The Kremlin Conversation Russia’s Chief Rabbi Never Forgot

At a Kremlin meeting just before Rosh Hashanah, President Putin asked Russia’s Chief Rabbi, Rabbi Berel Lazar, how the Jewish people had survived when so many other nations disappeared. Rabbi Lazar turned the question back to him, and Putin answered that Jewish life rests on eternal foundations.

By COLlive reporter

Hundreds of Shluchim and bochurim were huddled for hours on Sunday night to hear inspiring words of Torah and chassidus at the many farbrengens held at the small and main shuls of 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.

Among those who farbrenged was Chief Rabbi of Russia Rabbi Berel Lazar. Standing at a farbrengen table set with food and l’chaim, with Chassidim packed in around him, he shared a story from one of his meetings in the Kremlin.

It was, he recalled, “a terrible day in Russia”: a plane carrying an orchestra had gone down on its way to Russia, “and all the people died.” It was just before Rosh Hashanah, and Rabbi Lazar had a meeting scheduled for the next day.

“I was sure that the meeting will be cancelled,” he said. Instead, he was told President Putin wanted to see him, and that he would be “the first one in, because we know you have to finish early before Rosh Hashanah.”

When he arrived, the room was full. “I come to the Kremlin, I walk into the room and I see all the ministers are there. Minister of Internal Affairs, Foreign Affairs, the Army, everybody’s there.” He was told to go first, and the officials would wait.

“The meeting took like an hour and 20 minutes,” Rabbi Lazar said. Eventually he cut it short himself: “Mr. President, we’ll continue at a different time. We have a lot of people there who are probably hungry. I don’t want to, you know, get eaten up.”

But as he stood holding the door on his way out, the president stopped him.

“Rebbe, I have one more question for you,” he said. “Can you tell me the secret of the survival of the Jewish people?”

The president went on: “We had so many nations, nationalities in our country, they are gone. They had territory, they had a language, they had a culture, they had everything, an army… The Jewish people spread out all over the world, no country, no language. These people speak English, these people speak Ladino, these people don’t even speak Hebrew, and they survived. How did they survive?”

Rabbi Lazar described his dilemma. “So what should I do? I start giving him a secret? No — rabbis, when they start speaking, they never stop,” he said. “start telling him our history from Avrohom, Yitzchok, Yaakov?”

Instead, he said, the words came to him at that moment: “Mr. President, maybe you have an answer to this question.”

The president did. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” he replied, “and I think the reason is because all these other nationalities, nations, they’re all founded on things that come and go. Money, language changes, culture comes and goes. The Jewish nation, the foundations are eternal values. It’s going to be there for eternity.”

“And he tells me eternal values are the Torah, the Jewish family, and the rabbis,” Rabbi Lazar related.

The Torah, the president explained, “because the Torah was never going to change, not one word ever changed in the Torah, three thousand years.” And the Jewish family “has value that you don’t see anywhere in the world.”

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