Return of the Jews; For decades the story of Russia's Jews has been one of fear and flight to Israel. Now many are coming home.

Byline: Frank Brown

It's not easy being Jewish in Russia, original home of the pogrom. But sometimes it's even harder to be Jewish in Israel. That's why an estimated 50,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past five years. They come mostly to booming Moscow--but also to godforsaken places like Russia's Jewish Autonomous Region, a swampy Siberian area larger than Israel that is plagued by mosquitoes in summer and minus-35-degree temperatures in winter. Viktor Dubinin is among the 200 or so Israeli Jews who have returned to this region along the Chinese border in recent years. "No one likes Russians there," says Dubinin, who emigrated to Israel in 1999 and came back last year. Part of the reason, he says, is that under President Vladimir Putin, life for the Jews of Russia has changed. "It's a lot better," he says. "There's work. Russia is rising again."

The contrast is indeed stark, at least by some measures. In Russia oil prices are setting new highs. Economic growth is set to surpass 7 percent in 2004, as it has in most recent years. In Israel the economy is a mess. Unemployment tops 10 percent, and the intifada is in its fifth year. Even the Jewish Autonomous Region--created in the 1930s by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin to lure Jews from western Russia to a new Siberian "homeland"--is enjoying a modest boom. As Dubinin puts it, "You can make a good living."

All this defies expectations. When the Soviet Union collapsed and Jews were free to leave, demographers predicted that the region would quickly lose its Jewish identity. Instead, a steady 5 percent of the population--about 8,500 people--remains Jewish. That's mainly because local officials are strongly supportive, funding the construction of a new synagogue, helping purchase land for a Jewish school, giving the rabbi a weekly radio show and publishing the regional newspaper partly in Yiddish. In Moscow, too, officials appreciate the returns as evidence of Russia's normalization. "Jews in Russia are as free as they are anywhere else in the world," declares Rabbi Berel Lazar, a top Jewish leader who has forged unusually good relations with the Kremlin--partly on the strength of the fact that Putin himself, Lazar says, happily shared an apartment with a Jewish family when growing up ...