The Jewish Religious Community of Yekaterinburg between the Mid-19th and Early 20th Centuries: Size and Institutions

Abstract

This article is devoted to the history of the Yekaterinburg Jewish community and the formation of its religious institutions between the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries. It is based on an analysis of legislative acts, archival documents, census data, local periodicals, and the early 20 th century studies in local history. The paper discusses the development of the Yekaterinburg Jewish community, the formation of its religious institutions and location of prayer houses, and synagogues. The authors manage to reconstruct the appearance of the buildings used by the city Jews, as well as their interior and property, including the library. The authors argue that the Jewish religious community only began to form in Yekaterinburg in the late 1870s due to the formation of permanent Jewish population. The so-called Soldier Synagogue, operating in Yekaterinburg from 1851, disappeared in 1858, when all Jewish military men were expelled from the city. As soon as the city’s Jewish community got its own officially recognised rabbi in 1905, it also got a right to keep its own metric books and have its own Synagogue. The number of Jews in the city grew constantly due to an influx of refugees first caused by pogroms in the western part of the Empire and then by World War I. The newly founded social institutions, both secular and religious, meant to support the Jews arriving in the city contributed to the preservation of their religious and ethnic identity. Despite the systematic attempts by the Soviet authorities to close the Yekaterinburg Synagogue between the 1920s and 1930s, the Jewish community was able to reopen it again and keep the right to operate officially and carry out religious practice until as long as 1961.