Jair Lapid immediately made it clear how seriously Israel takes the matter.

The prime minister met with officials from the State Department and the National Security Council to discuss Russia's crackdown on the Jewish Agency.

Hours earlier it had become known that the Ministry of Justice in Moscow had filed a motion to dissolve the Russian branch of the organization that supports Jews emigrating to Israel.

Christian Meier

Political correspondent for the Middle East and Northeast Africa.

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"The Jewish community in Russia is deeply connected to Israel," Lapid said Thursday evening, and the Jewish Agency is conducting important activities in this regard.

A government delegation is now to travel to Moscow to negotiate that it stays that way.

However, experts see this as not very promising.

The Russian ban request looks like a "well orchestrated" step, says Israeli Russia expert Xenya Svetlova, who works for the American think tank Atlantic Council.

The timing is also anything but coincidental, she believes: just a few weeks after Jair Lapid took over as prime minister.

"That's a message for Lapid." Moscow was dissatisfied with the attitude of the new prime minister to the war in Ukraine.

Israel does not supply arms to Ukraine

It was only on Wednesday that an Israeli television station reported on alleged statements by the Russian ambassador.

Anatoly Viktorov said in private that Lapid could "create problems" for Russian-Israeli relations.

The Russian embassy rejected the report.

At the same time, a spokeswoman said Moscow hopes that Israel will take "a more balanced and impartial position" on the war in Ukraine.

Ever since the Russian invasion at the end of February, Israel had been trying to strike that balance.

While then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett did not name Russia's war of aggression so as not to alienate the friendly superpower, Secretary of State Lapid fell to the task of reassuring Israel's Western allies by finding sharper words.

In early April, when reports of massacres in the village of Bucha became public, he wrote on Twitter: "Russian forces have committed war crimes against a defenseless civilian population." Beyond the rhetorical plane, however, Israel's support for Ukraine has remained muted.

The country provided protective equipment for police officers and provided humanitarian aid.

However, it did not deliver any weapons, and Israel has not yet joined the Western sanctions against Russia.

Ukraine has repeatedly criticized this.

Jewish Agency promotes the emigration of Jews to Israel

Nonetheless, it seems Moscow is now using one of the leverages at its disposal against Israel.

Already in early July there were reports of allegations against the Jewish Agency.

The organization downplayed this, but asked the Israeli government for support.

This led talks with Russian representatives, apparently unsuccessful.

The AP news agency, citing a Jewish Agency official, reported that Russia accused the organization of violating privacy laws by collecting personal information from citizens.

According to the employee, however, these are routine matters.

Svetlova also points out that the law in question is not new and that the Jewish Agency has been doing the same thing for years.

According to media reports, however, Russian President Vladimir Putin recently signed a law that expands the definition of “foreign agents” to include organizations that do not receive financial support from abroad.

The Jewish Agency was founded in 1929 to promote the emigration of Jews to what was then Palestine.

To this day, she helps with the Aliyah, the Jewish emigration to Israel.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain, one of her focal points was the promotion and integration of Eastern European Jews.

About a million people emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, aliyah from the region has increased significantly again.

Russians came even more than Ukrainians: there have been around 15,000 since February – more than twice as many as in the whole of 2021. Many thousands more Russians came to Israel without officially immigrating.

Observers assume that many of them have fled the increasingly repressive Russian regime.

Among the newcomers is Pinchas Goldschmidt, who had been Moscow's chief rabbi since 1993.

He left Russia two weeks after the start of the war, by his own admission, because he believes his critical stance on the Ukraine war would endanger the Jewish community.

Goldschmidt now said with regard to the action against the Jewish Agency that one was approaching "new Soviet times", in which the possibility of Jews to emigrate depended on the state of Russian-Israeli relations.

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and former chairman of the Jewish Agency, spoke more urgently.

On Facebook, he warned all Jews in Russia who are seriously considering emigrating not to put off their plans.