Jewish identity of Russian-speaking Jews in Melbourne: Ethnicity and religiosity

• In Event: How Jews think about being Jewish: Three Perspectives

Abstract

From the 1970s about two million Jews emigrated from the former Soviet Union. Of those about 12,000 settled in Australia. My research project studies the settlement experiences and adaptation patterns of these Russian-speaking Jews in Melbourne. This paper focuses on one aspect of this ongoing research and examines the Jewish identity of Russian-speaking Jews in Melbourne. According to Zvi Gitelman, Jews in the Soviet Union had a ‘thin’ Russian-Jewish culture and their Jewish identity was mostly secular and comprised of ethnic markers with almost no religious identifications. More recently, a secularization trend was also recognized for American and Australian Jews. This paper seeks to understand if Russian-speaking Jews maintained mostly a ‘thin’ Jewish ethnic identity or if their level of religiosity increased living in proximity to vibrant Jewish communities.
The Jewish identity of Russian-speaking Jews is analyzed compared to Israelis, South Africans and Australian-born in Melbourne. These three largest most recent Jewish migrant populations account for about one in four Jews in Australia. The analysis is based on the weighted Gen17 Australian Jewish community survey. With 8,621 participants it is the largest contemporary Jewish community survey in the Diaspora. The Gen17 Jewish community survey asked attitudinal and behavioral questions for both ethnic and religious identifications. Jewish identity is constructed mostly based on Steven Cohen’s indices for measuring religious and ethnic dimensions. My research shows that Russian-speaking Jews were the only group considered that had a net increase in persons who indicated being more religiously observant compared to five years ago. This contrasts with the three other groups who had a net decrease and underwent a secularization trend. Overall, however, Russian-speaking Jews scored lower on both ethnicity and religiosity scales compared to Australian-born and South Africans, but with less differentiation compared to Israelis. My findings further indicate that Russian-speaking Jews scored especially low on religious behavior. Supplementing the quantitative data, interviews with 20 Russian-speaking Jews are used to add meaning to these findings especially shedding further light on their religious behaviors. Further discussion is necessary to reevaluate if existing indices that measure religious behavior are appropriate for Russian-speaking Jews.

Author

• Emmanuel Gruzman, Monash University