Russian Israelis and Religion: What Has Changed after Twenty Years in Israel?

Abstract

Most former Soviet immigrants who arrived in Israel had a secular or atheistic outlook, with only a small minority leaning toward Orthodox Judaism or Christianity. To understand how 20 years of life in the ethno-religious polity of Israel have influenced their religious beliefs and practices, we conducted a survey of a national sample of post-1990 immigrants. The findings suggest that most immigrants have adopted the signs and symbols of the Jewish lifestyle. They celebrate the major religious holidays in some form, and many are interested in learning more about Jewish culture and history. We interpret these changes mainly as an adaptive response aiming at social inclusion in the Israeli Jewish mainstream rather than actually emerging religiosity. Few immigrants observe the demanding laws of kashrut and Shabbat, and even fewer attend synagogues and belong to religious communities. Their expressed attitudes toward state-religion matters reflect their ethno-nationalist stance, which is more typical for ethnic Jews than for partial or non-Jews.While for most people who call themselves Jewish the ethnic and religious aspects of their identity are closely intertwined, the Russian-Soviet reality has created a separation between the two, even using different words for them: Yevrei (Hebrew) as an ethnic label and Yudei (Jew) to refer to the Judaic faith. Starting from the beginning of the twentieth century, and especially after the 1917 Russian Revolution, the trend toward Jewish secularism and the switch to Russian-and Yiddish-based secular literature, press, and culture swept through the majority of Russian Jewry, especially Israel Studies Review, Volume 27, Issue 1, Summer 2012: 55-77 © Association for Israel Studies

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