Forward: At a senior center in South Brooklyn, the old Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet bloc can’t wait to vote for Donald Trump.
“I like his honesty, that he’s against Muslims, that he’s against refugees,” said Valentina Albert, a former refugee from Moldova whose husband was Jewish. “I think that our lives, the lives of immigrants from Russia, will be better and richer [with Trump.]”
Seated at round tables in a long auditorium, the Russian-speaking immigrants were waiting for their lunch on a recent weekday morning. The only English to be heard was spoken by the Forward reporters, who had come to talk politics.
The seniors like to fight about politics. During the 2014 conflict in Ukraine, one man got so excited during an argument that he was taken the hospital with heart trouble. These days, the conversation is all about the U.S. presidential race. Whether they were born in Ukraine or Azerbaijan or Belarus, and whether they came to the United States as immigrants in the 1970s or as refugees in the’90s, all support the same candidate.
“I think Trump is a man…” said Olga Dubova, 82, a hairdresser who emigrated from Ukraine in 1995. “We also came here as immigrants in our own time. But we can’t let crooks in.”
“I think that enough immigrants entered this country,” said Rosa Berezovskaya, 86, who emigrated from Kiev in 2003. “We really need a new stream that will bring America back to what it was.”
In Russian-speaking Jewish communities in South Brooklyn, the Trump fans at the senior center are not alone. That sets them apart from the American Jewish community at large, where Trump has struggled to find traction. Yet Trump’s promise to halt Muslim immigration to the United States, along with his strongman persona, has struck a chord among New York City’s Russian-speaking Jews.
“There is a widely spread opinion in the Russian Jewish community that… all Muslims are terrorists,” said Alec Brook-Krasny, a local businessman and a former member of the New York State Assembly who opposes that view, and supports Clinton in the presidential race.
Many in the Russian Jewish community in South Brooklyn are suspicious of, and even hostile toward, Muslims. Members of the community spent years fighting the construction of a mosque on Voorhies Avenue in Sheepshead Bay. The dispute began in 2010; as recently as this February, the mosque had yet to open, and its members were using a closed Burger King as a prayer space.
