A German publishing house De Gruyter launched the book series “Post-Soviet Jewry in Transition” in cooperation with Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies.

The publisher noted, “At the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the communist-ruled Soviet Union, more than two million Jews left their home, most permanently. They dispersed not only to the United States and Israel, the current major Jewish demographic centers, but also to Central Europe, Canada, Australia, and other places around the world.

At the same time, about 900,000 Jews and their family members still live in post-Soviet countries, despite certain negative demographic trends. Post-Soviet Jews around the globe maintain customs, worldviews, and networks of their own, produce new subcultural realities, and are active in the public sphere.

They form a new, transnational subethnic group of Jewish people, a new Russian-speaking Diaspora, whose collective identification appears against the backdrop of a gradual decay of the former Soviet Jewish identities. Most Russian-speaking Jews enjoy their own networks and infrastructures in local communities, embodying a changing balance of identification between country-of-residence and the broader transnational Russian-speaking Jewish Diaspora.

This series sheds light on post-Soviet Jewry across the globe, a new type of modern Jewish Diaspora in transition”.