Travel Deals – Marina from Belarus and Ida from Ukraine were selling jewelry on fold-up tables by the beach, alongside Malka from Georgia. On the way over, I had met Natalya from Russia and Igor from Uzbekistan, who were holding hands as they strolled around a hilltop park, sunning themselves on a sparkling winter afternoon. Should it have been any surprise that Yana, the saleswoman at the nearby mall, grew up in Azerbaijan?
All around me in the Israeli city of Ashdod, people were chatting in Russian, darting in and out of stores with signs in Cyrillic, living the lives that they had once lived, as if they were in a mythical, far-flung former Soviet republic. I had come from Moscow to explore Israel, but when I reached Ashdod, a port on the Mediterranean that is shunned by most guidebooks, I almost felt as if I were back where I had started. Minus the snow.
Israel has many guises: Jewish and Christian, Arab and secular, pottery-shard old and stiletto-heel new. Over the last two decades, a wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union has added another piece to the country’s mosaic of cultures and identities and textures. Russian speakers now account for roughly 15 percent of Israel’s 7.5 million people. Even so, their influence is not ballyhooed for outsiders. You can spend a week or two as a tourist and have only an inkling of their impact.
But it is everywhere. On Channel 9, news anchors discuss the latest wrangling with the Palestinians in the language of Pushkin. Graduates of Soviet institutes have helped transform the Tel Aviv region into such a fertile high-tech center that some Israelis quip that you have to master Russian to get ahead there. Across the country, the symphonies and theaters abound with performers trained in Moscow or St. Petersburg or Kiev. So do the streets. One day, I approached a violinist fiddling for change in Jerusalem and, on a lark, greeted him in Russian. He was from Siberia.
The younger crowd frequents Bar Putin in Jerusalem, where the walls are decorated with photos of the man himself, as well as advertisements for Soviet champagne and vintage Communist Party posters. You can dine on Georgian or Uzbek specialties in Tel Aviv, or examine rare volumes spirited out of the shtetl at the Russian Library in Jerusalem, which has been championed by Israel’s most famous Russian immigrant, the dissident Natan (formerly Anatoly) Sharansky. And then there is the most startling symbol of this influx: pork. But more on that later.
As a resident of Russia, I found something poignant in the world of these immigrants. In their tumultuous history in the Soviet Union and in the Russian empire before it, Jews were subjected to brutal prejudice yet often flourished. And so their exodus has left a gap in these societies. Of course, Jews have remained, and communities are reviving. But in Israel, you can catch a refracted glimpse of what once was.
A fine place to start is Ashdod, a coastal industrial center of 210,000 people that is Israel’s fifth largest city and a 45-minute ride south from Tel Aviv. It is here that high-rise buildings sprouted in the 1990s to provide apartments for families from the former Soviet Union, who make up more than a third of the city’s population.
Most are not religious, a result of Soviet state-enforced atheism, and on a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, they thronged the beachfront, not the synagogues. The slightly shabby promenade reminded me of Brighton Beach in Brooklyn, another place with a Russian soul. I arrived to a beguiling scene: scores of people doing coordinated Israeli dances on an outdoor square, a sign that the newcomers (whether from the former Soviet Union or elsewhere) had embraced some Israeli traditions. In fact, Ashdod likes to consider itself the country’s dance capital.
“Ashdod is one of Israel’s secrets,” said David Stromberg, a journalist and cartoonist who was my navigator for the day. The son of immigrants who were born in Moldova and Georgia, he spent part of his childhood in the city.
“You could call this the Israeli Riviera,” he said. “It has a very pan-Mediterranean feel.”
Ashdod’s beaches did not disappoint, and while my wife and children swam, I mingled. I was curious as to whether adults who emigrated from the former Soviet Union as youngsters had a connection to the old country. Most of the people I met seemed pleased to be Israelis; some were more ambivalent.
Leonid and Yulia Novikov walked by with their baby daughter and a few friends, all from Ukraine, now in their 20s. Mr. Novikov, a security guard, said he had visited Ukraine recently, and it did not seem familiar, especially now that he had served in the Israeli Army and learned Hebrew.
“I can’t really communicate with people in Ukraine in the same way anymore,” Mr. Novikov said. “My mentality has changed.”