Abstract
The Pew Research Center’s study “Jewish Americans in 2020” (Pew 2020) found that about 10% (750,000) of American Jews were born in the former Soviet Union (FSU) or are the children of Jews born in the FSU. The goal of the Soviet Jewry movement was to settle all Soviet Jews in Israel where they would be free to be Jews/live Jewishly. Many observers thought that the chances were significant that FSU Jews who came to the US would quickly assimilate and lose the tenuous Jewish identity with which many arrived. The purpose of this paper, using data from the Century 21 dataset and Pew 2020, is to examine the extent to which FSU Jews differ from non-FSU Jews. Are FSU Jews more or less religiously and culturally connected to their Jewish identity than non-FSU Jews? Has this immigrant group, about 30 years after many arrived, lost their Jewish identity? To provide context, this paper reviews studies from Israel and Germany as well as the 2000–2001 National Jewish Population Survey and the 2011 Jewish Community Study of New York. The Soviet Jewry movement was correct in assuming that FSU Jews would be more connected in an ethnic sense than in a religious sense. Both Century 21 and Pew 2020 basically show this to be true. But for so many measures, even when FSU Jews have lower levels of Jewish connectivity, those levels are not all that much lower. Perhaps most telling is that synagogue membership is now just over one-third for both FSU and non-FSU Jews. In Pew 2020, 82% of FSU Jews do at least one of eight religious behaviors, as do 81% of non-FSU Jews. Thirty-nine percent of FSU Jews do four or more of these behaviors as compared with 41% of non-FSU Jews. FSU Jews show greater Jewish connectivity for eight of nine Jewish cultural behaviors. Thus, the fears of the Soviet Jewry movement appear to be mostly unfounded.
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Notes
This number is generally consistent with the 600,000–750,000 cited in Remennick 2007, 175). The US Department of State reported almost 600,000 Jewish refugees from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR)/FSU from 1961 to 2001 and the Department of Justice reported 394,000 (Chiswick and Wenz 2004).
For a summary of FSU Jewish migration, see Tolts (2020).
Tolts (2020) presents evidence that from 1989 to 2017 about 1,084,000 Jews and their relatives went to Israel, 328,000 to the US, and 229,000 to Germany.
Some evidence exists that there was an interest in the Jewish religion among at least some FSU arrivals. See Marti (1991).
See Vinokurov et al. (2019) for a discussion of the impact of local community on acculturation among FSU Jews.
Other studies have examined FSU Jews that we do not cover here. Kliger (2004) presents an analysis of the demographics and religiosity of FSU Jews in New York and Philadelphia compared with a national sample of American Jews. Brym, Slavina, and Lenton (2020a, b) examine FSU Jews in Canada compared with the US, combining data from the Pew Research Center (2013) and the 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada (Brym et al. 2020a, 2020b). Rutland (2011) and Forest and Sheskin (2015) examine whether Jews from the FSU are assimilating or maintaining Jewish identities in Australia. Rutland (2011, 83) concludes that “a high proportion of the Jews from the FSU who migrated to Australia… have lost touch with the organized Jewish community and, as a consequence, their Jewish identity has not been reinforced.”
Similarly, 36% of Americans attend worship services at least weekly, compared with 30% of Israelis and 10% of Germans. Also, 55% of Americans pray daily, compared with 27% of Israelis and 9% of Germans (Pew Research Center 2018).
For a discussion of Jews who came from the Soviet Union in the 1960 and 1970s, see Simon and Simon (1982).
The extant analysis does not strictly compare: FSU Jews and non-FSU Jews but rather FSU Jews and all Jews. First, since FSU Jews were only 5.5% of the total households in 2000–2001, they have relatively minor impact on the “all Jews” percentages. (Thus, we call “all Jews” “non-FSU Jews” in this discussion because all but 5.5% are non-FSU Jews.) Second, the data only include immigrants arriving after 1980. Since only very small numbers of FSU Jews arrived before 1980, this has minor impact on comparisons. Third, the data do not include adult children of FSU immigrants living on their own. In 2000, the number of such households was probably relatively small. Thus, we believe these findings can be compared with Pew 2020.
This perhaps explains why these Jews selected the US, perhaps believing that medical care would be better in the US than in Israel. In addition, older households were more likely to have relatives in the US that they might remember from pre-Soviet times.
For another analysis of FSU immigrants to the US, see Gold (2015).
New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island) and Nassau, Suffolk, and Westchester counties.
The 27 communities include Atlantic County (NJ); Bergen; Broward; Detroit; Hartford; Houston; Indianapolis; Jacksonville; Las Vegas; Lehigh Valley; Miami; Middlesex; Minneapolis; New Haven; Omaha; Pinellas; Portland (ME); Rhode Island; San Antonio; St. Paul; Sarasota; South Palm Beach; Tidewater; Tucson; Washington, DC; West Palm Beach; and Westport. Miami and Detroit did two studies between 2000 and 2018. Thus, there are 29 studies, all conducted by Sheskin. Contact isheskin@miami.edu for access to the data.
Chabad has established specific Chabad Centers to provide outreach and service to the Russian-speaking population in locations around the country.
Defined as a trip with a Jewish group, such as a Federation, synagogue, or Jewish organization.
The publicly available dataset did not include a variable defining FSU Jews. Thanks to Alan Cooperman and Becka Alper at the Pew Research Center for creating the FSU/non-FSU variable.
See any local Jewish community study report by Sheskin (for example, Sheskin 2018) for numerous tables that show relationships with age, gender, education, income, household size, and the presence of children.
If the odds ratio is equal to 1, then being an FSU household has no impact on one’s attitudes or behavior. The further the ratio is from 1 (and the closer it is to 0), the less likely FSU Jews are to exhibit a given attitude or behavior. The higher the ratio, the more likely it is for FSU Jews to exhibit a given attitude or behavior.
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Sheskin, I.M., Altman, D.E. & Hartman, H. A Comparison of FSU Jews and Non-FSU Jews in the USA. Cont Jewry 43, 411–445 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09482-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09482-1