page_title: History of the Jews in Saint Petersburg
section_title: Post-war Soviet Union
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Jews in Saint Petersburg / Post-war Soviet Union
caption_attribution_description: English: Sylva Zalmanson 1977
context_page_description: The history of the Jews in Saint Petersburg dates back to the 18th century and there is still a Jewish community in the city today. In the late 18th century, the annexation of eastern Poland meant millions more Jews were now subjects of the Russian Empire, many of whom flocked to the city. When Catherine the Great created the Pale of Settlement to attempt to contain the new Jewish population, Jewish settlement was largely restricted. Under Tsar Alexander II upper class Jews fitting certain criteria were allowed to live in the city, and many other Jews who did not fit these categories settled illegally. By the end of his reign in 1881, the Jewish population of the city was 17,253. Unlike other cities in the Russian Empire, Saint Petersburg never had a pogrom, likely due to the amount of police and army presence it had as the capital. The community continued to grow, despite expulsions and persecution, and flourished creatively until the Bolshevik Revolution. Under the Soviet Union, Jewish life was stifled and repressed, and a number of Saint Petersburg Jews took part in the refusenik movement and underground revival of Jewish nationalism.
context_section_description: The Jewish population of the city, no longer being bolster by migration, began on a steady decline, largely due to a combination of low birthrates and assimilation. The 1959 census showed the Jewish population to be 162,344, but some estimate that it was more like 200,000.
  The Grand Choral Synagogue, still standing despite being bombed by the Nazis, remained the city's only synagogue after the war. In 1962–1964, the matzo baking done by the synagogue was prohibit by the authorities, as it was in many other parts of the Soviet Union. Use of the cemetery was also forbidden in 1963, and it was closed in 1969.
  Despite the overall level of assimilation of the Jewish community in the city, after the Six-Day War in the State of Israel, a number of youths in the community began to affiliate themselves with Israel and a Jewish national identity. There were Hebrew classes organized in secret and public protests over the government's refusal to let Jews emigrate to Israel, and a number of refusenik activists were jailed by the government. In 1970, an attempt by a group of young refuseniks, and two non-Jews, to hijack a plane from the city's airport and fly to Israel caught worldwide media attention. Two were sentenced to death, which sparked global outcry, and the capital sentences were eventually commuted.
  Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Jewish mortality rate in the city exceeded the birthrate by a factor of more than 10, and two-thirds of newborns registered as Jewish had one parent whose nationality was not Jewish.
caption: Sylva Zalmanson, a refusenik involved in the hijacking attempt at Leningrad's airport.
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