Obituary

Mordechai Altshuler, the leading historian of Soviet Jewry, died in Jerusalem on July 18, 2019. He was born in 1931 in Suwałki, Poland to a middle-class traditional Zionist-oriented Jewish family. Following the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union in 1939, Mordechai, his parents, and part of his extended family were deported to the Soviet North. They were settled in Komaritsa, where young Mordechai started his Soviet education. He soon became fluent in Russian in addition to Yiddish and Polish. Following the Soviet-Polish agreement of 1941, the Altshulers traveled southward to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, where the family, including Mordechai, worked in nearby cotton fields. Following the end of the war, they returned to Poland and settled in Wroclaw (former Breslau). There Mordechai studied in a Jewish school and joined the Socialist-Zionist Youth movement, Dror. Arriving in Israel in early 1950, he settled with his peer group in kibbutz Naan. He served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) from 1951 to 1953, and moved from Naan to Tel-Aviv, where he worked in various jobs while completing his secondary education. Altshuler started his academic studies at Hebrew University in fall 1956. He completed his B.A. in general history and Hebrew literature in 1962, and his Masters in Jewish history in 1964. Among his mentors were such renowned scholars as Shimon Halkin, Jacob Talmon, Shmuel Ettinger, and Khone Shmeruk.

Professor Altshuler's scholarly research concerning Soviet Jewry spanned half a century, starting in the 1960s and ending in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. During the early decades of his studies he accessed all possible sources in the West, and the 1990s opened a new and unexpected vista following the disintegration of the Soviet Union. He was among the first Israeli scholars to travel to post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine, and succeeded in unearthing a wealth of new documentation from the formerly inaccessible archives.

Altshuler's first pioneering study, his doctoral dissertation, dealt with the history of the Yevsktsiia, (established to appeal to the Jewish masses, 1918–1929) the Jewish Section of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He argued, based on a variety of sources, that the Yevsektsiia was not only an instrument of Soviet policies, but also attempted to maintain specifically Jewish activities and the continuity of Jewish culture in the USSR. From the very beginning of his research, Altshuler opposed the impact that anti-Soviet attitudes had upon scholars, who perceived Soviet-Jewish activists as mere tools of the regime. One of his subsequent studies was his monumental book Bukhara Jews and Mountain Jews: Two Kibbutzim in the Southern Soviet Union (1973). It earned him two prestigious prizes: the Bialik Prize and the Yitzhak Ben Zvi Prize. After the publication of his book, he continued to study this group, interviewing scores of Mountain Jews who immigrated to Israel in the 1990s.

Altshuler was not only a historian of Soviet Jewry, he was among the leading scholars on the demography of the Jewish population in Soviet Russia. His Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (1998) presented and analyzed statistical data concerning Jewish rates of birth, educational levels, mixed marriages, and death rates in various regions of the country. In his pioneering study on Jewish religion in the USSR, Religion and Jewish Identity in the Soviet Union, 1941–1964 (2012), he used newly available sources from former Soviet archives in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Altshuler also incorporated these sources in numerous articles published in the years since the opening of the Soviet archives. We used to share our adventures in these archives, to which we never imagined having access. Altshuler published his last book in Israel during the final year of his life. "She'erit Hapletah": Shifts in Jewish Life in the Soviet Union, 1939–1963 (2019) focuses on the far-reaching impact of the Holocaust on Soviet Jews, mainly on their demographic profile and national identity.

Editor-in-chief of such scholarly periodicals as Behinot: Studies on Jews in the USSR and Eastern Europe and Jews in Eastern Europe, Professor Altshuler was also active as a...