Religious identity of immigrants from ex-USSR in Israel

The paper draws upon a large-scale sociological survey analyzing three groups of respondents ranked according to a "combined Jewish identity": "status (halachic) Jews", "self-declared Jews," and "Russian Jews." The survey showed that although the Jewishness as the ethnicity remained the major component of Jewish identity of immigrants from the USSR and FSU in Israel, the religious component of their identity in the course of the recent quarter of the century had undergone serious transformation. The late Soviet opposition of "atheists" and "believers" had shifted to adapting a typical Israeli five-rank classification: atheists, hilonim (secular), masoratim (traditional), religious Zionists, and haredim (religious ultra-Orthodox). There are three sources of the religious identity of immigrants from the former Soviet Union: some elements of the Eastern-European religious tradition passed on in families; some religious experiences, both modern and traditional, adopted in the late Soviet period and in Israel; behavioral models and practices of religious origins, which rather refer to the general Israeli civil culture. Contrary to common knowledge, religious identity of the first and especially the second generation of immigrants from the USSR have much more to do with the local Israeli experiences than the so called "Soviet legacy".