Russian oligarchs and Chabad

How Russia's post-Soviet oligarchs related to Chabad-Lubavitch: the 1999–2000 split between Gusinsky's Russian Jewish Congress and the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities, the FJC's funders, and whether Chabad networks helped create oligarchic wealth or arrived after it

Russian oligarchs and Chabad
Key people	Berel Lazar; Lev Leviev; Roman Abramovich; Vladimir Gusinsky; Adolf Shayevich

Russian oligarchs and Chabad covers the relationship between Russia's post-Soviet business magnates and Chabad-Lubavitch, mainly through the Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia (FEOR) and its rabbi Berel Lazar. The best-documented features are three. In 1999–2000 FEOR displaced the Russian Jewish Congress (RJC), which Vladimir Gusinsky had founded and funded, as the Kremlin's preferred Jewish body. FEOR's main funding came from the Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev and, later, from Roman Abramovich. And other wealthy donors backed FEOR projects such as the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow. This page treats as an open question, not a conclusion, whether Chabad networks helped the oligarchs acquire their wealth. The sources found show patronage of Chabad by men who were already wealthy. They do not show Chabad helping to create that wealth.

Background: who the oligarchs were

In 1996 the leading financiers were nicknamed the semibankirshchina, "the rule of the seven bankers". Sakwa, citing the Financial Times, lists them as "Boris Berezovsky, Mikhail Fridman, Vladimir Gusinsky, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Vladimir Potanin, Alexander Smolensky and Vladimir Vinogradov". Hoffman writes that in 1996 "Five of them had parents, either one or both, who were Jewish: Gusinsky, Berezovsky, Friedman, Smolensky, and Khodorkovsky", and that the group "settled on Potanin as their man in government because he was not Jewish".

Jewish oligarchs were overwhelmingly outsiders to the Soviet nomenklatura. Braguinsky studied 296 first-wave oligarchs and found that "23.2 percent of outsider oligarchs were of Jewish ethnicity, while just 2.4 percent of insider oligarchs were Jewish". He attributes the gap to "widespread discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union". Of the five Jewish "seven bankers", none came from the nomenklatura in the strict sense. Khodorkovsky is the borderline case: he "was the deputy chief of Komsomol at his university" and, according to Graham, "used his position in the Komsomol to establish a small bank". Guriev and Rachinsky note that the older oligarchs "have typically come from Soviet-era nomenklatura", while "The younger entrepreneurs started from scratch in the late 1980s". Graham cautions that the oligarchs' "power has been much exaggerated".

The Russian Jewish Congress and the 1999–2000 split

Gusinsky "was elected president of the Russian Jewish Congress in January 1996". Fridman was also among the RJC's founders. JTA reports that "For several years, Chabad and non-Chabad rabbis sat together on the board of the Russian Jewish Congress, a foundation formed in 1996 by media mogul Vladimir Goussinsky".

FEOR was founded in November 1999. According to Chabad's own news service, more than 80 communities met in Moscow, and "Rabbi Berel Lazar, chief Lubavitch emissary to the region, was appointed as its head". A study published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA) describes the federation as formed by "delegates from Habad-controlled congregations" and calls it "a direct organizational challenge to the Gusinsky-led alliance". It adds that "The following month, then Prime Minister Putin attended a festive Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony as guest of the Habad leadership, a clear signal that the new federation had his approval."

In June 2000 FEOR elected Lazar "chief rabbi of Russia", a title already held by Adolf Shayevich of the Moscow Choral Synagogue. The election came days after Gusinsky's arrest. The details are on the page Berel Lazar and the Kremlin. Zelenina writes that Chabad was "Placing stake on loyalty to Kremlin while the Grand Choral Synagogue remained loyal to their supporter disfavoured oligarch Vladimir Gusinsky". She sets "The critical view", that this "was an immoral political trick", against the "Hasidic narrative" that the leadership "just wanted to be 'above politics'". She quotes Lubavitch accounts holding that "Lazar realized that Gusinsky's actions posed a grave danger to the Jewish community". JTA later summarised: "Four years later, KEROOR and FEOR started their struggle over community representation and political influence, a process triggered by the Kremlin, which forced Goussinsky to emigrate from Russia."

After the arrest, the journalist Sergei Dorenko told Putin that he had sent a message "to try and catch journalists, businessmen, and Jews … Because Gusinsky is a Jew connected with the press and a businessman." Leonid Nevzlin of Yukos "took over as president of the Russian Jewish Congress after Gusinsky went into exile in 2001".

A critical account: David Berger

The historian David Berger, an Orthodox critic of Chabad messianism, wrote that "The recently formed Federation of Jewish Communities has installed a Chabad emissary named Berel Lazar as the country's chief rabbi". He called this "part of a larger power struggle within the community", in which "the existing chief rabbi has not relinquished his position", and added that "the new group enjoys the sympathy of the government, and the activities of Chabad dwarf those of all other Jewish religious movements". Berger quotes the Jewish Week as reporting that Chabad's annual budget in the former Soviet Union was "a staggering $20 million, 22 times more than what is spent by Reform", that Progressive Judaism across the region "operates on a budget of $900,000", and that a single Ukrainian Chabad synagogue had raised "$1 million, among the Jews of Dnepropetrovsk alone".

Berger also writes that Lazar's name "has appeared on the ruling on at least five occasions from 1998 to 2000 in English, Hebrew, and Russian". The ruling in question is a rabbinic declaration, first issued in late 1997, that Jewish law requires belief in the late Rebbe's messiahship. Berger reports that an unnamed official of the World Jewish Congress told him he had seen Lazar open a major Jewish event in Moscow in 1998 by "reciting the Yehi", the messianist acclamation. For the further claim that the ruling was reprinted in Russian with all eighteen signatories from the former Soviet Union, Berger relies on Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the chief rabbi of Moscow, whom he describes as "engaged in a struggle with Chabad". Goldschmidt was therefore a rival of Lazar's, not a neutral witness. In the introduction to the 2008 paperback edition, Berger reports that Lazar's secretary wrote to Commentary in December 2001 asserting that "it was known that the signature was a forgery". Berger replies that he "cannot know whether or not the signature is genuine", but that he knows of no objection by Lazar to its use. These are Berger's claims and are disputed by Lazar's office. This page does not state that Lazar is a messianist.

Funders of the Chabad federation

Lev Leviev

Leviev's family links to Chabad predate his wealth. A Chabad-side memoir by Hillel Zaltzman recalls the arrest in Samarkand, during the 1948–53 wave, of "R. Zevulun Leviev, grandfather of the renowned philanthropist Lev Leviev", who was targeted "as someone associated with Chabad chassidim". In a 2026 interview with Ami, a Haredi magazine, Leviev said that from the age of five his teacher was "a Chabad chasid who operated in secret", and that at 12 he went "to study in an underground yeshivah in Samarkand". He described living "in a house with ten other bachurim and our teacher", adding: "Only later did we discover that there was a network of many such houses, each with a teacher and each operating quietly." When his father "was threatened with arrest, I was smuggled back home in the middle of the night". In Tashkent, he said, "We lived in a kind of clique of our own: our family, my father's brothers and a few Chabad chasidim." His father "was the manager of a department store" with "a side business selling imported clothing". On the family's departure in 1971 he said: "For a long time, we were denied permission to emigrate, and my father had to pay a lot of money for our permits."

Editor's note: the claim that Chabad networks helped a future oligarch leave the Soviet Union is unverified. Two Chabad-side books were checked for it. The full English text of Zaltzman's The Jewish Underground of Samarkand (2023) was searched by keyword. Its only references to the family are the grandfather's arrest and a photograph, and it says nothing about the Leviev family's emigration. Chapter 1 of Yosef Yitzchak Kaminetzky's Hebrew The Rebbe and the Mossad (Kfar Chabad, 1998), which covers Israeli envoys working with Chabad hasidim in the USSR in 1953–62, was read in full from the page images. The rest of that book was searched by keyword only. Chapter 1 mentions Tashkent three times (pp. 21, 25, 34), always in connection with distributing religious material, and describes no help with emigration; it states that in 1953–55 not one Jew got through the Iron Curtain (p. 10). Neither book mentions Leviev's emigration. Only the family's 1971 emigration from Tashkent is stated here, on Leviev's own account, which attributes the exit to paid permits rather than to Chabad. The family settled in Bnei Brak. The interview's later sections, including the Rebbe's role in his career, are behind a paywall and have not been checked.

In 2002 JTA described Leviev as "the president and principal financial backer" of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS. It reported that his assistants put his spending on Jewish causes in the former Soviet Union at "$15 million to $30 million a year". Lazar told JTA that Leviev had promised: "Anything you do above what is already existing, I'm going to pay for — fully". JTA added: "With Leviev's backing — and thanks to his close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin — FEOR and Lazar in recent years have eclipsed the Russian Jewish Congress as the main representative of Russian Jewry." JTA calls the story that the Rebbe, in a 1990 audience, advised Leviev "to pursue business opportunities in the former Soviet Union" one of a number of "apocryphal stories". Leviev himself said he was helping Russian Jewry "as he promised Schneerson". The same article reports that Leviev had been "an unofficial adviser to President Mikhail Gorbachev on diamond issues — which helped Leviev immensely when the Russian market began to open up". The RJC's president, Evgeny Satanovsky, charged that "Leviev merely has supplanted Goussinsky as the Jewish community's leading oligarch". Zelenina names Leviev and Sami Rohr as the main sources of the federation's "lavish financial support".

Editor's note: Leviev is an Israeli citizen of Bukharan origin, and none of the oligarch studies cited above treats him as one of the Russian oligarchs.

Roman Abramovich

In 2007 JTA reported: "It has been known for some time that the notoriously media-shy Abramovich was a major donor to the Chabad-controlled Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia". In 2018 FEOR honoured Abramovich, who chairs its board of trustees. FEOR president Rabbi Alexander Boroda said: "He never talks about it but I want to because people don't understand who is the source of it is – and it is him. We have more than 160 communities in all of Russia and Roman supports them all." Boroda put Abramovich's share at some 80% of developments in Jewish life in Russia. The Moscow Times reported that he bought Sibneft in 1995 "for $100.3 million" and in 2005 sold 73 per cent of it to Gazprom for $13 billion. By either chronology, his documented patronage of FEOR follows the acquisition of his fortune.

Other donors

• Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center, Moscow (opened 2012). The Forward describes it as "initiated by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia — the umbrella organization for Chabad-Lubavitch in Russia — supported by the Kremlin and financed by a handful of Russian Jewish oligarchs at a cost of $50 million". Bloomberg reported it as "partly financed by President Vladimir Putin and billionaire Viktor Vekselberg". The Art Newspaper lists the benefactors as Alexander Smuzikov ("who donated $10m"), Putin (a month's salary, "around $4,900"), Alexey Miller, Vladimir Evtushenkov, Vladimir Bogdanov and Anatoly Chubais. The New York Times called it "underwritten by oligarchs close to President Vladimir V. Putin". Politico, a critical investigation, also credits Abramovich with funding it.
• Arkady Gaydamak was described by JTA as "a generous donor to FEOR" before he became president of the rival KEROOR in 2005.
• Lubavitch Development Fund project for the former Soviet Union. Berger reports receiving a brochure from the Lubavitch Development Fund "announcing a dramatic $30 million project to build ten new Jewish community centres in the Former Soviet Union with significant funding from a wonderful Modern Orthodox philanthropist whom I know very slightly". Berger does not name the donor. The brochure is undated, but he describes it in text written in 2000–01.
• Mikhail Fridman gave through bodies outside Chabad: he co-founded the RJC and the Genesis Philanthropy Group, whose grantees include Birthright Israel, Yad Vashem and Hillel.

Editor's note: no reliable source was found tying Alexander Mashkevich (president of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress) or Telman Ismailov (a patron of Mountain Jewish synagogues) to donations specifically to Chabad, so neither is listed as a Chabad donor. In Ukraine, the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky and the Optima Management partners are discussed on a separate page.

Did Chabad networks aid the oligarchs' rise?

The sources consulted do not support the idea that Chabad networks helped create oligarchic fortunes.

• Timing. Hoffman dates the fortunes of the core group to the late-Soviet cooperative and banking boom of 1987–1995 and to the 1995–96 loans-for-shares auctions. FEOR was founded in November 1999, and the large documented donations (Leviev in 2002; Abramovich from the 2000s, recognised in 2018) came later.
• The early Jewish oligarch body was not Chabad. The leading Jewish oligarchs of the 1990s (Gusinsky, Fridman) organised Jewish life through the RJC, a cross-denominational body. Chabad's rise came with Kremlin favour against Gusinsky in 1999–2000.
• Leviev is the partial exception. His business and philanthropy grew together in the former Soviet Union. JTA reports that his Gorbachev-era diamond advisory role helped his business, and that he cultivated Putin and Kremlin officials in ways "that have benefitted both his business interests and the FJC". This is evidence of overlapping business and communal networks around one donor. It is not evidence that Chabad created his wealth.
• Patronage and politics. Critics, including the RJC's Satanovsky and Zelenina's "critical view", argue that FEOR traded on loyalty to the Kremlin and on the money of loyal oligarchs. That argument concerns the use of wealth after 1999, not its origin.

Editor's note: this conclusion rests on English-language journalism and the scholarship listed. Russian-language sources (e.g. Kommersant, Charnyi 2005/2006 as cited by Zelenina) have not yet been checked.

See also

• Berel Lazar and the Kremlin
• Chabad and Ukraine
• Schneerson library case
• Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia
• Chabad Lubavitch of Russia