President Bush visits Russian synagogue nine months after 9/11 attacks through invitation of Putin’s rabbi Berel Lazar, who called visit ‘the closing of a circle’

 

For the past several decades, the situation of Jews in Russia has been something of a litmus test for Russian-American relations. In 1974, the United States passed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked U.S.-Soviet trade relations to the loosening of restrictions on Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. As a result, during the last decade or so of the Cold War, Russian Jews became an ethnicity friendly to the United States in a country that was an American enemy. U.S. officials used to stress their support for Soviet Jewry by inviting hundreds of underground Jewish activists to a ...

https://fitzinfo.net/2026/03/15/president-bush-visits-russian-synagogue-nine-months-after-9-11-attacks-through-invitation-of-putins-rabbi-berel-lazar-who-called-visit-the-closing-of-a-circle/