In this lecture, Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff says: “We come to the synagogue [in Moscow in 1980] and there is a famous picture of Golda Meir when she was the Israeli ambassador to Russia after the founding of the state [of Israel]. She had announced that on Rosh Hashanah, she would come to this shul and 50,000 Jews turned out and Stalin went crazy. It influenced his thinking afterward. His hatred that the Jews still retain an identity, that they are not like all other communist people.”
Perhaps Stalin wasn’t nuts. Perhaps he saw that many Russian Jews had more loyalty to the Jewish state than they had to the Soviet Union and this rationally disturbed him.
All of the American nuclear scientists who turn over to Stalin the secrets of how to build a nuclear bomb were also Jewish. Perhaps there were some rational reasons why Gentiles in the U.S. Military became suspicious of Jews?
When Gentile leaders of Gentile countries start to suspect that their Jewish citizens don’t have the same loyalty to the state that non-Jews have, perhaps they’re not totally crazy and perhaps it is in their self-interest to address this. If American Jews today face a tougher security clearance test than WASPs, perhaps there is a good reason for this?
Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff announces in his talk that he has the highest security clearance in Israel. He never stints in self-praise.
He says about the Jews of Russia: “But these are Jews. These are our brothers. These are our sisters. This is whole we’re going to build the state of Israel.”
Some Jews see their fellow non-Jewish citizens as their brothers and sisters, while other Jews see Jews around the world as their brothers and sisters.
Jews will swell with pride listening to the rabbi’s adventures in Russia while many non-Jews will conclude that Jews need extra scrutiny.
Rabbi: “The hardest thing for the Jewish people is to learn to salute.”
