. He took the documents to Latvia and later Poland, but left them behind when the Nazis invaded and he fled to the U.S. The collection was seized and taken to Germany, then recovered by the Soviet Army in 1945.
Lewin asked Lamberth to order Russia to allow a delegation from Chabad to inspect the collection at the Russian library and ensure that they are being properly secured.
Lamberth also warned Russia that the government faces a default ruling in the case if it does not get new lawyers to represent them in the U.S. court.
The law firm representing Russia has asked to withdraw from the case because they say their client has not paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills and no longer communicates with them.
The law firm says government representatives have refused to take their calls, respond to memos about the case or see an attorney who traveled to Moscow for a face-to-face meeting. Attorneys for Russia said they did not know whether any documents were removed from the collection since the Russian government is not talking to them.
Lamberth told Chabad that he did not think that he could order a sovereign government like Russia to accept foreigners into the country and encouraged them to explore other methods of reviewing the collection, such as hiring attorneys already in Moscow.
Lamberth agreed to take the case in U.S. court because he said both the Nazi seizure and the Russian government's appropriation of the archives violated international law.
Members of Chabad also say that they are asking the Obama administration to intervene to get the documents returned.
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Russia. Show all posts
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Squires Sanders Seeks to Withdraw as Counsel to Russia in Sacred Jewish Text Case
By Andrew Longstreth
January 22, 2009
Last June, we reported on a case filed against the Russian Federation by members of Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement that seeks to reclaim sacred religious texts allegedly stolen by Russia's government. After a D.C. federal district court judge dismissed some of Chabad's claims, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated them, allowing the case to move forward.
But since then, things apparently have not gone so well between Russia and its lawyers at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. Last week, the firm filed a motion requesting to withdraw as Russia's counsel in the case. Squire Sanders lawyers cite a "breakdown in communications" with their client, alleging that the Russians repeatedly ignored their request for instructions in how to proceed. They also say they haven't been paid, and claim that Russia has been in default on its legal bills since April 2008. (Their papers don't say by how much.) A Squire Sanders spokesperson declined comment to the Litigation Daily.
The case, meanwhile, continues. On Thursday, Washington, D.C., federal district court judge Royce Lamberth indicated he would grant a temporary restraining order requested by the plaintiffs, who had alleged that Russia planned to sell some of the sacred texts at issue in Israel. According to the AP, Judge Lamberth said he would order Russia to protect and retrieve any documents that may have been removed from the Russian State Military Archives.
The plaintiffs in the case are represented by Nathan Lewin of Lewin & Lewin. Lawyers from Bingham McCutchen and Howrey are also working on the case with Lewin.
January 22, 2009
Last June, we reported on a case filed against the Russian Federation by members of Chabad-Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement that seeks to reclaim sacred religious texts allegedly stolen by Russia's government. After a D.C. federal district court judge dismissed some of Chabad's claims, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated them, allowing the case to move forward.
But since then, things apparently have not gone so well between Russia and its lawyers at Squire, Sanders & Dempsey. Last week, the firm filed a motion requesting to withdraw as Russia's counsel in the case. Squire Sanders lawyers cite a "breakdown in communications" with their client, alleging that the Russians repeatedly ignored their request for instructions in how to proceed. They also say they haven't been paid, and claim that Russia has been in default on its legal bills since April 2008. (Their papers don't say by how much.) A Squire Sanders spokesperson declined comment to the Litigation Daily.
The case, meanwhile, continues. On Thursday, Washington, D.C., federal district court judge Royce Lamberth indicated he would grant a temporary restraining order requested by the plaintiffs, who had alleged that Russia planned to sell some of the sacred texts at issue in Israel. According to the AP, Judge Lamberth said he would order Russia to protect and retrieve any documents that may have been removed from the Russian State Military Archives.
The plaintiffs in the case are represented by Nathan Lewin of Lewin & Lewin. Lawyers from Bingham McCutchen and Howrey are also working on the case with Lewin.
Russians ordered to preserve Chabad documents
January 22, 2009
NEW YORK (JTA)
A federal judge ordered Russia to preserve historic documents sought by members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said Thursday he will order Russia to preserve the documents and return any that already may have been removed from state archives, The Associated Press reported.
Chabad is suing Russia to recover thousands of books and documents that belonged to the late Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the father-in-law of the last Chabad leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994.
The judge also warned Russia that it could face a default ruling in the case if does not bring in new lawyers. Russia's current firm asked to withdraw from the case, saying that the government has failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
NEW YORK (JTA)
A federal judge ordered Russia to preserve historic documents sought by members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said Thursday he will order Russia to preserve the documents and return any that already may have been removed from state archives, The Associated Press reported.
Chabad is suing Russia to recover thousands of books and documents that belonged to the late Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, the father-in-law of the last Chabad leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994.
The judge also warned Russia that it could face a default ruling in the case if does not bring in new lawyers. Russia's current firm asked to withdraw from the case, saying that the government has failed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills.
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Russia chief rabbi: Repeal Jackson-Vanik
Russia's chief Chabad rabbi castigated the United States for its refusal to repeal the Jackson-Vanik amendment.
In an interview published Wednesday in a Russian newspaper, Rabbi Berel Lazar said the only reasoning behind retaining the amendment was political and that it's usefulness had long ago passed.
The Cold War-era measure places restrictions on countries that do not allow their citizens to freely emigrate. Enacted 33 years ago, it was targeted at alleviating the constraints on Jewish intellectuals.
Jackson-Vanik, named for the two major co-sponsors in the U.S. Congress, remains in place for Russia and several other former Soviet countries, preventing their admittance to organizations such as the World Trade Organization.
Lazar said Chabad representatives have brought up the issue with President Bush and the U.S. State Department.
Jews have been able "to emigrate and to freely travel" for a long time, Lazar told Nezavisimaya Gazeta, while many have returned to Russia.
"No one has forced them to return," he said. "It was their free choice."
Lazar said the amendment is now harming the Jewish people because their struggle for human rights has been tied to economic policy.
"The repeal of the amendment is now tied to things like American chicken imports to Russia," Lazar said. "People and their spiritual freedom have been placed on the same plane with chicken."
In an interview published Wednesday in a Russian newspaper, Rabbi Berel Lazar said the only reasoning behind retaining the amendment was political and that it's usefulness had long ago passed.
The Cold War-era measure places restrictions on countries that do not allow their citizens to freely emigrate. Enacted 33 years ago, it was targeted at alleviating the constraints on Jewish intellectuals.
Jackson-Vanik, named for the two major co-sponsors in the U.S. Congress, remains in place for Russia and several other former Soviet countries, preventing their admittance to organizations such as the World Trade Organization.
Lazar said Chabad representatives have brought up the issue with President Bush and the U.S. State Department.
Jews have been able "to emigrate and to freely travel" for a long time, Lazar told Nezavisimaya Gazeta, while many have returned to Russia.
"No one has forced them to return," he said. "It was their free choice."
Lazar said the amendment is now harming the Jewish people because their struggle for human rights has been tied to economic policy.
"The repeal of the amendment is now tied to things like American chicken imports to Russia," Lazar said. "People and their spiritual freedom have been placed on the same plane with chicken."
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Moscow recognizes Jewish projects
The mayor of Moscow recognized the president of a Chabad-led umbrella group for his efforts developing the city.
Alexander Boroda, the head of the Federation of Jewish Communities, developed a sprawling complex in the Marina Roscha district that includes the largest synagogue and Jewish community center in Eastern Europe, a medical and charity center, and an educational complex.
Plans call for a Museum of Tolerance in the district dedicated to Jewish history with a focus on Russia.
Mayor Yury Luzhkov noted Boroda's "great contribution to the development of the construction industry in Moscow and many years of dedicated work," according to the federation's Web site.
Luzhkov has deep connections to the booming real estate and development industries of Moscow. His wife, Yelena Baturina, Russia's only female billionaire, heads one of the largest construction companies in the capital.
Real estate analysts say it is nearly impossible to gain ground for any major development project without the city government's blessing.
Alexander Boroda, the head of the Federation of Jewish Communities, developed a sprawling complex in the Marina Roscha district that includes the largest synagogue and Jewish community center in Eastern Europe, a medical and charity center, and an educational complex.
Plans call for a Museum of Tolerance in the district dedicated to Jewish history with a focus on Russia.
Mayor Yury Luzhkov noted Boroda's "great contribution to the development of the construction industry in Moscow and many years of dedicated work," according to the federation's Web site.
Luzhkov has deep connections to the booming real estate and development industries of Moscow. His wife, Yelena Baturina, Russia's only female billionaire, heads one of the largest construction companies in the capital.
Real estate analysts say it is nearly impossible to gain ground for any major development project without the city government's blessing.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Chabad Wins Appeal Against the Russian Federation in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
Landmark Ruling Clears Way for Chabad to Pursue Recovering Archive of Sacred Books Stolen by Nazis During World War II, Soviet Red Army in U.S. Courts WASHINGTON, June 13
WASHINGTON, June 13 /PRNewswire/ -- In a landmark ruling today, the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that Agudas
Chasidei Chabad of United States (Chabad) may pursue its claims in a U.S.
federal court against the Russian Federation, the Russian Ministry of Culture
and Mass Communication, the Russian State Library, and the Russian State
Military Archive to recover a collection of sacred religious books and
archives.
The D.C. Circuit held that a U.S. federal court has jurisdiction over
Chabad's claims to recover an archive of sacred books and manuscripts which
were stolen by the Nazis during World War II and then taken by the Soviet Red
Army to Moscow in 1945 in violation of international law. In addition, the
D.C. Circuit cleared the way for Chabad to pursue its claims against the
Russian Federation to recover a library of sacred, irreplaceable religious
books which were seized by the Soviets during the Bolshevik Revolution and
then retaken by the newly formed Russian Federation in 1992 after the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
"This is a landmark ruling," said Marshall Grossman, a partner in Bingham
McCutchen's Santa Monica office, who represents Chabad with Bingham partners
Seth Gerber in Santa Monica and David Salmons in Washington, D.C. "We hope and
pray that the Russian government will respect it."
In addition to the Bingham team, Chabad is represented by Washington
attorneys Nathan Lewin and Alyza D. Lewin of Lewin & Lewin, LLP, and Wm.
Bradford Reynolds of Howrey, LLP.
"The Court of Appeals' decision clears the way for the Russian government
to correct a historic wrong that its predecessors have committed against the
Jewish community. We can only hope that the current Russian authorities will
now fulfill the assurances that were made to Chabad representatives and to
United States officials after the Soviet state was replaced with the Russian
Federation. It should not be necessary to engage in extended litigation for
the Chabad community, headquartered today in the United States, to recover
what rightfully belongs to it," added Nathan Lewin.
"This is a historic victory for the Rebbe and for all people of faith and
freedom. These sacred books and manuscripts contain the souls of our Rebbes,
and of their countless followers who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazi
and Soviet regimes. We hope and pray the Russian government of today will now
fulfill its moral and legal obligations to return these sacred texts, " said
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Eliyohu Cunin of Agudas Chasidei Chabad.
Chabad is headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., with more than 3,000
international branches; it is the largest Jewish organization in the world
today. On November 9, 2004, Chabad filed its lawsuit against the Russian
Federation, the Russian Ministry of Culture and Mass Communication, the
Russian State Library, and the Russian State Military Archive, asserting
violations of international law and seeking the return of its collection of
sacred, irreplaceable religious books and manuscripts.
Bingham McCutchen LLP -- www.bingham.com -- is a national law firm with
global capabilities, with nearly 1,000 attorneys in 13 offices. The firm
represents clients in cross-border restructurings and insolvencies, high-
stakes litigation, complex financing and regulatory matters, government
affairs, and a wide variety of sophisticated corporate and technology
transactions.
Based in Washington, D.C., Lewin & Lewin LLP specializes in Supreme Court
and federal appellate litigation and is available for consultation by lawyers
and clients in complex criminal and civil matters in federal courts. Lewin &
Lewin also represents clients and assists attorneys in relations with federal
legislative, executive and administrative agencies.
Founded in 1956, Howrey LLP is a global law firm with over 700 attorneys
and more than 50 economic, financial, and regulatory consultants. Howrey has
offices in Washington, D.C.; Northern Virginia; Houston, Texas; New York, New
York; Los Angeles, Irvine, East Palo Alto and San Francisco, California; Salt
Lake City, Utah; Chicago, Illinois; London, England; Brussels, Belgium; Paris,
France; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Munich, Germany; Madrid, Spain and Taipei,
Taiwan.
SOURCE Bingham McCutchen LLP
WASHINGTON, June 13 /PRNewswire/ -- In a landmark ruling today, the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held that Agudas
Chasidei Chabad of United States (Chabad) may pursue its claims in a U.S.
federal court against the Russian Federation, the Russian Ministry of Culture
and Mass Communication, the Russian State Library, and the Russian State
Military Archive to recover a collection of sacred religious books and
archives.
The D.C. Circuit held that a U.S. federal court has jurisdiction over
Chabad's claims to recover an archive of sacred books and manuscripts which
were stolen by the Nazis during World War II and then taken by the Soviet Red
Army to Moscow in 1945 in violation of international law. In addition, the
D.C. Circuit cleared the way for Chabad to pursue its claims against the
Russian Federation to recover a library of sacred, irreplaceable religious
books which were seized by the Soviets during the Bolshevik Revolution and
then retaken by the newly formed Russian Federation in 1992 after the collapse
of the Soviet Union.
"This is a landmark ruling," said Marshall Grossman, a partner in Bingham
McCutchen's Santa Monica office, who represents Chabad with Bingham partners
Seth Gerber in Santa Monica and David Salmons in Washington, D.C. "We hope and
pray that the Russian government will respect it."
In addition to the Bingham team, Chabad is represented by Washington
attorneys Nathan Lewin and Alyza D. Lewin of Lewin & Lewin, LLP, and Wm.
Bradford Reynolds of Howrey, LLP.
"The Court of Appeals' decision clears the way for the Russian government
to correct a historic wrong that its predecessors have committed against the
Jewish community. We can only hope that the current Russian authorities will
now fulfill the assurances that were made to Chabad representatives and to
United States officials after the Soviet state was replaced with the Russian
Federation. It should not be necessary to engage in extended litigation for
the Chabad community, headquartered today in the United States, to recover
what rightfully belongs to it," added Nathan Lewin.
"This is a historic victory for the Rebbe and for all people of faith and
freedom. These sacred books and manuscripts contain the souls of our Rebbes,
and of their countless followers who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazi
and Soviet regimes. We hope and pray the Russian government of today will now
fulfill its moral and legal obligations to return these sacred texts, " said
Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Eliyohu Cunin of Agudas Chasidei Chabad.
Chabad is headquartered in Brooklyn, N.Y., with more than 3,000
international branches; it is the largest Jewish organization in the world
today. On November 9, 2004, Chabad filed its lawsuit against the Russian
Federation, the Russian Ministry of Culture and Mass Communication, the
Russian State Library, and the Russian State Military Archive, asserting
violations of international law and seeking the return of its collection of
sacred, irreplaceable religious books and manuscripts.
Bingham McCutchen LLP -- www.bingham.com -- is a national law firm with
global capabilities, with nearly 1,000 attorneys in 13 offices. The firm
represents clients in cross-border restructurings and insolvencies, high-
stakes litigation, complex financing and regulatory matters, government
affairs, and a wide variety of sophisticated corporate and technology
transactions.
Based in Washington, D.C., Lewin & Lewin LLP specializes in Supreme Court
and federal appellate litigation and is available for consultation by lawyers
and clients in complex criminal and civil matters in federal courts. Lewin &
Lewin also represents clients and assists attorneys in relations with federal
legislative, executive and administrative agencies.
Founded in 1956, Howrey LLP is a global law firm with over 700 attorneys
and more than 50 economic, financial, and regulatory consultants. Howrey has
offices in Washington, D.C.; Northern Virginia; Houston, Texas; New York, New
York; Los Angeles, Irvine, East Palo Alto and San Francisco, California; Salt
Lake City, Utah; Chicago, Illinois; London, England; Brussels, Belgium; Paris,
France; Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Munich, Germany; Madrid, Spain and Taipei,
Taiwan.
SOURCE Bingham McCutchen LLP
Monday, March 03, 2008
The Kremlin's chief rabbi
MOSCOW - Any rabbi in Israel would be envious of Berl Lazar, chief rabbi Of Russia. From his spacious, wood-paneled office at the top of the Jewish Community Center that is located in the Marina Rocha neighborhood, he holds sway over more than 200 communities that comprise, according to unofficial estimates, more than 1 million Jews. The Kremlin considers him the leader of Russia's Jews and Lazar enjoys President Vladimir Putin's trust. He is likely to receive the same treatment from Putin's successor-elect, Dmitri Medvedev. He is backed by billionaire Lev Leviev, who sees the rehabilitation of Jewish religious life in Russia as his life's ambition.
These are good times for Lazar. The Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (FEOR), which he heads, celebrated its 10th anniversary last week. After years of harsh struggles among the Jewish organizations in Moscow, FEOR has established its leading status. Fact: Even the president of the rival organization, the Jewish Congress of Russia (KEROOR), Arcadi Gaydamak, came to the anniversary celebration to offer his congratulations.
Only 10 years ago, the international Jewish organizations and the Jewish Agency thought the Jewish community in Russia had reached the end of its road. The best of its sons and daughters had immigrated to Israel or to the United States, and it seemed as though the handful who remained would close shop and leave. According to official data, there are currently 250,000 Jews in Russia, but the leaders of the community and many experts believe the real number of is closer to 1 million, half of whom live in Moscow.
Lazar, 43, came to Moscow from New York 18 years ago as the Lubavitcher Rebbe's emissary. Last Wednesday, he oversaw his son's bar mitzvah celebration at the Community Center. The Rolls Royces of the oligarchs who arrived as his guests, surrounded by bodyguards, packed the narrow street. In a city that worships political and financial power, Lazar is considered a significant locus of power.
But should he be envied? It is hard to think of a rabbi who in recent years has been the object of quite so much criticism - a level of vituperation reminiscent of the czarist era. He has been accused of everything: of using economic and political power to get rid of rivals, of forcing Chabad on Russia's secular Jewry, of serving as an "informer" and turning Jews in to the authorities and of whitewashing cases of anti-Semitism to curry favor with the regime. Even within his own movement, Chabad, there were those who said he had not advanced the interests of the religious in order not to damage his good relations with the regime.
Once a quiet life
"I didn't want to be elected chief rabbi," says Lazar in an interview to Haaretz in which he responds for the first time to accusations against him. "The heads of the communities approached me several times, and I said no. Before that, for 10 years I had lived a very quiet and satisfying life here, but they asked again and again and I gave in. I knew that a public figure does not have an easy life, but today I feel very comfortable with myself. It might have been possible to have achieved more, but these are things that could be done."
Why do you think that they are attacking you from so many directions?
"There are people who love success and are trying to blame other people. There are certain possibilities in this community, and we are trying to do the things that need to be done. In this country there is no other way to do this job."
Lazar outright rejects the accusations that he whitewashes incidents of anti-Semitism to help Putin's regime. In the past, a document to this effect was prepared at Nativ but was never published. Lazar's opponents say it was his own lobbying that won him the administration's official recognition as the chief rabbi of Russia instead of Rabbi Adolf Shayevich who had held the position since 1980. Similar accusations were raised several weeks ago after FEOR published figures according to which during the past year there was a drop in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Russia. The Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University claims, however, that it is possible there has even been an increase in anti- Semitism.
"We are living here every day, we are working with the courts and the police and we put pressure on the government in every case of anti-Semitism," says Lazar in defense of FEOR's record. "Every community knows it is necessary to inform us immediately of every incident; we have a special hotline and we are the first to know and publish everything. Check into the cases that other organizations report to the world, and you will see that their source is our report. There is anti-Semitism and xenophobia here and this is not good, but to say there is an increase in anti-Semitism is simply incorrect."
Aren't you playing into the hands of the authorities, who are perhaps trying to hush up the problem of anti-Semitism?
"Playing into their hands? Of course. If they deserve credit, they deserve it. And when criticism is deserved, we speak out. There's a carrot and a stick, and we mustn't use only the stick."
They say that Putin makes calculating use of the Jews in order to advance his agenda. Are you convinced his affection for the Jews is authentic?
"I have no doubt. There are reasons for this that have to do with his childhood. Jewish teachers helped him very much and he had Jewish neighbors and friends. I once showed him a picture of the synagogue in St. Petersburg. He told me it couldn't be the right building because he remembers how as a boy he would go in there with a friend and eat the leftover matzas. I explained to him that we had simply renovated the building."
Putin is now saying in talks with Jewish leaders that one of the greatest mistakes of the Soviet leadership was that Jewish community life, as well as contact with world Jewry, were perceived as a threat to the regime. Even those who are among Putin's harshest critics, like former minister Natan Sharansky, believe this.
"I have serious complaints about his behavior," Sharansky said last week, "but I believe that in his attitude towards the Jews he is telling the truth."
Lazar: "Until now there has been good work done with the Russian administration regarding restoring assets and rebuilding community institutions. Now they also need to support the spiritual process and the restoration of the Jewish knowledge that was lost during the years of Communism. Putin understands this - a few months ago, he announced a donation of a month's salary to the establishment of the Jewish Museum."
Perhaps he is doing this only in order to gain points in the international arena?
"He doesn't need points in the United States."
What the Russian people wants, says Lazar, is stability "so a person knows that he can open a business without being afraid that someone is going to take it away from him."
And will Medvedev provide this stability?
"He is a very intelligent and open individual, who cares about Russia's future and the relations with the Jewish community. This can be seen in his visit here in the community, three days before it was announced he was the candidate. All of a sudden, he showed up at the synagogue for two and a half hours. Afterward, when Putin announced he would be the candidate, what they showed on Russian television were the pictures from that visit."
As for rumors spread by nationalist and anti-Semitic circles concerning Medvedev's Jewish roots, he prefers not to respond.
Criticism within Chabad
Not only slander has been Lazar's lot during his years in Russia. He was sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as one of the first Chabad emissaries to Russia at the end of the 1980s. His mission was to revive religious life in Moscow and in Russia. During the first years, his large family lived in a small, decaying apartment. His eldest daughter came down with spinal meningitis, and after suitable medical treatment was not found for her in Russia the family went to Finland and from there to Israel, where the child eventually died.
Lazar's devotion to the movement, and the fact that during his years in the country the Chabad rabbis established their nearly exclusive control of established Jewish life, do not render him immune to criticism within the movement. Some of the factions in the Hasidut are not pleased with the nearly total control that Lazar has obtained in Russia, with the backing of Leviev, who is currently the most significant donor to Chabad activity.
An especially fraught issue is the fate of the Chabad Library, a large collection of antique books that belonged to the previous Lubavitcher rebbe and were confiscated by the Communists. Before his death, the Rebbe appointed four personal emissaries to deal with the issue, in order to pressure the Russian authorities, who relate to the library as a national asset and are refusing to hand it over to them. Some Chabad officials say Lazar prefers to see to his personal connections with the Putin government rather than help restore the library. His supporters, however, say that the four emissaries made every possible mistake and succeeded only in increasing the anti-Semitism in Russia through their actions.
Lazar himself is very cautious when he relates to this matter: "The Rebbe sent four rabbis to deal with the matter of the library. This is their mission. When they contact me, I will look into what can possibly be done about the matter. I have never been asked by them to deal with this. This is a matter of a decision by the Chabad center."
But the library is peanuts compared to the emotions that were stirred at the Chabad centers around the world in the wake of the arrest of 13 youngsters, Chabad yeshiva students, in the town of Rostov. The Tomkhei Temimim Yeshiva is one of the few Chabad institutions in Russia that is not under Lazar's control. Four months ago, the police raided the yeshiva a few hours before the start of the Sabbath. Thirteen students, citizens of the United States and Israel, were arrested. They were held under arrest over the Sabbath and afterward, and were then deported from Russia along with the local Chabad rabbi.
At Kfar Chabad in Israel, people accused Lazar of acting as an "informer" and of giving the authorities information to the effect that the students did not have valid visas. Lazar, who usually answers every question with a smile, tenses when he is asked about the affair and firmly refuses to relate to it. At the time he sent a letter to the rabbis of Kfar Chabad in which he refuted the accusations. "It is open season on me everywhere," he wrote. "My blood is being spilled like water in public."
Lazar claimed at the time that the students had been arrested because they had not updated their visas, despite clear instructions to do so.
But Lazar knows that on this issue he has entered sensitive territory. The accusations are similar to those raised against him several years ago. That was when one of his local rivals, the chief rabbi of Moscow on behalf of the Jewish Congress in Russia, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, was arrested upon entering Russia and deported. At the time, too, people accused Lazar of involvement in the affair. Lazar sighs again when these issues are raised during the course of the interview. Such is the price of success in Russia.
These are good times for Lazar. The Federation of Jewish Communities in Russia (FEOR), which he heads, celebrated its 10th anniversary last week. After years of harsh struggles among the Jewish organizations in Moscow, FEOR has established its leading status. Fact: Even the president of the rival organization, the Jewish Congress of Russia (KEROOR), Arcadi Gaydamak, came to the anniversary celebration to offer his congratulations.
Only 10 years ago, the international Jewish organizations and the Jewish Agency thought the Jewish community in Russia had reached the end of its road. The best of its sons and daughters had immigrated to Israel or to the United States, and it seemed as though the handful who remained would close shop and leave. According to official data, there are currently 250,000 Jews in Russia, but the leaders of the community and many experts believe the real number of is closer to 1 million, half of whom live in Moscow.
Lazar, 43, came to Moscow from New York 18 years ago as the Lubavitcher Rebbe's emissary. Last Wednesday, he oversaw his son's bar mitzvah celebration at the Community Center. The Rolls Royces of the oligarchs who arrived as his guests, surrounded by bodyguards, packed the narrow street. In a city that worships political and financial power, Lazar is considered a significant locus of power.
But should he be envied? It is hard to think of a rabbi who in recent years has been the object of quite so much criticism - a level of vituperation reminiscent of the czarist era. He has been accused of everything: of using economic and political power to get rid of rivals, of forcing Chabad on Russia's secular Jewry, of serving as an "informer" and turning Jews in to the authorities and of whitewashing cases of anti-Semitism to curry favor with the regime. Even within his own movement, Chabad, there were those who said he had not advanced the interests of the religious in order not to damage his good relations with the regime.
Once a quiet life
"I didn't want to be elected chief rabbi," says Lazar in an interview to Haaretz in which he responds for the first time to accusations against him. "The heads of the communities approached me several times, and I said no. Before that, for 10 years I had lived a very quiet and satisfying life here, but they asked again and again and I gave in. I knew that a public figure does not have an easy life, but today I feel very comfortable with myself. It might have been possible to have achieved more, but these are things that could be done."
Why do you think that they are attacking you from so many directions?
"There are people who love success and are trying to blame other people. There are certain possibilities in this community, and we are trying to do the things that need to be done. In this country there is no other way to do this job."
Lazar outright rejects the accusations that he whitewashes incidents of anti-Semitism to help Putin's regime. In the past, a document to this effect was prepared at Nativ but was never published. Lazar's opponents say it was his own lobbying that won him the administration's official recognition as the chief rabbi of Russia instead of Rabbi Adolf Shayevich who had held the position since 1980. Similar accusations were raised several weeks ago after FEOR published figures according to which during the past year there was a drop in the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Russia. The Institute for the Study of Contemporary Anti-Semitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University claims, however, that it is possible there has even been an increase in anti- Semitism.
"We are living here every day, we are working with the courts and the police and we put pressure on the government in every case of anti-Semitism," says Lazar in defense of FEOR's record. "Every community knows it is necessary to inform us immediately of every incident; we have a special hotline and we are the first to know and publish everything. Check into the cases that other organizations report to the world, and you will see that their source is our report. There is anti-Semitism and xenophobia here and this is not good, but to say there is an increase in anti-Semitism is simply incorrect."
Aren't you playing into the hands of the authorities, who are perhaps trying to hush up the problem of anti-Semitism?
"Playing into their hands? Of course. If they deserve credit, they deserve it. And when criticism is deserved, we speak out. There's a carrot and a stick, and we mustn't use only the stick."
They say that Putin makes calculating use of the Jews in order to advance his agenda. Are you convinced his affection for the Jews is authentic?
"I have no doubt. There are reasons for this that have to do with his childhood. Jewish teachers helped him very much and he had Jewish neighbors and friends. I once showed him a picture of the synagogue in St. Petersburg. He told me it couldn't be the right building because he remembers how as a boy he would go in there with a friend and eat the leftover matzas. I explained to him that we had simply renovated the building."
Putin is now saying in talks with Jewish leaders that one of the greatest mistakes of the Soviet leadership was that Jewish community life, as well as contact with world Jewry, were perceived as a threat to the regime. Even those who are among Putin's harshest critics, like former minister Natan Sharansky, believe this.
"I have serious complaints about his behavior," Sharansky said last week, "but I believe that in his attitude towards the Jews he is telling the truth."
Lazar: "Until now there has been good work done with the Russian administration regarding restoring assets and rebuilding community institutions. Now they also need to support the spiritual process and the restoration of the Jewish knowledge that was lost during the years of Communism. Putin understands this - a few months ago, he announced a donation of a month's salary to the establishment of the Jewish Museum."
Perhaps he is doing this only in order to gain points in the international arena?
"He doesn't need points in the United States."
What the Russian people wants, says Lazar, is stability "so a person knows that he can open a business without being afraid that someone is going to take it away from him."
And will Medvedev provide this stability?
"He is a very intelligent and open individual, who cares about Russia's future and the relations with the Jewish community. This can be seen in his visit here in the community, three days before it was announced he was the candidate. All of a sudden, he showed up at the synagogue for two and a half hours. Afterward, when Putin announced he would be the candidate, what they showed on Russian television were the pictures from that visit."
As for rumors spread by nationalist and anti-Semitic circles concerning Medvedev's Jewish roots, he prefers not to respond.
Criticism within Chabad
Not only slander has been Lazar's lot during his years in Russia. He was sent by the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, as one of the first Chabad emissaries to Russia at the end of the 1980s. His mission was to revive religious life in Moscow and in Russia. During the first years, his large family lived in a small, decaying apartment. His eldest daughter came down with spinal meningitis, and after suitable medical treatment was not found for her in Russia the family went to Finland and from there to Israel, where the child eventually died.
Lazar's devotion to the movement, and the fact that during his years in the country the Chabad rabbis established their nearly exclusive control of established Jewish life, do not render him immune to criticism within the movement. Some of the factions in the Hasidut are not pleased with the nearly total control that Lazar has obtained in Russia, with the backing of Leviev, who is currently the most significant donor to Chabad activity.
An especially fraught issue is the fate of the Chabad Library, a large collection of antique books that belonged to the previous Lubavitcher rebbe and were confiscated by the Communists. Before his death, the Rebbe appointed four personal emissaries to deal with the issue, in order to pressure the Russian authorities, who relate to the library as a national asset and are refusing to hand it over to them. Some Chabad officials say Lazar prefers to see to his personal connections with the Putin government rather than help restore the library. His supporters, however, say that the four emissaries made every possible mistake and succeeded only in increasing the anti-Semitism in Russia through their actions.
Lazar himself is very cautious when he relates to this matter: "The Rebbe sent four rabbis to deal with the matter of the library. This is their mission. When they contact me, I will look into what can possibly be done about the matter. I have never been asked by them to deal with this. This is a matter of a decision by the Chabad center."
But the library is peanuts compared to the emotions that were stirred at the Chabad centers around the world in the wake of the arrest of 13 youngsters, Chabad yeshiva students, in the town of Rostov. The Tomkhei Temimim Yeshiva is one of the few Chabad institutions in Russia that is not under Lazar's control. Four months ago, the police raided the yeshiva a few hours before the start of the Sabbath. Thirteen students, citizens of the United States and Israel, were arrested. They were held under arrest over the Sabbath and afterward, and were then deported from Russia along with the local Chabad rabbi.
At Kfar Chabad in Israel, people accused Lazar of acting as an "informer" and of giving the authorities information to the effect that the students did not have valid visas. Lazar, who usually answers every question with a smile, tenses when he is asked about the affair and firmly refuses to relate to it. At the time he sent a letter to the rabbis of Kfar Chabad in which he refuted the accusations. "It is open season on me everywhere," he wrote. "My blood is being spilled like water in public."
Lazar claimed at the time that the students had been arrested because they had not updated their visas, despite clear instructions to do so.
But Lazar knows that on this issue he has entered sensitive territory. The accusations are similar to those raised against him several years ago. That was when one of his local rivals, the chief rabbi of Moscow on behalf of the Jewish Congress in Russia, Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, was arrested upon entering Russia and deported. At the time, too, people accused Lazar of involvement in the affair. Lazar sighs again when these issues are raised during the course of the interview. Such is the price of success in Russia.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
excerpt from: A Few Things Are Illuminated: A Wild and Crazy Roots Trip to the Old Country
...In order to find the best archivists and genealogists available in a certain town or region, it is best to contact the local Jewish community in advance. In Rostov, I contacted Rabbi Chaim Friedman, the Chabad-linked spiritual leader of Rostov Jewry, who not only put me into contact with archivist Yevgeni Gimodudinov but made sure Tanya and I had the chance to participate fully in the life of the community. A well-preserved 19th century city of over one million that serves as the unofficial capital of Russia's south, Rostov is booming these days with plenty of new construction, emblematic of a prosperity that has now spread from Moscow to major regional centers.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Russian army gets 1st chief rabbi since 1917 revolution
For the first time since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a chief rabbinical chaplain is servicing the spiritual and religious needs of Jewish soldiers in Russia's armed forces and various security services.
Rabbi Aharon Gurevich, 34, was appointed after being asked to fill the role by the chief rabbi of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Russia, Rabbi Berel Lazar, who had received official permission from the Russian government to establish a military rabbinate.
Upon accepting the post, Gurevich was granted the rank of colonel by Russian authorities and was given permission to visit military bases freely. While his status as a military rabbi has yet to be fixed by law, Gurevich has effectively been functioning as chief rabbi of the Russian Army since the beginning of the year.
In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, the soft-spoken and cordial 34-year-old Moscow native was full of praise for the cooperation he has received at all levels of Russia's military establishment.
"I work closely with the General Staff and its education department, and a number of army and police generals have shown great interest in my initiative to teach about the basics of Judaism in Russian military academies," Gurevich says.
Earlier this year, he was invited to deliver a lecture at a special seminar for top police commanders from across the country.
As a member of the Russian Defense Ministry's Public Council, Gurevich advises the military and the police forces on various matters relating to Jewish life.
"I visit military commands on a regular basis and determine the estimated number of Jews in the locale, speak with their commanders and explain the need for a spiritual component in the motivation to serve," he says.
Shortly after his appointment, Gurevich visited Israel to consult with the IDF's military rabbinate, as well as the chief rabbi of the Israel Police, to learn more about the role and functions his office should fulfill.
Thus far, Gurevich has succeeded in arranging for High Holiday services to be held on Russian military bases throughout the country, organized the distribution of ritual objects and newsletters among Jewish servicemen and provided pastoral counseling to soldiers, some of whom had previously been reluctant to openly admit their Jewish heritage.
"There are an estimated 40,000 Jews serving in the various Russian security forces, including some generals. But the Communist past left a permanent mark on their consciousness, and many do not speak about their Judaism among their colleagues out of concern for their careers," Gurevich notes, adding that "a lot depends on their position and the location of their service.
"But I am often approached unexpectedly by senior officers and regular soldiers who had hidden their Jewish origins until now, and I try as best I can to help them feel Jewish," he says.
While there is currently no option toarrange for the regular supply of kosher food throughout the Russian military, Gurevich makes sure to send care packages containing kosher food to Jewish soldiers prior to holidays and festivals.
"Before Passover," he says, "we distributed over 1,000 kilograms of matza and other kosher-for-Passover products."
Gurevich views education as a main component of his mission, and he has gone to great lengths to raise awareness about Judaism throughout the Russian military, among both Jews and non-Jews alike. To this end, he has worked closely with Russian officers to arrange for classes and periodic day-long seminars on Judaism and Jewish culture at Russian military academies.
On the first day of Hanukka, he notes proudly, a military newspaper published by the Russian Defense Ministry printed a lengthy article explaining the history and meaning of the holiday.
When necessary, Gurevich also intervenes with commanders on behalf of Jewish soldiers. "For example, there are soldiers who prefer not to shave during the counting of the Omer period between Passover and Shavuot, or those who run into issues of Shabbat observance, so I speak to their officers and explain the situation," he says.
Born into a secular home, Gurevich was initially drawn closer to Judaism through his reading of Jewish literature, as well as the knowledge that distant relatives had made aliya prior to World War II and settled on a kibbutz near Tiberias.
He says he was also influenced by the general atmosphere of the 1980s, when opposition to the Soviet regime simmered among many Jewish youth in the capital.
"Toward the end of the '80s, we started to receive more books and materials from abroad on Jewish national history and tradition on a regular basis," he recalls. "This would all come to play a role in influencing my growing interest and later embrace of Jewish observance."
At the age of 16, Gurevich was surprised when he was accepted into Moscow University's Faculty of History, particularly since he had told his interviewers that he was interested in studying the history of the Jewish people.
"In those years, it was still considered bold or even defiant to say such a thing," he recalls somewhat mischievously.
Alongside his university studies, Gurevich enrolled at Moscow's Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim. Upon completing his degree, he continued his religious studies at a hassidic yeshiva in Jerusalem and later received his rabbinical ordination. After a two-year stint as a rabbi in Frankfurt, Germany, he returned to Russia eight years ago to become involved in Jewish outreach work.
While issues such as anti-Semitism and the reluctance of many Russian Jews to identify Jewishly present Gurevich with some formidable challenges, he is nonetheless keenly optimistic about his work.
"The creation of a Russian military rabbinate has helped many Jewish soldiers to feel a greater sense of pride about their identity," he insists. "As much as possible, I travel around the country, going from base to base to awaken within them a stronger sense of connection. There is still a lot of work to be done."
Rabbi Aharon Gurevich, 34, was appointed after being asked to fill the role by the chief rabbi of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Russia, Rabbi Berel Lazar, who had received official permission from the Russian government to establish a military rabbinate.
Upon accepting the post, Gurevich was granted the rank of colonel by Russian authorities and was given permission to visit military bases freely. While his status as a military rabbi has yet to be fixed by law, Gurevich has effectively been functioning as chief rabbi of the Russian Army since the beginning of the year.
In a recent interview with The Jerusalem Post, the soft-spoken and cordial 34-year-old Moscow native was full of praise for the cooperation he has received at all levels of Russia's military establishment.
"I work closely with the General Staff and its education department, and a number of army and police generals have shown great interest in my initiative to teach about the basics of Judaism in Russian military academies," Gurevich says.
Earlier this year, he was invited to deliver a lecture at a special seminar for top police commanders from across the country.
As a member of the Russian Defense Ministry's Public Council, Gurevich advises the military and the police forces on various matters relating to Jewish life.
"I visit military commands on a regular basis and determine the estimated number of Jews in the locale, speak with their commanders and explain the need for a spiritual component in the motivation to serve," he says.
Shortly after his appointment, Gurevich visited Israel to consult with the IDF's military rabbinate, as well as the chief rabbi of the Israel Police, to learn more about the role and functions his office should fulfill.
Thus far, Gurevich has succeeded in arranging for High Holiday services to be held on Russian military bases throughout the country, organized the distribution of ritual objects and newsletters among Jewish servicemen and provided pastoral counseling to soldiers, some of whom had previously been reluctant to openly admit their Jewish heritage.
"There are an estimated 40,000 Jews serving in the various Russian security forces, including some generals. But the Communist past left a permanent mark on their consciousness, and many do not speak about their Judaism among their colleagues out of concern for their careers," Gurevich notes, adding that "a lot depends on their position and the location of their service.
"But I am often approached unexpectedly by senior officers and regular soldiers who had hidden their Jewish origins until now, and I try as best I can to help them feel Jewish," he says.
While there is currently no option toarrange for the regular supply of kosher food throughout the Russian military, Gurevich makes sure to send care packages containing kosher food to Jewish soldiers prior to holidays and festivals.
"Before Passover," he says, "we distributed over 1,000 kilograms of matza and other kosher-for-Passover products."
Gurevich views education as a main component of his mission, and he has gone to great lengths to raise awareness about Judaism throughout the Russian military, among both Jews and non-Jews alike. To this end, he has worked closely with Russian officers to arrange for classes and periodic day-long seminars on Judaism and Jewish culture at Russian military academies.
On the first day of Hanukka, he notes proudly, a military newspaper published by the Russian Defense Ministry printed a lengthy article explaining the history and meaning of the holiday.
When necessary, Gurevich also intervenes with commanders on behalf of Jewish soldiers. "For example, there are soldiers who prefer not to shave during the counting of the Omer period between Passover and Shavuot, or those who run into issues of Shabbat observance, so I speak to their officers and explain the situation," he says.
Born into a secular home, Gurevich was initially drawn closer to Judaism through his reading of Jewish literature, as well as the knowledge that distant relatives had made aliya prior to World War II and settled on a kibbutz near Tiberias.
He says he was also influenced by the general atmosphere of the 1980s, when opposition to the Soviet regime simmered among many Jewish youth in the capital.
"Toward the end of the '80s, we started to receive more books and materials from abroad on Jewish national history and tradition on a regular basis," he recalls. "This would all come to play a role in influencing my growing interest and later embrace of Jewish observance."
At the age of 16, Gurevich was surprised when he was accepted into Moscow University's Faculty of History, particularly since he had told his interviewers that he was interested in studying the history of the Jewish people.
"In those years, it was still considered bold or even defiant to say such a thing," he recalls somewhat mischievously.
Alongside his university studies, Gurevich enrolled at Moscow's Yeshiva Tomchei Temimim. Upon completing his degree, he continued his religious studies at a hassidic yeshiva in Jerusalem and later received his rabbinical ordination. After a two-year stint as a rabbi in Frankfurt, Germany, he returned to Russia eight years ago to become involved in Jewish outreach work.
While issues such as anti-Semitism and the reluctance of many Russian Jews to identify Jewishly present Gurevich with some formidable challenges, he is nonetheless keenly optimistic about his work.
"The creation of a Russian military rabbinate has helped many Jewish soldiers to feel a greater sense of pride about their identity," he insists. "As much as possible, I travel around the country, going from base to base to awaken within them a stronger sense of connection. There is still a lot of work to be done."
Saturday, September 15, 2007
The Missionary Mogul
By ZEV CHAFETS
When Lev Leviev’s first son, Shalom, was born in 1978, Leviev decided to circumcise the baby himself. He was only 22 years old. He had never studied the art of circumcision and never performed one. But he had seen it done. His father, Avner, had been an underground mohel in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbek Republic, at a time when performing any Jewish ritual act could get you in trouble with the Soviet authorities. The family had been in Israel for eight years. There were plenty of trained ritual mohelim in Tel Aviv. But Leviev regarded the act of circumcising his own son as both a religious duty and the fulfillment of a family tradition.
Avner Leviev advised his son to prepare by cutting chicken legs, but young Lev felt no need to practice. “I knew what I was doing,” he told me when I spoke to him recently at his office in Yahud, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “I was a diamond cutter, after all. It’s not all that different.” He extended his hands, palms down, for my inspection and smiled. “I’ve got steady hands.”
In the years since he introduced his son into Israel’s blood covenant with the almighty, Lev Leviev has performed more than a thousand ritual circumcisions — many on the sons of employees in his ever-expanding business empire. In those years, Leviev has gone from impoverished immigrant to the man who broke the De Beers international diamond cartel. His companies build vast shopping malls, housing projects, highways and railways throughout Israel, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe. He owns everything from diamond mines in Angola to a string of 7-Elevens in Texas. Recently he has been buying up iconic American properties, including the former New York Times Building in Manhattan for a reported $525 million.
Lev Leviev is probably Israel’s richest man. Forbes ranks him 210th among the world’s wealthiest people, with an estimated personal net worth of $4.1 billion. (People close to Leviev put that figure closer to $8 billion.) However much Leviev has, he is hungry for more. His business role model is Bill Gates, whom he says he hopes to eventually join in what he calls, in Russian-accented Hebrew, “the world’s starting 10.”
Leviev admires not only Gates’s wealth but also his activist style of philanthropy. “A lot of very rich men wait too long to give their money away,” he told me. “Warren Buffett, for example. He’s in his 70s now, and he should have started earlier. But Bill Gates is a young man, and he’s already giving to help the world. That’s the right way to do it.”
Leviev, who is 51, is a legendary philanthropist, too — he refuses to say how much he gives away each year, but he did not dispute an estimate of $50 million. He does not share Gates’s universalist outlook, however. Leviev is a tribal leader, a benefactor of Jewish causes, particularly in the former Soviet Union, where he underwrites Jewish day schools, synagogues, orphanages, social centers and soup kitchens for more than 500 communities. To make this vast philanthropic enterprise run, Leviev subsidizes an army of some 10,000 Jewish functionaries from Ukraine to Azerbaijan, including 300 rabbis.
Most of the 300 rabbis are Chabadniks, adherents of the Brooklyn-based Hasidic group Chabad — fundamentalist, missionizing, worldly and centered on the personality and teachings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. Chabad is anti-abortion, regards homosexuality as a sexual perversion and generally finds itself aligned with other fundamentalist religious groups on American domestic issues. In Israel, it has supported right-wing Greater Israel candidates. Most controversially, during Rebbe Schneerson’s lifetime, Chabad entertained the notion that he might be the messiah; a vocal group in the community still does. (This led the ultrapious Rabbi Eliezer Shach to acidly define Chabad as the sect closest to Judaism.)
Lev Leviev’s loyalty to Chabad is unquestioning. “The rebbe is my role model, and my values are his values,” he says.
Lev Leviev arrived in Israel as a teenager in 1971, at a time when Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War, was the legendary embodiment of the Israeli WASP (Well-born/Ashkenazi/Secular/Paratrooper). Immigrants were classified by their potential to attain this ideal. The Leviev family — unconnected, uneducated, not even real Russians but Bukharan Jews, primitives from the steppes of Central Asia — were classified as “bad material” and dispatched by government authorities to the dusty “development town” of Kiryat Malachi.
Avner Leviev enrolled his son in a Chabad yeshiva. It was a match that didn’t take. “I’m not a born yeshiva scholar,” Leviev admits. In Tashkent he had finished 10th grade. He left the yeshiva after a few months, ending his formal education. If Leviev regrets this, he doesn’t show it. “I just wanted to make money,” he told me.
Through a family friend, Leviev found work as an apprentice diamond cutter. It was industry practice not to teach anyone all 11 steps of the diamond-cutting trade, but Leviev paid his fellow workers to show him every facet of the process. By the time he finished an undistinguished stint in the rabbinical corps of the army, he was ready to go into business for himself.
“I never doubted that I would get rich,” Leviev told me. “I knew from the time I was 6 that I was destined to be a millionaire. I’d go with my father to shops, and while he was talking business, my eyes automatically counted the merchandise.”
Leviev chose a tough industry. “The diamond business is usually a family business,” says a Tel Aviv diamond merchant. “People accumulate wealth slowly, over generations. When Leviev started out, all he had was an amazing amount of ambition and the ability to understand the stone. Understanding the stone — that was the key.”
The headquarters of Leviev’s U.S. diamond company, LLD USA, is located at the mouth of the Manhattan diamond district, on the corner of 47th Street and Fifth Avenue. To get up to his office, you need to be both photographed and fingerprinted by a very high tech security system.
People who handle gems are cautious and security-conscious, and Leviev is no exception. Perhaps for that reason, many of his closest associates are relatives or longtime friends, most of them also Bukharan Jews. Paul Raps, the general manager of LLD USA, has known Leviev since they were both young diamond merchants in Ramat Gan. “One day we were sitting there, just chatting, and suddenly Leviev said to me: ‘You know what we need? We need to get our hands on the gelem.’ Uncut diamonds. I thought he was kidding. Nobody could find uncut diamonds back then.”
Before Leviev’s epiphany, the world’s diamond market was strictly regulated by De Beers, a company founded in the 19th century to mine its first shaft of diamond-bearing kimberlite. In 1930, De Beers established a cartel that over the next few decades came to dominate diamond mining in the Soviet Union, Africa and the rest of the world. It regulated the market through a system of “sightholders,” handpicked producers of rough diamonds and dealers of finished diamonds, who were allowed to buy quantities of unfinished diamonds at fixed prices, via De Beers.
When Leviev started out, there were about 100 sightholders around the world. They came to London several times a year and, at syndicate headquarters, were offered diamonds on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Those who left it too often were decertified, and new sightholders were selected.
Small diamond cutters and merchants like Leviev couldn’t afford to buy from sightholders. They were allowed to buy rough diamonds from “secondary dealers” who managed to get their hands on small, smuggled quantities. It was a limiting arrangement, and Leviev didn’t like limitations. He applied to become a De Beers sightholder.
“There was resistance to him at first,” recalls the Tel Aviv diamond merchant, who knew Leviev at the time. “A lot of people thought he was uncouth, not really civilized. This wasn’t anti-Semitism. Most of the people who rejected him were European Jews themselves. Leviev was an outsider, a Bukharan. But he was so industrious, so ambitious, such a good businessman, that eventually they had no choice. They had to accept him.”
Soon Leviev became a rising star in the De Beers syndicate. He brought his extended family into his business, leveraged their resources and prospered. But he chafed under the control of the syndicate.
In the late ’80s, Leviev saw an opportunity. De Beers had encountered antitrust problems in the United States. In South Africa, the apartheid government that had worked with De Beers was losing political power. At the same time, the Soviet Union, whose leaders had long had a mutually profitable partnership with De Beers, was nearing collapse.
Leviev has a complicated relationship with his former homeland. In our first meeting, when I asked him about his boyhood memories, he surprised me by saying: “Fear. I grew up in fear.”
Tashkent is a Muslim city, and although there wasn’t much overt anti-Jewish violence, there was a climate of mistrust. “Many times I was beaten up in school,” he recalls. But his biggest fear was of the Communist government.
“As a boy, they used to make us stand at attention and salute the statue of Lenin,” he told me. “I’d curse him and the other Communists under my breath. They sent my grandfather to Siberia. They wouldn’t let us keep the Sabbath — we had to go to school on Saturdays. Just being Jewish was dangerous.”
Still, he saw business potential in Russia. He spoke the language, knew the local customs. His father, sensing danger, begged Leviev not to go. So Leviev traveled to Brooklyn, to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher rebbe, for a second opinion.
It is a meeting that has become folklore, both in Chabad and in the diamond industry. Leviev tells the story with obvious relish: “I spoke to the rebbe in Hebrew. I asked him, Should I go or not? He answered me in a kind of antique Russian. He said: ‘Go. Go to Russia and do business, but don’t forget to help the Jews. Remember your family tradition.’ ”
This was more than good advice. The rebbe’s blessing gave Leviev the keys to the Chabad network in the former Soviet Union at a very dangerous time.
Officially, Leviev was invited by the Soviet minister of energy in 1989, which was exploring ways of ending the De Beers grip on the country’s diamonds. “When I got there, Gorbachev was still in power, but you could sense that things were coming apart,” Leviev says. “Everything was unsettled, and I felt the fear again.”
There were other risks, too. To do business with the Russians, Leviev had to give up his position as a De Beers sightholder. This shook the international diamond business. “It was unbelievable,” says the Tel Aviv merchant. “He was breaking the rules, going after the source. When he succeeded in Russia, and then in Angola, others saw it and were suddenly emboldened. That’s how Leviev cracked the De Beers cartel. With the instincts of a tiger and the balls of a panther.”
There’s no need to cry for De Beers, which still controls a major share of the world’s uncut diamonds. But the syndicate no longer sets the worldwide market value of diamonds or decides who can manufacture and sell them.
Neither can Leviev. But he has become the world’s largest cutter and polisher of diamonds and one of its major sources of rough diamonds — the gelem he dreamed of.
A key to his success is his vertical integration. He mines the diamonds in Angola, Namibia and Russia, cuts and polishes them, ships them and sells them, wholesale and retail. He has a string of high-end shops in Russia and a luxury boutique, Leviev, on Bond Street in London. Next month, Leviev is opening a store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, which, as the president of Leviev Jewelry, Thierry Chaunu, told a reporter, will cater to “the young hedge-fund professional who just got his bonus.”
One of Leviev’s first moves in Russia was to set up a high-tech cutting and polishing plant. It provided jobs and, more important, showed the Russians how they could gain control of their own industry. In turn, the Russian government helped him gain a foothold in Africa. In 1997, Leviev bought into the Catoca diamond mine, Angola’s largest, in a joint venture with the Russian state diamond company, Alrosa; a Brazilian partner; and the Angola state diamond company. Leviev soon established warm ties with the Angolan president, José Eduardo Dos Santos, who speaks fluent Russian from his days as an engineering student in the U.S.S.R.
When Leviev arrived in Angola, Dos Santos was fighting a civil war against Unita rebels, who were financed by the sale of smuggled “blood diamonds.” Leviev had a suggestion: Why not create a company that would centralize control of all diamonds? The company that grew out of that idea was the Angola Selling Corporation, or Ascorp, jointly owned by the Angolan government, a Belgian partner and Leviev. While Leviev’s plan took aim at the trade in conflict diamonds, critics say that Ascorp took advantage of mounting international pressure to establish and profit from a monopoly.
Unita surrendered in 2002, after the death of its leader, Jonas Savimbi. By then, the Angolan government had effectively pushed De Beers out of the country, and Ascorp had generated great sums for the Dos Santos government (and, it is rumored, the Dos Santos family), created thousands of jobs for Angolans in newly established factories and mines and made Lev Leviev a vast fortune. None of this would have been possible without the Russian connection.
On a shelf in Leviev’s Ramat Gan office sits a framed photo of Vladimir Putin. Leviev describes him as a “true friend.” The offices of many Israeli business magnates feature photographic trophies, grab-and-grin shots with (in ascending order of importance) the prime minister of Israel, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton and A-list Hollywood stars. Leviev has a different collection. Aside from the Lubavitcher rebbe and Vladimir Putin, there are photos taken with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Kazakhstan, for which he serves as honorary consul in Israel. (“Yes, I saw ‘Borat’ ” Leviev told me wearily. “Yes, I thought it was funny. But silly.”) Leviev’s picture gallery reflects his status as the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union, an organization he has led since 1998. Nobody knows exactly how many Jews live in the former Soviet Union, but estimates range from 400,000 to upward of one million. Leviev leads them with his checkbook.
“When it comes to contributing to the Jewish people, Lev Leviev is in a class by himself,” says Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and former Israeli deputy prime minster. “I know a lot of rich people who give money. But Leviev is on a completely different level. He’s building entire communities.”
More than this, he is a power broker and intercessor on behalf of beleaguered Jews throughout the former U.S.S.R. Take, for instance, the case of the Jewish private schools in Baku, Azerbaijan. Three years ago the government, concerned about the influence of neighboring Iran and the spread of local madrassas, decided to close all the private schools in the country. This, of course, included the Jewish school in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. The community elders petitioned the government, but to no avail.
“They even tried to get American Jewish organizations to intervene,” Leviev recalled. “But the Jewish organizations couldn’t do a thing.” He smiled thinly. He has a generally low opinion of American Jewish activists, especially his fellow billionaires.
And so Leviev decided to ride to the rescue. He flew to Baku on his private plane, parked at the airport and went straight to the synagogue.
“The Jews were all gathered there,” he recounted in what is obviously a favorite story. “I told them to wait while I talked to the president.” At the time, that was Heydar Aliyev. “There were journalists in his outer office. Everyone was excited to see me there, because they thought I had come to invest money in the country. Heydar thought so, too. He said: ‘Just tell me what you’re interested in — oil? Gas? Tourism? What can I do for you?’
“I asked him, ‘How can I invest in a country that doesn’t like Jews?’ Heydar got very upset when I said that. He began telling me how many Jewish friends he had and how much the Jews had contributed to his culture and the country and so on.
“ ‘But you’re closing down the Jewish school,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come to ask you to allow it to remain open. Right now the Jews of Baku are gathered in the synagogue, awaiting your answer.’ ”
Leviev paused at this point in the story. Dramatic tales of peril and salvation are part of the Chabad oral tradition.
“Heydar consulted his advisers,” Leviev said. “Then he returned to me and said: ‘The school can remain open. All right?’
“I told him: ‘Well, there’s another problem. The Jewish institutions here are in bad shape. Can you arrange for me to acquire a plot of land to rebuild?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Heydar. ‘Is that all?’
“ ‘Not quite. I’d appreciate it if you would personally open the school next year. That way there will be no misunderstandings about what the government’s position is.’
“Heydar said: ‘I’ll do that. Are you satisfied now?’
“I told him: ‘Just one last thing, sir. Those journalists in your outer office? Would you mind announcing our agreement to them?’ ”
After Aliyev’s press conference, Leviev remembers returning triumphantly to the synagogue to deliver the good news. Shortly thereafter, Aliyev died and was succeeded by his son, with whom Leviev is on friendly terms.
“And did you invest after that?” I asked.
Leviev smiled. “No,” he said. “Azerbaijan has so many natural resources they don’t need my investment. But I told them that they would get a blessing from God.”
Leviev insists that he maintains a strict division between his community leadership and his business dealings. Perhaps this is so, but the republics of the former Soviet Union are not famous for their transparency. At any rate, business depends to a large extent on personal and political access. “A big part of our analytical value depends on the perception that we can get anything approved in Russia,” says Jacques Zimmerman, the vice president for communications of Africa Israel, Leviev’s international holding and investment company.
This perception has been strengthened by public displays of affection between Putin and Leviev. In 2000, the Russian president was the guest of honor at the opening of the Jewish Community Center in the Marina Roscha district of Moscow, which Leviev played a major role in building. It was a gesture widely interpreted as a sign of good will not only toward Russia’s Jews but toward Leviev himself.
Putin also took Leviev’s side in a dispute over the post of chief rabbi of Russia, backing Leviev’s candidate, Berel Lazar, over Adolf Shayevich, who held the position. The Kremlin’s endorsement of Lazar was a final confirmation that Leviev had achieved a typically audacious and improbable victory — putting the fundamentalist Chabad in effective control of the assimilated, mostly irreligious Jewish communities of the former Soviet Union.
Lazar’s selection has been quite controversial not only in Russia but also among Jewish groups in Israel and in the U.S. But Chabad is nothing if not practical, and they have taken a gradualist approach to winning over Russia’s secular Jews. Schools enroll nonreligious students and offer them a full government curriculum, along with some beginner’s Torah studies. Community centers hold coeducational social events. There are even mixed dances.
Such modernity comports with Leviev’s personal style, which is, in its outward aspect, Chabad-lite. He once made headlines by closing his upscale mall in Ramat Aviv — a bastion of WASP Israel — on the Sabbath, and officially his businesses are closed on Saturday. But he maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for his Israeli executives, some of whom hold unofficial meetings and phone sessions on the Sabbath. Abroad, some of the businesses Leviev owns an interest in work seven days a week, and his American 7-Elevens sell nonkosher food. Leviev himself strictly observes the Sabbath, but he has been known to interrupt his weekday prayers for important phone calls.
Unlike many Chabad men, Leviev is clean-shaven, wears stylish business suits open at the collar and sometimes lounges in jeans, and his small black skullcap is barely visible. He is also something of a feminist. The women in his office, including his private secretaries, are allowed to wear slacks, a violation of strict Orthodox custom. Leviev’s two eldest daughters have been brought into the business as senior executives. Zvia, a mother of four who runs international marketing and mall businesses for her father, is frequently mentioned in the Israeli press as a potential successor. Leviev is proud to have raised his nine children in B’nai B’rack, Tel Aviv’s ultra-Orthodox suburb, but he is planning to move to an estate in Saviyon, the equivalent of going from Borough Park to Scarsdale.
Leviev’s pragmatism ends, however, at the vexing and fundamental question of who is a Jew. American Reform Judaism recognizes patrilineal descent. The State of Israel grants citizenship under the Law of Return to people with a single Jewish grandparent. But Leviev accepts only the Talmudic rule that a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother, or someone who has undergone an Orthodox conversion and agreed to keep all 613 Jewish laws.
There are a great many people who regard themselves as Jews but do not meet these criteria. In Israel alone, there are an estimated 300,000 among Soviet immigrants, and perhaps more than that in the former Soviet Union. “What do you do about all these people?” I asked Leviev. “Just write them off?”
Leviev’s answer: “It’s not a matter of what I do or what I want. I have no choice. The law is the law.”
A few years ago, concerned Bukharan Jewish immigrants in New York reported to Leviev that their children were being corrupted by the public schools of Queens. “The kids were going out with Pakistanis, Puerto Ricans, all sorts of people,” I was told by one of Leviev’s intimates. Leviev would have been equally horrified to learn that the Bukharan Jews of Queens were hooking up with descendants of the Mayflower.
In response, Leviev donated the money for a private school in Elmhurst. He picks up the tuition tab for the entire student body — about 800 kids at an estimated $18,000 a pop. Leviev regards this as a pilot project. His goal, I was told by his assistant, Shlomi Peles, is to make a free Orthodox Jewish education available to every Jewish child in United States.
The educational project is just one part of Leviev’s recent discovery of America. After 9/11, he and a partner bought the JP Morgan building near ground zero at a bargain price (a reported $100 million), converting it into luxury condominiums and clearing a very handsome profit. It made him a believer in New York.
“Every building is half a billion dollars,” he told me. “All you need is a global perspective. I knew New York would come back.”
Jacques Zimmerman, who handles communications for Africa Israel, told me: “Lev’s natural tendency, his home court, is Israel and Russia. But he is constantly looking to expand.”
The engine for this growth is Africa Israel. The company is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and handles Leviev’s businesses, not including privately held diamond interests. Leviev personally owns about 75 percent of Africa Israel, which was valued, in mid-July, at approximately $5 billion.
According to Zimmerman, Africa Israel has made a “strategic decision” to think big. “The work involved in large and small projects is about the same, so why not do big projects?” In Moscow, Africa Israel is currently building a million-square-foot mall as well as another 750,000-square-foot mall that is entirely underground. It is the lead partner in a consortium that is building the subway in Tel Aviv. Africa Israel is active in China, India, the Philippines and Latin America as well.
“We’re worldwide, but our emphasis is moving more and more to the United States,” Zimmerman says. “In the last six months, we’ve bought into more than a billion dollars’ worth of projects in Manhattan, and that’s going to grow.”
Africa Israel’s American holdings include not only the former New York Times Building but also a half-share of the Apthorp apartment building on the Upper West Side and the Clock Tower on Madison Avenue, 1,700 Fina gas stations around the country and development projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Phoenix. Recently the company announced it will be opening a giant Hard Rock amusement park in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“All you need to do business in America is a good name, and banks will lend you all the money you need,” Leviev told me with enthusiasm.
Israel is a society in which successful people are rarely praised. But I encountered very little criticism of Leviev there, even from members of the Jewish WASP business establishment. “He’s still an outsider,” one high-powered Tel Aviv lawyer told me. “We don’t know anything about his personal life. But from what anyone can tell, he’s clean. You read about him in the business pages of the newspaper, not the gossip columns.”
One of Leviev’s greatest admirers is Eitan Raff, chairman of Israel’s Bank Leumi, from which Leviev bought Africa Israel in 1996. The sale was controversial at the time. “He was a Russian,” Raff says. “We didn’t know him or anything about him. We thought he might be some kind of oligarch. I hired two or three investigators to check him out. He came up clean.”
There were a number of foreign suitors for Africa Israel, but after fighting broke out in Jerusalem between Israeli and Palestinian gunmen, they became skittish and withdrew, leaving Leviev as the sole bidder. The asking price was $400 million, and Bank Leumi had to sell; it had been ordered by a court to divest itself of nonfinancial holdings, including Africa Israel, by a certain date. Leviev had the bank over a barrel. “What would you say to $330?” Leviev asked Raff.
“No, it’s worth four, that’s the fair price,” Raff said.
Leviev stuck out his hand, diamond-business style. “Four,” he said.
“He acted with great probity,” Raff says. “He didn’t try to take advantage or squeeze. His word is his bond,” he says. “Look, I’m a kibbutznik. Leviev and I aren’t from the same world at all. But I consider him a friend, and I think he’s an example of what the head of a public company should be.” Leviev’s biggest public-relations problem is his association with Arkady Gaydamak, a mysterious Russian-Israeli billionaire of unsavory reputation, now under indictment in France for a variety of offenses, including gunrunning and money laundering. Gaydamak, who cuts a flamboyant figure and recently established his own political party in Israel, is reputed to have made his fortune selling arms in Angola in partnership with various European, Israeli and African military and government figures.
Leviev says he was first introduced to Gaydamak by the former Mossad chief Danny Yatom. They certainly knew each other. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan journalism group based in Washington, Leviev and Gaydamak jointly acquired a metallurgy plant in Kazakhstan in 1999. A year later, Gaydamak bought a 15 percent share of Africa Israel, which he later sold. Leviev swears they are no longer partners, but the relationship has stained his reputation.
Unlike Gaydamak, Leviev has thus far steered clear of Israeli politics. That doesn’t mean he lacks influence, however. He meets from time to time with the nation’s leaders, mostly to discuss the economy. He owns Israel’s Russian-language television station, which reaches about 15 percent of the population. Despite his allegiance to Chabad, Leviev is considered a moderate. “He’s not one of the crazies,” a former adviser to Ariel Sharon told me. “Certainly not a Greater Israel man.”
Leviev’s global view is Moscow-centric and more than a little Machiavellian. He says he believes, for example, that America’s difficulties in places like Iran, Syria and Venezuela come primarily from George W. Bush’s failure to come to Russia’s economic aid. “If Bush had invested $100 million to help the Russian economy early in his first term, he’d have Putin’s friendship,” he says. “Instead, Bush put the money into a war with Iraq, and he’s been paying for it all over the world ever since.”
The first time I spoke to Leviev, he denied that he had any personal political aspirations. Three days later, he wasn’t so sure. “Would I like to be prime minister?” he mused. “I might. When I turn 60.”
That’s nine years off. At Leviev’s pace, nine years is a lot of time — time enough to make his way into the Forbes “starting 10,” time to complete the Chabadization of Soviet Jewry and time, perhaps, to make a run at becoming Israel’s first Russian-Bukharan-mohel-mogul prime minister.
Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance.”
When Lev Leviev’s first son, Shalom, was born in 1978, Leviev decided to circumcise the baby himself. He was only 22 years old. He had never studied the art of circumcision and never performed one. But he had seen it done. His father, Avner, had been an underground mohel in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbek Republic, at a time when performing any Jewish ritual act could get you in trouble with the Soviet authorities. The family had been in Israel for eight years. There were plenty of trained ritual mohelim in Tel Aviv. But Leviev regarded the act of circumcising his own son as both a religious duty and the fulfillment of a family tradition.
Avner Leviev advised his son to prepare by cutting chicken legs, but young Lev felt no need to practice. “I knew what I was doing,” he told me when I spoke to him recently at his office in Yahud, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “I was a diamond cutter, after all. It’s not all that different.” He extended his hands, palms down, for my inspection and smiled. “I’ve got steady hands.”
In the years since he introduced his son into Israel’s blood covenant with the almighty, Lev Leviev has performed more than a thousand ritual circumcisions — many on the sons of employees in his ever-expanding business empire. In those years, Leviev has gone from impoverished immigrant to the man who broke the De Beers international diamond cartel. His companies build vast shopping malls, housing projects, highways and railways throughout Israel, the former Soviet Union and Western Europe. He owns everything from diamond mines in Angola to a string of 7-Elevens in Texas. Recently he has been buying up iconic American properties, including the former New York Times Building in Manhattan for a reported $525 million.
Lev Leviev is probably Israel’s richest man. Forbes ranks him 210th among the world’s wealthiest people, with an estimated personal net worth of $4.1 billion. (People close to Leviev put that figure closer to $8 billion.) However much Leviev has, he is hungry for more. His business role model is Bill Gates, whom he says he hopes to eventually join in what he calls, in Russian-accented Hebrew, “the world’s starting 10.”
Leviev admires not only Gates’s wealth but also his activist style of philanthropy. “A lot of very rich men wait too long to give their money away,” he told me. “Warren Buffett, for example. He’s in his 70s now, and he should have started earlier. But Bill Gates is a young man, and he’s already giving to help the world. That’s the right way to do it.”
Leviev, who is 51, is a legendary philanthropist, too — he refuses to say how much he gives away each year, but he did not dispute an estimate of $50 million. He does not share Gates’s universalist outlook, however. Leviev is a tribal leader, a benefactor of Jewish causes, particularly in the former Soviet Union, where he underwrites Jewish day schools, synagogues, orphanages, social centers and soup kitchens for more than 500 communities. To make this vast philanthropic enterprise run, Leviev subsidizes an army of some 10,000 Jewish functionaries from Ukraine to Azerbaijan, including 300 rabbis.
Most of the 300 rabbis are Chabadniks, adherents of the Brooklyn-based Hasidic group Chabad — fundamentalist, missionizing, worldly and centered on the personality and teachings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe. Chabad is anti-abortion, regards homosexuality as a sexual perversion and generally finds itself aligned with other fundamentalist religious groups on American domestic issues. In Israel, it has supported right-wing Greater Israel candidates. Most controversially, during Rebbe Schneerson’s lifetime, Chabad entertained the notion that he might be the messiah; a vocal group in the community still does. (This led the ultrapious Rabbi Eliezer Shach to acidly define Chabad as the sect closest to Judaism.)
Lev Leviev’s loyalty to Chabad is unquestioning. “The rebbe is my role model, and my values are his values,” he says.
Lev Leviev arrived in Israel as a teenager in 1971, at a time when Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War, was the legendary embodiment of the Israeli WASP (Well-born/Ashkenazi/Secular/Paratrooper). Immigrants were classified by their potential to attain this ideal. The Leviev family — unconnected, uneducated, not even real Russians but Bukharan Jews, primitives from the steppes of Central Asia — were classified as “bad material” and dispatched by government authorities to the dusty “development town” of Kiryat Malachi.
Avner Leviev enrolled his son in a Chabad yeshiva. It was a match that didn’t take. “I’m not a born yeshiva scholar,” Leviev admits. In Tashkent he had finished 10th grade. He left the yeshiva after a few months, ending his formal education. If Leviev regrets this, he doesn’t show it. “I just wanted to make money,” he told me.
Through a family friend, Leviev found work as an apprentice diamond cutter. It was industry practice not to teach anyone all 11 steps of the diamond-cutting trade, but Leviev paid his fellow workers to show him every facet of the process. By the time he finished an undistinguished stint in the rabbinical corps of the army, he was ready to go into business for himself.
“I never doubted that I would get rich,” Leviev told me. “I knew from the time I was 6 that I was destined to be a millionaire. I’d go with my father to shops, and while he was talking business, my eyes automatically counted the merchandise.”
Leviev chose a tough industry. “The diamond business is usually a family business,” says a Tel Aviv diamond merchant. “People accumulate wealth slowly, over generations. When Leviev started out, all he had was an amazing amount of ambition and the ability to understand the stone. Understanding the stone — that was the key.”
The headquarters of Leviev’s U.S. diamond company, LLD USA, is located at the mouth of the Manhattan diamond district, on the corner of 47th Street and Fifth Avenue. To get up to his office, you need to be both photographed and fingerprinted by a very high tech security system.
People who handle gems are cautious and security-conscious, and Leviev is no exception. Perhaps for that reason, many of his closest associates are relatives or longtime friends, most of them also Bukharan Jews. Paul Raps, the general manager of LLD USA, has known Leviev since they were both young diamond merchants in Ramat Gan. “One day we were sitting there, just chatting, and suddenly Leviev said to me: ‘You know what we need? We need to get our hands on the gelem.’ Uncut diamonds. I thought he was kidding. Nobody could find uncut diamonds back then.”
Before Leviev’s epiphany, the world’s diamond market was strictly regulated by De Beers, a company founded in the 19th century to mine its first shaft of diamond-bearing kimberlite. In 1930, De Beers established a cartel that over the next few decades came to dominate diamond mining in the Soviet Union, Africa and the rest of the world. It regulated the market through a system of “sightholders,” handpicked producers of rough diamonds and dealers of finished diamonds, who were allowed to buy quantities of unfinished diamonds at fixed prices, via De Beers.
When Leviev started out, there were about 100 sightholders around the world. They came to London several times a year and, at syndicate headquarters, were offered diamonds on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Those who left it too often were decertified, and new sightholders were selected.
Small diamond cutters and merchants like Leviev couldn’t afford to buy from sightholders. They were allowed to buy rough diamonds from “secondary dealers” who managed to get their hands on small, smuggled quantities. It was a limiting arrangement, and Leviev didn’t like limitations. He applied to become a De Beers sightholder.
“There was resistance to him at first,” recalls the Tel Aviv diamond merchant, who knew Leviev at the time. “A lot of people thought he was uncouth, not really civilized. This wasn’t anti-Semitism. Most of the people who rejected him were European Jews themselves. Leviev was an outsider, a Bukharan. But he was so industrious, so ambitious, such a good businessman, that eventually they had no choice. They had to accept him.”
Soon Leviev became a rising star in the De Beers syndicate. He brought his extended family into his business, leveraged their resources and prospered. But he chafed under the control of the syndicate.
In the late ’80s, Leviev saw an opportunity. De Beers had encountered antitrust problems in the United States. In South Africa, the apartheid government that had worked with De Beers was losing political power. At the same time, the Soviet Union, whose leaders had long had a mutually profitable partnership with De Beers, was nearing collapse.
Leviev has a complicated relationship with his former homeland. In our first meeting, when I asked him about his boyhood memories, he surprised me by saying: “Fear. I grew up in fear.”
Tashkent is a Muslim city, and although there wasn’t much overt anti-Jewish violence, there was a climate of mistrust. “Many times I was beaten up in school,” he recalls. But his biggest fear was of the Communist government.
“As a boy, they used to make us stand at attention and salute the statue of Lenin,” he told me. “I’d curse him and the other Communists under my breath. They sent my grandfather to Siberia. They wouldn’t let us keep the Sabbath — we had to go to school on Saturdays. Just being Jewish was dangerous.”
Still, he saw business potential in Russia. He spoke the language, knew the local customs. His father, sensing danger, begged Leviev not to go. So Leviev traveled to Brooklyn, to the headquarters of the Lubavitcher rebbe, for a second opinion.
It is a meeting that has become folklore, both in Chabad and in the diamond industry. Leviev tells the story with obvious relish: “I spoke to the rebbe in Hebrew. I asked him, Should I go or not? He answered me in a kind of antique Russian. He said: ‘Go. Go to Russia and do business, but don’t forget to help the Jews. Remember your family tradition.’ ”
This was more than good advice. The rebbe’s blessing gave Leviev the keys to the Chabad network in the former Soviet Union at a very dangerous time.
Officially, Leviev was invited by the Soviet minister of energy in 1989, which was exploring ways of ending the De Beers grip on the country’s diamonds. “When I got there, Gorbachev was still in power, but you could sense that things were coming apart,” Leviev says. “Everything was unsettled, and I felt the fear again.”
There were other risks, too. To do business with the Russians, Leviev had to give up his position as a De Beers sightholder. This shook the international diamond business. “It was unbelievable,” says the Tel Aviv merchant. “He was breaking the rules, going after the source. When he succeeded in Russia, and then in Angola, others saw it and were suddenly emboldened. That’s how Leviev cracked the De Beers cartel. With the instincts of a tiger and the balls of a panther.”
There’s no need to cry for De Beers, which still controls a major share of the world’s uncut diamonds. But the syndicate no longer sets the worldwide market value of diamonds or decides who can manufacture and sell them.
Neither can Leviev. But he has become the world’s largest cutter and polisher of diamonds and one of its major sources of rough diamonds — the gelem he dreamed of.
A key to his success is his vertical integration. He mines the diamonds in Angola, Namibia and Russia, cuts and polishes them, ships them and sells them, wholesale and retail. He has a string of high-end shops in Russia and a luxury boutique, Leviev, on Bond Street in London. Next month, Leviev is opening a store on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, which, as the president of Leviev Jewelry, Thierry Chaunu, told a reporter, will cater to “the young hedge-fund professional who just got his bonus.”
One of Leviev’s first moves in Russia was to set up a high-tech cutting and polishing plant. It provided jobs and, more important, showed the Russians how they could gain control of their own industry. In turn, the Russian government helped him gain a foothold in Africa. In 1997, Leviev bought into the Catoca diamond mine, Angola’s largest, in a joint venture with the Russian state diamond company, Alrosa; a Brazilian partner; and the Angola state diamond company. Leviev soon established warm ties with the Angolan president, José Eduardo Dos Santos, who speaks fluent Russian from his days as an engineering student in the U.S.S.R.
When Leviev arrived in Angola, Dos Santos was fighting a civil war against Unita rebels, who were financed by the sale of smuggled “blood diamonds.” Leviev had a suggestion: Why not create a company that would centralize control of all diamonds? The company that grew out of that idea was the Angola Selling Corporation, or Ascorp, jointly owned by the Angolan government, a Belgian partner and Leviev. While Leviev’s plan took aim at the trade in conflict diamonds, critics say that Ascorp took advantage of mounting international pressure to establish and profit from a monopoly.
Unita surrendered in 2002, after the death of its leader, Jonas Savimbi. By then, the Angolan government had effectively pushed De Beers out of the country, and Ascorp had generated great sums for the Dos Santos government (and, it is rumored, the Dos Santos family), created thousands of jobs for Angolans in newly established factories and mines and made Lev Leviev a vast fortune. None of this would have been possible without the Russian connection.
On a shelf in Leviev’s Ramat Gan office sits a framed photo of Vladimir Putin. Leviev describes him as a “true friend.” The offices of many Israeli business magnates feature photographic trophies, grab-and-grin shots with (in ascending order of importance) the prime minister of Israel, the president of the United States, Bill Clinton and A-list Hollywood stars. Leviev has a different collection. Aside from the Lubavitcher rebbe and Vladimir Putin, there are photos taken with the leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia and Kazakhstan, for which he serves as honorary consul in Israel. (“Yes, I saw ‘Borat’ ” Leviev told me wearily. “Yes, I thought it was funny. But silly.”) Leviev’s picture gallery reflects his status as the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in the former Soviet Union, an organization he has led since 1998. Nobody knows exactly how many Jews live in the former Soviet Union, but estimates range from 400,000 to upward of one million. Leviev leads them with his checkbook.
“When it comes to contributing to the Jewish people, Lev Leviev is in a class by himself,” says Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident and former Israeli deputy prime minster. “I know a lot of rich people who give money. But Leviev is on a completely different level. He’s building entire communities.”
More than this, he is a power broker and intercessor on behalf of beleaguered Jews throughout the former U.S.S.R. Take, for instance, the case of the Jewish private schools in Baku, Azerbaijan. Three years ago the government, concerned about the influence of neighboring Iran and the spread of local madrassas, decided to close all the private schools in the country. This, of course, included the Jewish school in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital. The community elders petitioned the government, but to no avail.
“They even tried to get American Jewish organizations to intervene,” Leviev recalled. “But the Jewish organizations couldn’t do a thing.” He smiled thinly. He has a generally low opinion of American Jewish activists, especially his fellow billionaires.
And so Leviev decided to ride to the rescue. He flew to Baku on his private plane, parked at the airport and went straight to the synagogue.
“The Jews were all gathered there,” he recounted in what is obviously a favorite story. “I told them to wait while I talked to the president.” At the time, that was Heydar Aliyev. “There were journalists in his outer office. Everyone was excited to see me there, because they thought I had come to invest money in the country. Heydar thought so, too. He said: ‘Just tell me what you’re interested in — oil? Gas? Tourism? What can I do for you?’
“I asked him, ‘How can I invest in a country that doesn’t like Jews?’ Heydar got very upset when I said that. He began telling me how many Jewish friends he had and how much the Jews had contributed to his culture and the country and so on.
“ ‘But you’re closing down the Jewish school,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come to ask you to allow it to remain open. Right now the Jews of Baku are gathered in the synagogue, awaiting your answer.’ ”
Leviev paused at this point in the story. Dramatic tales of peril and salvation are part of the Chabad oral tradition.
“Heydar consulted his advisers,” Leviev said. “Then he returned to me and said: ‘The school can remain open. All right?’
“I told him: ‘Well, there’s another problem. The Jewish institutions here are in bad shape. Can you arrange for me to acquire a plot of land to rebuild?’
“ ‘Yes,’ said Heydar. ‘Is that all?’
“ ‘Not quite. I’d appreciate it if you would personally open the school next year. That way there will be no misunderstandings about what the government’s position is.’
“Heydar said: ‘I’ll do that. Are you satisfied now?’
“I told him: ‘Just one last thing, sir. Those journalists in your outer office? Would you mind announcing our agreement to them?’ ”
After Aliyev’s press conference, Leviev remembers returning triumphantly to the synagogue to deliver the good news. Shortly thereafter, Aliyev died and was succeeded by his son, with whom Leviev is on friendly terms.
“And did you invest after that?” I asked.
Leviev smiled. “No,” he said. “Azerbaijan has so many natural resources they don’t need my investment. But I told them that they would get a blessing from God.”
Leviev insists that he maintains a strict division between his community leadership and his business dealings. Perhaps this is so, but the republics of the former Soviet Union are not famous for their transparency. At any rate, business depends to a large extent on personal and political access. “A big part of our analytical value depends on the perception that we can get anything approved in Russia,” says Jacques Zimmerman, the vice president for communications of Africa Israel, Leviev’s international holding and investment company.
This perception has been strengthened by public displays of affection between Putin and Leviev. In 2000, the Russian president was the guest of honor at the opening of the Jewish Community Center in the Marina Roscha district of Moscow, which Leviev played a major role in building. It was a gesture widely interpreted as a sign of good will not only toward Russia’s Jews but toward Leviev himself.
Putin also took Leviev’s side in a dispute over the post of chief rabbi of Russia, backing Leviev’s candidate, Berel Lazar, over Adolf Shayevich, who held the position. The Kremlin’s endorsement of Lazar was a final confirmation that Leviev had achieved a typically audacious and improbable victory — putting the fundamentalist Chabad in effective control of the assimilated, mostly irreligious Jewish communities of the former Soviet Union.
Lazar’s selection has been quite controversial not only in Russia but also among Jewish groups in Israel and in the U.S. But Chabad is nothing if not practical, and they have taken a gradualist approach to winning over Russia’s secular Jews. Schools enroll nonreligious students and offer them a full government curriculum, along with some beginner’s Torah studies. Community centers hold coeducational social events. There are even mixed dances.
Such modernity comports with Leviev’s personal style, which is, in its outward aspect, Chabad-lite. He once made headlines by closing his upscale mall in Ramat Aviv — a bastion of WASP Israel — on the Sabbath, and officially his businesses are closed on Saturday. But he maintains a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for his Israeli executives, some of whom hold unofficial meetings and phone sessions on the Sabbath. Abroad, some of the businesses Leviev owns an interest in work seven days a week, and his American 7-Elevens sell nonkosher food. Leviev himself strictly observes the Sabbath, but he has been known to interrupt his weekday prayers for important phone calls.
Unlike many Chabad men, Leviev is clean-shaven, wears stylish business suits open at the collar and sometimes lounges in jeans, and his small black skullcap is barely visible. He is also something of a feminist. The women in his office, including his private secretaries, are allowed to wear slacks, a violation of strict Orthodox custom. Leviev’s two eldest daughters have been brought into the business as senior executives. Zvia, a mother of four who runs international marketing and mall businesses for her father, is frequently mentioned in the Israeli press as a potential successor. Leviev is proud to have raised his nine children in B’nai B’rack, Tel Aviv’s ultra-Orthodox suburb, but he is planning to move to an estate in Saviyon, the equivalent of going from Borough Park to Scarsdale.
Leviev’s pragmatism ends, however, at the vexing and fundamental question of who is a Jew. American Reform Judaism recognizes patrilineal descent. The State of Israel grants citizenship under the Law of Return to people with a single Jewish grandparent. But Leviev accepts only the Talmudic rule that a Jew is anyone born to a Jewish mother, or someone who has undergone an Orthodox conversion and agreed to keep all 613 Jewish laws.
There are a great many people who regard themselves as Jews but do not meet these criteria. In Israel alone, there are an estimated 300,000 among Soviet immigrants, and perhaps more than that in the former Soviet Union. “What do you do about all these people?” I asked Leviev. “Just write them off?”
Leviev’s answer: “It’s not a matter of what I do or what I want. I have no choice. The law is the law.”
A few years ago, concerned Bukharan Jewish immigrants in New York reported to Leviev that their children were being corrupted by the public schools of Queens. “The kids were going out with Pakistanis, Puerto Ricans, all sorts of people,” I was told by one of Leviev’s intimates. Leviev would have been equally horrified to learn that the Bukharan Jews of Queens were hooking up with descendants of the Mayflower.
In response, Leviev donated the money for a private school in Elmhurst. He picks up the tuition tab for the entire student body — about 800 kids at an estimated $18,000 a pop. Leviev regards this as a pilot project. His goal, I was told by his assistant, Shlomi Peles, is to make a free Orthodox Jewish education available to every Jewish child in United States.
The educational project is just one part of Leviev’s recent discovery of America. After 9/11, he and a partner bought the JP Morgan building near ground zero at a bargain price (a reported $100 million), converting it into luxury condominiums and clearing a very handsome profit. It made him a believer in New York.
“Every building is half a billion dollars,” he told me. “All you need is a global perspective. I knew New York would come back.”
Jacques Zimmerman, who handles communications for Africa Israel, told me: “Lev’s natural tendency, his home court, is Israel and Russia. But he is constantly looking to expand.”
The engine for this growth is Africa Israel. The company is publicly traded on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and handles Leviev’s businesses, not including privately held diamond interests. Leviev personally owns about 75 percent of Africa Israel, which was valued, in mid-July, at approximately $5 billion.
According to Zimmerman, Africa Israel has made a “strategic decision” to think big. “The work involved in large and small projects is about the same, so why not do big projects?” In Moscow, Africa Israel is currently building a million-square-foot mall as well as another 750,000-square-foot mall that is entirely underground. It is the lead partner in a consortium that is building the subway in Tel Aviv. Africa Israel is active in China, India, the Philippines and Latin America as well.
“We’re worldwide, but our emphasis is moving more and more to the United States,” Zimmerman says. “In the last six months, we’ve bought into more than a billion dollars’ worth of projects in Manhattan, and that’s going to grow.”
Africa Israel’s American holdings include not only the former New York Times Building but also a half-share of the Apthorp apartment building on the Upper West Side and the Clock Tower on Madison Avenue, 1,700 Fina gas stations around the country and development projects in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Phoenix. Recently the company announced it will be opening a giant Hard Rock amusement park in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
“All you need to do business in America is a good name, and banks will lend you all the money you need,” Leviev told me with enthusiasm.
Israel is a society in which successful people are rarely praised. But I encountered very little criticism of Leviev there, even from members of the Jewish WASP business establishment. “He’s still an outsider,” one high-powered Tel Aviv lawyer told me. “We don’t know anything about his personal life. But from what anyone can tell, he’s clean. You read about him in the business pages of the newspaper, not the gossip columns.”
One of Leviev’s greatest admirers is Eitan Raff, chairman of Israel’s Bank Leumi, from which Leviev bought Africa Israel in 1996. The sale was controversial at the time. “He was a Russian,” Raff says. “We didn’t know him or anything about him. We thought he might be some kind of oligarch. I hired two or three investigators to check him out. He came up clean.”
There were a number of foreign suitors for Africa Israel, but after fighting broke out in Jerusalem between Israeli and Palestinian gunmen, they became skittish and withdrew, leaving Leviev as the sole bidder. The asking price was $400 million, and Bank Leumi had to sell; it had been ordered by a court to divest itself of nonfinancial holdings, including Africa Israel, by a certain date. Leviev had the bank over a barrel. “What would you say to $330?” Leviev asked Raff.
“No, it’s worth four, that’s the fair price,” Raff said.
Leviev stuck out his hand, diamond-business style. “Four,” he said.
“He acted with great probity,” Raff says. “He didn’t try to take advantage or squeeze. His word is his bond,” he says. “Look, I’m a kibbutznik. Leviev and I aren’t from the same world at all. But I consider him a friend, and I think he’s an example of what the head of a public company should be.” Leviev’s biggest public-relations problem is his association with Arkady Gaydamak, a mysterious Russian-Israeli billionaire of unsavory reputation, now under indictment in France for a variety of offenses, including gunrunning and money laundering. Gaydamak, who cuts a flamboyant figure and recently established his own political party in Israel, is reputed to have made his fortune selling arms in Angola in partnership with various European, Israeli and African military and government figures.
Leviev says he was first introduced to Gaydamak by the former Mossad chief Danny Yatom. They certainly knew each other. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan journalism group based in Washington, Leviev and Gaydamak jointly acquired a metallurgy plant in Kazakhstan in 1999. A year later, Gaydamak bought a 15 percent share of Africa Israel, which he later sold. Leviev swears they are no longer partners, but the relationship has stained his reputation.
Unlike Gaydamak, Leviev has thus far steered clear of Israeli politics. That doesn’t mean he lacks influence, however. He meets from time to time with the nation’s leaders, mostly to discuss the economy. He owns Israel’s Russian-language television station, which reaches about 15 percent of the population. Despite his allegiance to Chabad, Leviev is considered a moderate. “He’s not one of the crazies,” a former adviser to Ariel Sharon told me. “Certainly not a Greater Israel man.”
Leviev’s global view is Moscow-centric and more than a little Machiavellian. He says he believes, for example, that America’s difficulties in places like Iran, Syria and Venezuela come primarily from George W. Bush’s failure to come to Russia’s economic aid. “If Bush had invested $100 million to help the Russian economy early in his first term, he’d have Putin’s friendship,” he says. “Instead, Bush put the money into a war with Iraq, and he’s been paying for it all over the world ever since.”
The first time I spoke to Leviev, he denied that he had any personal political aspirations. Three days later, he wasn’t so sure. “Would I like to be prime minister?” he mused. “I might. When I turn 60.”
That’s nine years off. At Leviev’s pace, nine years is a lot of time — time enough to make his way into the Forbes “starting 10,” time to complete the Chabadization of Soviet Jewry and time, perhaps, to make a run at becoming Israel’s first Russian-Bukharan-mohel-mogul prime minister.
Zev Chafets is a frequent contributor to the magazine and the author of ‘A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists and One Man’s Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance.”
Friday, September 07, 2007
Rare Judaica at Russian State Library
Rare vintage books from the Russian State Library’s massive Judaica collection went on display for the first time.
The exhibition, “Jewish Mysticism and Hassidism,” began Thursday and includes selections from the library’s holdings of more than 80,000 Jewish books and manuscripts. Sponsored by the Russian Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, it is the first such exhibit ever mounted in the country’s largest library.
It includes books from the collections of Baron David Gunzberg, Rabbi Yaakov Mazeh and the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef-Yitzchak Schneersohn.
Schneersohn’s library, representing pre-1915 Lubavitch publications, was confiscated by Soviet authorities in 1924 and has not been returned despite the repeated efforts of Chabad headquarters in New York.
Maria Endel of the Moscow Jewish Academic Library told JTA that the exhibition aims "to attract the attention of Russian and Western scholars to the library’s huge collection of printed Jewish mystical wisdom dating back to the 16th century.”
"You may see here books printed in Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic or, surprisingly, Latin, from Amsterdam, Venice, Istanbul, Prague, Krakow and many other towns of medieval Europe,” Konstantin Burmistrov of the library’s Oriental Literature Center told JTA. “They represent various areas of Jewish Kabbalah, from early esoteric Sefer Yetzirah to the 18th century Toldot Jakob Joseph.”
The exhibit will be on display until mid-September.
The exhibition, “Jewish Mysticism and Hassidism,” began Thursday and includes selections from the library’s holdings of more than 80,000 Jewish books and manuscripts. Sponsored by the Russian Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, it is the first such exhibit ever mounted in the country’s largest library.
It includes books from the collections of Baron David Gunzberg, Rabbi Yaakov Mazeh and the sixth Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Yosef-Yitzchak Schneersohn.
Schneersohn’s library, representing pre-1915 Lubavitch publications, was confiscated by Soviet authorities in 1924 and has not been returned despite the repeated efforts of Chabad headquarters in New York.
Maria Endel of the Moscow Jewish Academic Library told JTA that the exhibition aims "to attract the attention of Russian and Western scholars to the library’s huge collection of printed Jewish mystical wisdom dating back to the 16th century.”
"You may see here books printed in Hebrew, Yiddish, Aramaic or, surprisingly, Latin, from Amsterdam, Venice, Istanbul, Prague, Krakow and many other towns of medieval Europe,” Konstantin Burmistrov of the library’s Oriental Literature Center told JTA. “They represent various areas of Jewish Kabbalah, from early esoteric Sefer Yetzirah to the 18th century Toldot Jakob Joseph.”
The exhibit will be on display until mid-September.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Moscow to Get First Mitzvah Mobile
Moscow will soon be receiving its first Chabad "Mitzvah Mobile," according to an August 20th report on the Chabad.org website.
The large recreational vehicles -- mobile Jewish educational and outreach centers for areas not serviced by Chabad Houses -- are visible in cities all around the world, but this will be the first one in the Russian capital. The first such vehicle took to the road in New York City in 1974, as a means of reaching secular Jews and introducing them to Lubavitcher-style Chassidism.
Chabad hopes to have the vehice up and running by the High Holidays in September to distribute Shabbat candles, teach small sections of the torah and get Jewish men to don tefillin.
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