After 33 years of sweat and tears, Moscow’s Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt chooses exile over support for Putin’s war
IT was the night of February 23, and longtime Moscow chief rabbi Rav Pinchas Goldschmidt went to sleep at home; the next morning he woke up in a foreign country.
This wasn’t another long-haul trip for one of the most influential Jewish leaders in Europe, who has practiced diplomacy from the Gulf to America.
It was because the country he had known for 33 years — from the twilight of the Soviet Union to the heights of the Putin era — had disappeared overnight.
That morning, as Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled across the border into Ukraine and Spetsnaz special forces tried to seize Kviv’s airport, the Kremlin moved decisively to end the last vestiges of freedom across Russia.
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