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Conclusion From its inception, the Soviet Union was run by an explicitly antireligious regime, which considered religion in all its forms as a harmful relic of the past that needed to disappear. The regime had established a sort of new religion of Communism, whose proponents viewed traditional religion as an undesirable and rival element; the new human being to be fashioned by Communism was to be a sworn atheist who fights off every manifestation of religion or any connection with it. Thus, for its entire duration the Soviet regime was engaged in a constant battle against religion. Yet the scope and intensity of this battle were determined to a great extent by the social and political context in which the country found itself at any given period, and to varying degrees the regime took into consideration the effect that religious persecution would have on the USSR’s international standing. It is thus unsurprising that following the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, at a time when the regime sought, by any means, to recruit large masses of people into the war effort, a certain reprieve occurred in the battle against religion. This shift was also meant to serve Soviet foreign policy and to raise the standing of the Soviet Union in the public opinion of the Allied countries. Confronted with this new reality, the regime learned that despite its brutal persecution and suppression for some two decades, religion was still a significant social force that needed to be taken into account and preferably harnessed to achieve national objectives. Accordingly, in 1943 the government reached a sort of “concordat” with the Russian Orthodox Church, with permission to engage in religious activities extending to other religions as well. The agreement made necessary the 1944 establishment of a Soviet for Religious Affairs (SRA) to oversee these activities. Even during the periods of supposed tolerance toward religion, the Soviet regime confined the permitted activity to the realm of sacred ritual, while many other issues essential to the commandments of the Jewish faith, such as charity, kosher food, matzah for Passover, and so forth, were deemed to be not part of such ritual. Moreover, the approach of the Soviet authorities toward religion was patterned on the model of the universalist faiths and did not at all correspond to Judaism, in which national-ethnic and religious aspects are so closely intertwined as to be inseparable. It follows that any change in the attitude of the authorities toward one of the realms—ethnic or religious—had implications for the other. This state of affairs set the stage for a conception by 253 Conclusion the authorities of Judaism-oriented activities as expressions of ethnic identity or even of ethnic nationalism. Hence, as the policy of suppressing the Jewish ethnic minority intensified and relations with the state of Israel worsened, the legal institutions of the Jewish faith also came under increasing pressure. The bond between Jewish religion and ethnicity gave the authorities cover when accusing Jews who performed certain rituals of doing so out of ethnic-national motives. Indeed, accusations of this kind were used to remove Communist Jews from the ranks of the party and harshly chastise other Jews who had attained status in Soviet society. Judaism, like the other religions, existed in the Soviet Union under the constant supervision of an antireligious regime that for reasons of necessity permitted the legal existence of religious institutions. It is no surprise, then, that most scholarly publications on the Jews in the Soviet Union have focused on the persecutions and close supervision of the Jewish faith. In this study, by contrast, an attempt has been made for the first time, on the basis of new archival documentation, to examine and assess, systematically and fairly, the persistence of some Jewish religious activity in spite of the vise of Soviet antireligious policy—and how this contributed to sustaining the identity of the broad Jewish public, nearly all of which was not religious. Over the nearly twenty-five years dealt with in this work, congregations and synagogues were the sole Jewish institutions permitted to operate legally and with some independence at the local level. Such congregations spanned the length and breadth of the Soviet Union, and their number in certain years reached several hundred. Unlike the other Jewish organizations established by the Soviet regime, such as theaters, publishing houses, the Yiddish authors’ sections, and the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, the congregations were continuations of sorts of the institutions of Jewish religion that predated...

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