A Study Of Post-Soviet Jewish Immigrants And Sacred-Secular Relations In Israel

In 70 A.D.,the Second Temple in Jerusalem was violently destroyed by the Romans,and the Jews have been scattered ever since.The Jewish elite living in European countries,nearly two millennia after the destruction of their countries,were running around seeking the possibility of restoration in order to give the Jewish people a political entity that they can rely on.With their impetus,a vigorous Zionist movement was launched.However,this secular political movement ultimately conflicted with the deep religious roots of the Jewish people.It can be said that throughout the history of the Jewish people,religion has been the defining marker of Jewish national identity.Therefore,the Zionist elite,wanting to mobilize Jews around the world for restoration,had to resort to concepts unique to the Jewish religion,such as "salvation" and "the Promised Land".The full-scale mobilization of the Jewish elite for statehood(religious and secular)is the source of the division of Israeli Jewish society into two camps,the religious world and the secular world.After the founding of the country,events such as the Six-Day War and the founding of the Shas party continued to stimulate the relationship between the secular and religious worlds.Since the Likud group came to power,the religious world has continued to expand its influence by increasing its political power and trying to influence the life of the secular world with religious ideas and culture.The assassination of Rabin was a sign that the conflict between the two sides had reached its peak.Israel,formerly a secular democracy,began to falter in its national character.In the 1990s,nearly a million Soviet Jews fled the fractured Soviet Union for Israel.Soviet Jews,who were influenced by Soviet policies,thought and acted more closely to the secular camp in Israel.Arguably,the arrival of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants not only strengthened the secular world of Israel,but also served as a counterbalance to the relationship between religion and secularism.Post-Soviet Jewish immigrants became equal participants in Israeli society without abandoning the cultural activities and lifestyles of their countries of origin,promoting the emergence of a semi-permeable model of acculturation that provides potential Jewish immigrant groups with richer strategies for acculturation.a pluralistic model of cultural adaptation that infuses Israeli society with a new,secular multiculturalism.Post-Soviet Jewish immigrants brought Russian culture,food and media to Israel,and actively used Russian parades to reaffirm their distinctive cultural memory and immigrant identity,transforming the previously dominant Jewish culture and promoting the secularization and democratization of urban culture with "alternative marriage" as a resistance to the religious authority’s monopoly on Jewish marriage.Along with the growing cultural enrichment,post-Soviet Jewish immigrants formed new political parties to resist the religious nationalism of the religious parties under the banner of political nationalism,shifting the focus of Israeli society from the concept of the "Promised Land" to the security implications of the occupied territories for modern Israel and providing a new political strategy for secular Jews.Faced with the expansion of religiousized ethnic borders,Soviet Jews with their secular form of ethnic borders hindered the enclosure of religious Jewish identity to the secular.In sum,the arrival of post-Soviet Jewish immigrants dramatically changed the social conditions in Israel,interrupted the steady expansion of religious power,provided the secular world with demographic,ideological,and cultural support,and kept the country largely secularist in its statehood.