RISHON LEZION, Israel — For years, many Israelis got a little jittery as New Year’s Eve approached.
Their neighbors, some of the nearly 1 million Soviet citizens who flocked to the Jewish state as the Communist regime collapsed, would decorate fir trees and wear Santa Claus-like hats, celebrating New Year’s Soviet-style.
New Year's is not an official holiday in Israel because it is not a Jewish commemoration.
But after 20 years, Israel has come to terms with the Christmas-like custom, even if most of the country lights Hanukkah candles this time of year.
Soviet-born immigrants will ring in this New Year with more oomph than ever before — a testament to the comfortable and influential niche they’ve carved for themselves in Israeli society. One hotel is throwing a Russian winterland bash and charging up to $660 a plate.
“How can we not celebrate? There’s no holiday in Israel like this one,” said Violetta Galbert, a nurse from Moscow, as her toddler son dived into a large box of tinsel at a supermarket catering to the Soviet-born immigrant community. Read more
Categories: Asia, Israel, Middle East, Russia
‘Soviet Jews’ ? ‘Russian Jews’ ?
see: The Thirteenth Tribe. by Arthur Koestler http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/13trindx.htm
This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry. . .
The Khazars’ sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain.
In the second part of this book, “The Heritage,” Mr. Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research in support of a theory that sounds all the more convincing for the restraint with which it is advanced. Yet should this theory be confirmed, the term “anti-Semitism” would become void of meaning, since, as Mr. Koestler writes, it is based “on a misapprehension shared by both the killers and their victims. The story of the Khazar Empire, as it slowly emerges from the past, begins to look like the most cruel hoax which history has ever perpetrated.”