After two days of intensive sight-seeing in St. Petersburg, Russia, not so much a city as a cemetery holding the remains of what was once a city, I returned to Finland and turned on the St. Petersburg TV channel that we get here in Åbo. St. Petersburg TV was broadcasting a show Åbout Russian Jews in Tel Aviv—a program of Russian Jewish humor made in Israel. What a contrast! St. Petersburg is grim, dirty, decaying. The trams belong in museums, the buildings crumble, the people scavenge for food, the parks Åbound in weeds, whoever does not beg steals if he can. Russian Jews in Israel— with their fine Jewish faces and their vital Jewish humor—looked lively, witty, and joyful—everything St. Petersburg is not.

I asked myself: Why should any Jew in Russia, now free to emigrate to Israel, want to stay there? I see no compelling answer to that question. Russian Jews have been out of touch with Judaism for three generations. Hitler wiped out much of the population possessed of knowledge and memory; Stalin obliterated a thousand years of spirituality. Today Russian Jews gain no native access to the resources of Judaism—either the books that convey its wisdom and spirituality or the human beings who embody its learning and sanctity. The heroic refuseniks underwent political martyrdom; none left a legacy of religious consequence. In Russia, to be a Jew is an ethnic identity, stamped on a passport. But that identity carries with it only confrontation with contempt, for, as everyone knows, the broad rivers of Russia’s anti-Semitism run deep, swift, and very cold.

True, aliyah—migration to Israel— carries its costs. But the reward vastly outweighs them, for Russian Jews in Israel choose from among a hundred choices of what being a Jew may mean. The identity carries with it sanctity for some, a sense of fulfillment for others. and the sheer joy of being ordinary for another group—for all, it decries nothing but pride and well-earned self-esteem. For none is identification as a Jew defined by outsiders, who commence with hatred.

But Russia is miserable not only for the Jews. Trying to find a visual representation of the human condition in Russia, I think of the palaces of the czars and the churches of their day. Like the great stone heads on Easter Island in the remote Pacific, they speak of an age incomprehensible today, in a language no one speaks. And the same is so of Judaism, the ancient faith.

Whatever the future brings—and for the so-long-abused, suffering Russian people, who can wish anything but good?—tomorrow brings no more palaces. As for the transcendent churches of St. Petersburg, Russia will do well to retain what it has and is not likely to compete with the achievements of a glorious age of faith.

Seventy years of de-Judaization also mark three generations of de-Christianization, and while both great faiths renew themselves, neither draws on deep roots in a near-term past. But while Christians can look at surviving churches and their martyrs to remember and try to renew, where are Jews supposed to find their models? In neither native stone nor native-born models can they find definition for what they may become. American Jews took three generations to define for themselves a distinctively American and enduring mode of being Jewish, and they drew, and still draw, on learning and living memory to form the viable future we now have. Russian Jews have nothing but the broken stones of an edifice none today can hope to reconstruct.

In that context, why should a Jew stay in Russia instead of emigrating to Israel? Russia holds no future for Judaism, so far as a future depends upon the native resources of a vital present. Russia never valued the Jews and does not value us today. “But if not there, then where?” is a question easily answered. Israel wants the Russian Jews, needs them, values them, has placed a lien on the whole world of Jewry to help them settle within its borders. Israel offers them an entire menu of Judaisms for their taste. It can take Jews possessing nothing more than a vacant ethnic identification and turn them into joyful partners in the ongoing debate that defines the state and dignifies its people.

Then what of the United States? In the bitter American Jewish debate of the 1970’s on whether the resources of the Jewish community worldwide should be divided between emigrants to Israel and those to the United States, I took the view that, with scarce resources, we have rationally to allocate what we have by appealing to the public interest and not only to private preference. World Jewry has taken as its first priority the building of the Jewish state. Whatever resources we muster to help Jews find a better life should then flow to the building of the Jewish state. We also called into question the capacity of American Jews to explain to newcomers the wherefores and hows of being Jewish according to our model, which works in its context but in no other. Israel is the sole destination for those who turn to world Jewry for help, since only by devoting all scarce resources available for migrants to Israel can we accomplish our primary goal of building the Jewish state, our secondary goal of helping Jews to be Jewish, and the subsidiary one of helping Jews to improve their private lives.

Today the same is so. But times have changed, both for the better and for the worse. Jews can legally leave Russia, and Israel is ready to receive them. Who would have dreamed? But anti-Semitism renews itself, and any explanation for the great hatred that appeals only to the economic crisis and ignores the deeply rooted Russian contempt for Jews and the Russian Orthodox Church’s deep loathing of Judaism is insufficient. Russian Jews not only can leave; for the sake of the future they should leave. Judaism has no future in Russia. Money spent on building Judaism there buys a dubious present and extends false hope. The only future that Jews in the former communist countries can hope for if they wish to live as Jews—and, I fear, if they wish to live at all—will take place in the state of Israel.