Adolf Shayevich

Adolf Shayevich was raised in Birobidzhan during the years under Joseph Stalin in far-eastern Siberia near the border with China, in a fairly secular family of Belarusian Jewish descent. In the early 1970s, Shayevich left his job as a chief mechanic with a local government agency and moved to Moscow. According to his own recollection, he was looking for a change of environment, a more meaningful life where people are not tempted to spend their free time drinking. He found it difficult to find a job in Moscow: employers were wary about hiring a Jew, as they would not want to have any problems on their hands if the employee were to decide to migrate to Israel. However, in 1972 he was admitted to the small religious school affiliated with the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the main synagogue of the city. In 1973, the visiting New York rabbi Arthur Schneier, who had long had good relations both with the chief rabbi of the Moscow Synagogue, Yakov Fishman and with the Soviet ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin, helped two Soviet rabbinical students — Shayevich and Yefim Levitis (who was later to become the rabbi of the Leningrad Synagogue) – to enter the Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest, the only rabbinical training institution that operated at the time in the Soviet Bloc. Shayevich and Levitis became the first two Soviet rabbinical students in their generation who were allowed to go to study abroad. Shayevich was ordained as a rabbi in April 1980. He met his wife in Budapest.[citation needed]

Back in Moscow, after returning from Budapest, the Council for Religious Affairs (the Soviet government's office for dealing with the religious institutions) suggested that the newly ordained Shayevich return to Birobidzhan - where there was not even a synagogue at the time – but Rabbi Fishman offered Shayevich a position as his deputy at Moscow Choral Synagogue, located in downtown Moscow's Arkhipov Street. In the summer of 1983, after the death of Fishman, Shayevich took over his post as the chief rabbi of the synagogue a post he holds to this day. As this was Moscow's largest and principal synagogue, and the only synagogue in central Moscow, this appointment also made him the Chief Rabbi of Moscow. In 1984, Shayevich visited the United States in a delegation of Soviet religious leaders, hosted by the U.S. National Council of Churches. In 1988, he spent 3 months studying at Yeshiva University in New York.[citation needed]