Russian firm caught selling fake Jewish identities

MOSCOW - A racket has been uncovered in which gentile Russians were made to seem Jewish so they could emigrate to Israel.

Police have arrested two managers of a company in St Petersburg and accused them of fabricating evidence of Jewish identity for fees up to $NZ8,000.

Tamara Timofeeva and Eric Suomalinen allegedly devised a series of ingenious ploys in order to establish the Jewish background of their customers.

As soon as the first payment was received, staff from the company, Vesta, would start to teach potential emigrants about Jewish religious traditions, customs and manners. For an additional fee the clients were taught to speak Russian with a Jewish accent.

The next phase of the process was the creation of documents supporting the claims of the emigrant. These ranged from a certificate from passport offices to a birth certificate.

Staff from Vesta searched cemeteries in St Petersburg for well-kept graves of Jewish women. When one was located, the client and his family were taken to the cemetery in appropriately sombre clothes and a video was made of them grieving at the supposed grave of their relative.

Vesta allegedly specialised in manufacturing evidence that its clients' lives were under threat, by supplying them with anti-Semitic letters.

These would say: "Jews, go to Israel," or: "Suitcase, railway station, Israel."

The client would take these to the police and ask for a certificate saying that such threats had been made. This would be added to the file the potential emigrant submitted to the Israeli consulate.

The forged documents, threatening letters and photographs "worked without fail" says the daily Vremya Novostei.

It is not known how many Russians made their way to Israel thanks to Vesta. The police say they know of 15 families. The exposure will fuel suspicions in Israel that a decreasing number of arrivals from Russia have Jewish connections.

Almost 900,000 people emigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union between 1988 and 2000 on top of 135,000 who had come to Israel in the Soviet period. Some 50,000 emigrated last year, of whom 19,000 were Russian and 20,000 Ukrainian.

Fabrication of a Jewish background is made easier by the fact that nobody knows how many Jews there were in the Soviet Union.

The official figure is about a million, but Yaron Gamburg, the press attache at the Israeli embassy in Moscow, says this is found to be an under-estimate because so many Jews "had hidden their national identity to avoid discrimination".

Jews and non-Jews frequently intermarried. The number of Jews still in Russia is estimated to be between 650,000 and a million, with a total of 1.5 million in the former Soviet Union.

- INDEPENDENT