A round table discussion on the challenges facing Euro-Asian Jewish communities was held in Tel Aviv

On December 22, 2019, Tel Aviv University hosted an expert roundtable focusing on Jewish communities of the former USSR and other regions of Eastern Europe and Eurasia. The event was organized by the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies (IEAJS)—an academic and applied research project of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress—in partnership with the Eurasia Department of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The roundtable was moderated by Dr. Haim Ben Yakov, Director General of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress, and Prof. Zeev Khanin, Chairman of the IEAJS Academic Board and Chief Scientist of the Israeli Ministry of Aliyah and Integration.

Participants in the event included Prof. Evgeny Tartakovsky of Tel Aviv University; Dr. Nati Kantorovich, Director of the Information and Research Department at the Nativ organization under the Prime Minister's Office of Israel; Ariel Bulshtein, Advisor to the Prime Minister of Israel on former USSR immigrant affairs; Mikhail Brodsky, Director of the Eurasia-1 Department at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Dr. Boris Morozov of Tel Aviv University and RSUH; Ariel Zlatkin, representative of the Joint Distribution Committee; Arye Gut, Executive Director of the Israeli representation of the Baku International Multiculturalism Center and the Azerbaijan House in Israel; Tetyana Lokshyna, IEAJS expert; and Evgeniya Kalmykova, Congress Program Coordinator.

Conducted as a brainstorming session, the meeting aimed to assess the current state of Jewish communities in the region, examining both long-standing and emerging challenges, as well as the prospects for their development.

Roundtable participants discussed issues of demographic trends and the ethno-social structure of Jewry in the former USSR and Eurasia; the identity, culture, and boundaries of the post-Soviet Jewish collective; key factors of organized Jewish life in post-Soviet and broader Euro-Asia; and the relations between Euro-Asian Jews and organizations and the State of Israel. The discussion also addressed antisemitism and other threats to Jewish life in the region, the dynamics of the transnational Russian-Jewish and Euro-Asian Jewish diaspora, the role of academic research on the region's Jewish population, and other pressing issues.

During the discussions, the final results of a large-scale, multi-sided study on the Jewish population of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova were presented. The study was conducted by the Institute for Euro-Asian Jewish Studies at the initiative of the EAJC during the first half of 2019.

Based on the experts' presentations and subsequent discussions, a series of academic and applied policy papers will be prepared and submitted to EAJC partners and other stakeholder organizations.