Moscow Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt left Russia after refusing to support the war against Ukraine. Goldschmidt was pressured by Russian authorities to speak out publicly for the “special operation” in Ukraine, his daughter Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt said on Twitter.
Goldschmidt has been a rabbi in Moscow for the past 33 years and is currently president of the Conference of European Rabbis.
Collected donations for refugees
As early as March, two weeks after the start of the Russian invasion, he and his wife, Rebbetzin Dara Goldschmidt, fled to Hungary to collect donations for refugees in Eastern Europe. Then he went to Jerusalem, where his father was in the hospital.
In recent weeks, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow has repeatedly sharply criticized Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine, calling it a “catastrophe”. At the end of May, in an interview with the German Catholic news agency KNA, he reported a “depressing atmosphere” in the Russian Jewish communities.
Many Jews have already emigrated, some are “on packed suitcases”. At that time, Goldschmidt was speaking in Munich at the meeting of the conference of European rabbis he chaired.
Source: Krone
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