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this is a good question. brighton has been russian since i can remember. i think concept is right that it started after wwII, when this country opened the gates to any euro jew. many were from the ukraine or russia. during the soviet era, the u.s. used to give stipends to emigrating cccp'ers. i guess it was only natural that they would go to a place with other russians. i think the u.s. continued to subsidize russian emigration here even after the ussr collapsed. i don't know if they do it anymore.
Yeh but the current occupants of brighton beach are not Jews I believe. They are eastern orthodox christians. They are Russian, or Ukrainian, etc.
Jews from eastern europe make up a large percentage of NY metro. I think these russians cannot be grouped together with the jews who came here first.
I remember in the late 90's my high school history teacher Lofredo, who is from brooklyn mentioned that "the Russians are in Brooklyn now". I am assuming she meant that they were not there before, and that they suddenly came in.
I think we have at least one poster on here who is Russian and lives in Brighton Beach, so he should probably chime in.
Here is what I understand about the Russians in Brighton Beach though. If I make any mistakes please correct me, because I am not down that way often.
Most of the Russians in Brighton Beach are ethnically Jewish, but are VERY secular. So they have Russian-Jewish surnames and whatnot but most have no clue about Judaism. 70 years of official Communist enforced secularism kind of ensured that.
To make things more complicated a lot of the Russian Jews living there are mixed Russian-Christian/Russian-Jew, so even though they might have a Jewish surname, their mother could have been Orthodox Christian and raised them to be Russian Orthodox. In addition I believe that there are just a lot of regular Russian-Orthodox Christians who have moved to the area over the past decade.
I used to know a Russian teacher/professor who oftened traveled to Brighton Beach and he would describe the Russians by saying somethign like "Yeah they are Jewish, however they're the type of Jew who would tell you that they are Jewish while eating a ham sandwich."
ur misinformed Chutzpah...most of them are jewish that live there, not eastern orthodox christians. for a long time that area was called "little odessa". where u might be confused, is that the russian mafia that is present there are russian (christians). im sure there are some regular residents that are also russian christian, but the majority are jewish (mainly from the ukraine). at least, thats how it was last i remember. its possible in recent times they have evened out more, im not sure.
You need to take a break from the computer screen once in a while (an observation I make as a Jewish New Yorker).
As to the Russians in Brighton Beach, there weren't originally as many non-Jewish Russians as there are now. After President Carter negotiated that deal allowing Russian Jews to leave the Soviet Union, a fair number of Russians who weren't Jewish produced papers declaring that they were...in order to be able to leave under the conditions of the deal.
I imagine that it must have been in the 80's or early 90's when real estate was much cheaper
it is funny because I never heard of a russian enclave in NYC until I saw the Jean Claude Van Damme movie "Maximum Risk" which came out in 1996.
I believe it was after the end of the USSR. Most are Russian Jews but secular, they couldn't wait to get out of Russia, I imagine. The same thing happened in Israel.
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