Rabbi Lazar on ’50 Influential’ List

The Jerusalem Post has put together its annual list of ’50 most influential Jews’ for 2015 who have impacted the world last year, and have the potential to affect change in years to come.

Ranked at #34 was Rabbi Berel Lazar, Chief Rabbi of Russia and chairman of the Rabbinical Alliance of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), who is credited by the paper for “Shepherding Chabad in Russia.”

Here is the Post’s description for choosing Rabbi Lazar:

When one thinks of post-Soviet Jewry, one institution that may come to mind is the Chabad Hassidic group, whose Russian branch is headed by Rabbi Berel Lazar.

Born in Italy in 1964 to Chabad emissaries, Lazar went to the United States as a teenager, studying and living in Crown Heights through his early 20s. He moved to Russia 25 years ago, at the end of the Cold War, where he quickly became involved in communal life and helped found the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia. He became chief rabbi in 2000.

While Russian Jewry under Lazar has flourished, with synagogues, schools and cultural centers opening and offering a plethora of religious and communal services, his tenure has not been without controversy.

In a 2007 report on the chief rabbi, The Wall Street Journal cited his “Faustian bargain with the Kremlin,” in which he allegedly minimized anti-Semitism and acted as a lobbyist for the increasingly autocratic President Vladimir Putin in exchange for government backing against other Jewish communal umbrella groups. One critic was quoted as calling Lazar a “court Jew.”

The rabbi likewise drew criticism for his decision to take the Russian government’s side in a long-running dispute between the Kremlin and Chabad’s worldwide headquarters in America over a massive collection of books the hassidic group’s leader left behind when he fled to the United States in 1940.

Lazar’s participation in a ceremony marking the annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula to the Russian state last year met with disapproval as well. He subsequently attended a controversial Holocaust memorial ceremony in the occupied territory, which one Ukrainian Jewish leader dubbed a “cynical use of the Holocaust for political ends.”

The fraught relationship between Russia and Ukraine has spilled over, to some degree, to relations between Lazar’s communities and those of his Ukrainian counterparts.

Alexander Boroda, president of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia and a close affiliate of Lazar, told The Jerusalem Post that Ukrainian “Jews and rabbis should stay away from politics,” in response to a Ukrainian Jewish condemnation of Russian “aggression.”

Nonetheless, Russian Jews under Lazar have extended aid to their Ukrainian coreligionists, and Russian communities have certainly blossomed.