http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53604
Meeting with Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl
Lazar and President of the Federation of Jewish Communities
Alexander Boroda
Vladimir Putin met with Chief
Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar and President of the Federation
of Jewish Communities Alexander Boroda and congratulated Russia’s
Jewish community on Hanukkah.
President of Russia Vladimir
Putin: I want to take this opportunity to congratulate you
and all Russian Jews on Hanukkah and wish all the very best
to you, your families, your faith, and all Jews throughout Russia.
I wish you all the very best in the New Year. I am
sure, and we all hope, that it will be a happy and prosperous year.
I know
you do much to develop relations with other faiths and you are
in constant contact on these matters. You do a lot of work
within the faith too. The result is very positive development, with
new synagogues and religious and cultural centres opening. I am
very grateful to you for this work and I hope we will
continue our cooperation.
Chief Rabbi of Russia Berl Lazar: Thank
you.
Let me
start by expressing our condolences over the tragedy
in the Black Sea. I say this on my own behalf
and on behalf of our people. This is truly a great sorrow
for us. We sense how this grief unites people. It is at moments like
this that we realise just how important it is to come together. When we
are under pressure or traversing difficulties, we nonetheless hope
and believe that God will help. With God’s help, all problems can be
solved.
Thank you
for your assessment of our work. I want to thank you
for the attention you give these matters, which we think are indeed
very important – issues such as the rights of believers,
reviving the traditional religion, and relations between
the different faiths.
In this
respect, our community tries to do what it can. We opened the Jewish
Museum and Tolerance Centre, with your help too. You perhaps heard that
the museum recently received a UNESCO prize. The work that we
have done over these last years has received recognition, thanks be
to God. Most important is that they see in us an instrument
for going the right way about teaching a tolerant attitude
to and relations with religious faiths and ethnic communities
in Europe and throughout the world. Mr Boroda has done much work
in this area. We are very grateful to him for taking
on this important work.
I would
like to discuss with you how useful we can be here in Russia, whether
we can do more, perhaps by opening tolerance centres in other cities
too.
An idea
that we discussed with the Patriarch, and which would be very good,
would be to hold an international interfaith forum, because Russia’s
experience in interfaith relations is really quite unique.
The congress
of European rabbis took place in Moscow recently. The rabbis saw
what is happening here, saw the relations, the atmosphere, saw how
at ease Jewish people feel here. They said, “Sadly, it is no longer this way
in Europe, and we do not even know what to expect tomorrow.” We
need to show them our experience, I think, including the fact
that we really do live together in peace, friendship and mutual
understanding. It is very important that the whole world sees this.
Probably, we can show them how to develop further.
This is
our biggest task – to live in such a way that all peoples
around us will live in peace and friendship. After all,
the prime task of any religion is to love and respect
others. I think that Russia today is a country that genuinely values
religious communities’ work and where there is clear understanding
of the contribution this work makes and the results it
produces. We are very grateful to you for this.
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