Russian Jewish leaders have paid their respects to Alexiy II, the Russian Orthodox patriarch who died on Friday at the age of 79. He was one of the first major religious Christian voices to call for an end to anti-Semitism in Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Alexiy II led a spiritual revival of his church, assuming the role of patriarch as the officially atheistic Soviet Union collapsed. He rebuilt a national religion from the ground up, developing Russian Orthodoxy as a quasi-national religion with deep nationalistic sentiment.
With the Russian Orthodox Church's history of pogroms and forced baptism of Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews worried about its renewed ascendancy. However while Alexiy II pushed for compulsory Russian Orthodox education in Russia, he also become an early clarion voice calling for an end to historical virulent anti-Semitism among Russian Orthodox believers. In 1991, as the Soviet Union fell apart, Alexiy II traveled to the United States and spoke before a group of rabbis and vowed to fight anti-Semitism in Russia. He addressed the Jews as "brothers." The speech was condemned as a "Judaic heresy" by Orthodox priests in Russia who often included anti-Semitic diatribes in their sermons. Alexiy's name was omitted from liturgical readings referring to the head of the church, and some even denounced him as a secret Jew, according to Yuri Tabak, a historian and religious expert at the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights.
Alexiy II was born Alexiy Mikhailovich Ridiger in Tallinn, Estonia, an area that at the time was also a Jewish religious center. He successfully pushed for the passage of a 1997 law on religious organizations that officially recognized four "traditional religions" in Russia: Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam and Buddhism. Originally the law intended to recognize "world religions," which would have left out Judaism because it is the religion of just one people, said Zinoviy Kogan, a spokesman for the Russian Jewish Congress. As the law worked its way through the legislative process, the Jewish community asked Alexy to change the formulation of the law to "traditional religions" and include Judaism, Kogan told JTA. "We connected with him and told him that we felt it wasn't fair, that Judaism appeared on the Earth even before Russia, and they agreed," Kogan said. "We changed it to 'traditional religions' and that's how Judaism appeared in the preamble" of the law. Since then, the leaders of those four religious denominations often have appeared together at official events.