LOOKING out from his sixteenth-floor office in a Moscow skyscraper, Arsen Revazov can hardly believe that this is a country where it was once illegal to learn Hebrew or celebrate Passover.

He emigrated to Israel 15 years ago — one of a million Jews who fled the Soviet Union to escape institutionalised anti-Semitism and economic stagnation. But today he is back in Moscow — with his wife and two children — living an openly Jewish life and running an advertising business.

“I just realised that there were so many more opportunities in Russia than in Israel. It is like the difference between New York and Arizona,” Mr Revazov, 38, told The Times. “Almost all my friends in Israel have come back, too.”

An estimated 100,000 Jews have returned to Russia in the past few years, sparking a dramatic renaissance of Jewish life in a country with a long history of anti-Semitism.

President Putin will cement Russia’s new relationship with its Jewish community today when he begins the first visit to Israel by a Soviet or Russian leader.

“This sends a message to the world that the Moscow-Arab coalition is over,” Berl Lazar, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, said. “It’s eerie that it is happening at Passover. Here, during our holiday, the Russian President is visiting the Holy Land.”

The Soviet Union was one of the first states to recognise Israel in 1948, but later severed ties and backed Arab regimes to balance US support for Jerusalem.

Relations were reopened in 1987, when President Gorbachev allowed Soviet Jews to emigrate. Roughly one in four Israelis is now of Russian origin.

Five years ago, Rabbi Lazar opened a seven-storey, $20 million (£10.5 million) Jewish centre with a synagogue, swimming pool and kosher restaurant, built mostly with donations from abroad. Last year, work started on a bigger, $100 million complex, including a school, a medical centre and Russia’s first Jewish museum, using funds mostly raised in Russia. The land was given by Yuri Luzhkov, the Mayor of Moscow, in the clearest sign yet of government support.

“At first people were afraid to give their names to the centre. They had had enough trouble in the past,” Rabbi Lazar said. “Today, being Jewish here is like anywhere else in the world.”

In the past year anti-Semitism has again bubbled to the surface. Many Russians still blame the Soviet Union’s collapse on a Zionist conspiracy and accuse Jewish businessmen of stealing state assets in 1990s privatisations.

In January, a rabbi was assaulted by skinheads in Moscow in one of a string of racist attacks on Jews. The same month, 19 Duma deputies wrote an open letter calling for a ban on Jewish organisations. In March, several Russian cultural figures wrote a similar letter. But Russian Jews say that these cases pale compared with the state-sponsored anti-Semitism of the Soviet era and the ultra-nationalist attacks in the lawless 1990s, when synagogues were bombed and burnt.

Mr Putin has spoken out against anti-Semitism and introduced new legislation against racism. “For us, the struggle against anti-Semitism, as well as any other kind of nationalism and chauvinism, is the core of our domestic policy,” he told Israeli television this week.

For now Arsen Revazov believes his two children are as safe here as in Israel. These days Russian racism is more often directed at Asians or Caucasians, he says. But he is not quite ready to swap Israeli citizenship for Russian.

“That way, if something happens, I’ve always got my Israeli passport,” he said.

TURBULENT PAST

• Most Russian Jews were of Polish origin, incorporated into Russia after Poland was partitioned in the 1790s
  
• Jews suffered frequent pogroms. Between 1881 and 1884, two million left, mostly for the US
  
• The Soviet Union backed Israel’s creation in 1947, but later supported the Arabs
  
• More than a million emigrated to Israel after it was legalised in 1987

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