Fischer Brothers Both Donate

By COLlive reporter

A charitable partnership between two businessmen from across the Atlantic has resulted in the purchase of a large campus for the Jewish community in Togliatti, a city in Samara Oblast of Russia, home to 5,000 Jews.

Rabbi Dovid Fischer, a landlord in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights and father of Togliatti’s Shliach and Rabbi Meir Fischer, was joined by local entrepreneur Moshe Shwatz in purchasing the property a few months ago.

This month, they both were on hand to inaugurate the campus which includes a spacious shul, kindergarten and school, lecture rooms and social halls, commercial kitchen and 15 guest rooms for Shabbos.

“I bless you that very soon this building will be too small for you to serve the needs of the local Jews and you will need to expand,” said the proud father, who knows a thing or two about building from his real estate holdings in New York.

British-Israeli business mogul Shalom Fisher flew in as well for the festivities and was honored with opening the state-of-the-art Mei Sara Mikvah which he has donated to his nephew’s community.

Some 250 local Jews attended the celebration on Sunday, Tammuz 11, which began with affixing a Mezuza on the front entrance and included a tour and gala dinner, marking the revival of local Jewry decades after the fall of Communism.

It was a fact the city officials were particularly proud of. In fact, in attendance were the Mayor Sergey Andreyev and Oleg Lobanov, Vice President of Russian automobile manufacturer AvtoVAZ, the city’s claim to fame and better known to the world under the trade name Lada.

Rabbi Fischer is regularly in touch with the Jews among its 110,000 employees in the car plant and with Jewish workers in other enterprises based in Togliatti.

“Whatever help the city can offer to the Jews of the city and the rabbi, we will gladly do,” declared the Mayor and received a round of applause.

Shluchim from neighboring cities and family members from around the world sat alongside with dignitaries, including Merkos L’inyonei Chinuch chairman Rabbi Yehuda Krinsky, Kehot Publication Society director Rabbi Yossi Friedman, Ohr Avner Foundation director Rabbi David Mondshine and Rabbi Avraham Yosef Leizerson, head of the independent orthodox education system in Israel.

At the event, Rabbi Fischer thanked all the participants, and notified that the campus will already be put to use this month for the summer Camp Gan Israel for Jewish children of Togliatti, Samara and other cities in the area.

For Shwatz, from the pillars of the local Jewish community, the resurgence of Judaism there is not a surprise. He recalled visiting a local museum and seeing a photograph of 2 chassidim walking in the streets of the city that what was once called Stavropol-na-Volge.

“I guess the foundations were already put down then for the chassidim that are here today, bringing Torah and chassidus to this place,” he said.