Tag Archives: St. Petersburg

Jew of the Week: Mikhael Mirilashvili

Pediatrician, Oligarch, Philanthropist

Mikhael Mirilashvili with a glass of air-generated water from one of his Watergen machines

Mikhael Mirilashvili (b. 1960) was born to a Jewish family in Kulashi, Georgia. He moved to St. Petersburg at 17 to study mathematics, then switched to medicine and became a pediatrician. As many new opportunities opened up with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mirilashvili went into business. He started with real estate, then expanded to retail stores, banking, television, oil and gas, and casinos. He owned six casinos in St. Petersburg alone, and his Viking bank is among the city’s most popular. Mirilashvili was a cofounder of Russian social media app Vkontakte, which he sold in 2013 for $1.12 billion. In 2000, his father was kidnapped by a group of criminals posing as police officers. Two weeks after his father’s release, the kidnappers were all found dead. Mirilashvili was arrested for ordering the hit on his father’s captors, and spent eight years in prison. Upon his release in 2009, he moved to Israel and has since invested a great deal in the country, including in Israel’s new offshore gas fields. He is a generous philanthropist, donating millions to ZAKA (of which he was chairman), Keren haYesod, Yad Vashem, the IDF, the World Jewish Congress, the Russian Jewish Congress (of which he is the vice-president), the Torah and Chessed Center for Georgian Jews, as well as Migdal Ohr, an organization started by beloved rabbi Yitzchak Dovid Grossman (known as “the disco rabbi”) to help struggling Israeli youths. Mirilashvili’s funding has allowed Migdal Ohr to support, educate, and care for over 17,000 impoverished and disadvantaged Israeli kids and teens. Mirilashvili also co-founded and owns Watergen, an Israeli start-up that transforms air into clean drinking water, extracted and filtered from humidity. Watergen machines are now found in over one hundred water-starved regions of the world. In previous years, Mirilashvili donated seven such machines to the Gaza Strip, each providing over 2000 litres a day of clean water, powered by solar cells. The machines are still operating in the Gaza Strip amidst the war, providing essential water to Palestinians. Watergen machines are also operating in Ukraine, though Mirilashvili has been falsely accused by the Ukrainians of supporting the Russian invasion. He has dispelled these myths, and reminds people that he was imprisoned for years in a Russian jail, survived several Russian assassination attempts, and has sold off nearly all of his Russian-based businesses. Meanwhile, Mirilashvili established the Israeli-Emirati Water Research Institute in Abu Dhabi (together with Tel Aviv University), and the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Food Security at Ben-Gurion University in honour of his father. Over the years, he has donated millions more to synagogues, hospitals, and Jewish schools, for medical equipment, Torah scrolls, and ambulances, as well as a special fleet of firetrucks to combat forest fires in Israel.

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Support the #KidnappedFromIsrael Campaign

Words of the Week

The Arab refugee problem was caused by a war of aggression, launched by the Arab States against Israel in 1947 and 1948. Let there be no mistake: If there had been no war against Israel, with its consequent harvest of bloodshed, misery, panic and flight, there would be no problem of Arab refugees today.
Abba Eban

Jew of the Week: Marc Chagall

The Colour Master

Moishe Shagal (1887-1985) was born in the shtetl of Liozna, in what is today Belarus, the oldest of nine children in a Hasidic Jewish family. Shagal went to a religious heder school until age 13, but wanted to learn a wider breadth of subjects, so his mother managed to bribe a local high school to take him in. (Jews were then forbidden from public schools, and the bribe was a whopping 50 roubles—three months salary—a small fortune for their impoverished family.) This is where he discovered his passion for art. He soon enrolled in Yehuda Pen’s art school in Vitebsk, and was given free tuition since he was so poor. While most Jewish artists in Russia at the time hid their Jewishness, Shagal embraced it. He would later say how Hasidism greatly influenced his artwork, and many of his pieces are deliberately meant to preserve Jewish culture. He wrote that every single one of his artworks “breathed” with the “spirit and reflection” of his childhood home and memories. In 1906, Shagal moved to St. Petersburg and joined a prestigious art academy (using a friend’s passport). A few years later, he left to Paris and henceforth went by “Marc Chagall”. Among his biggest influences were Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and (former Jew of the Week) Pissarro, though he did not want to be associated with any particular type of art. An exhibit in Germany in 1914 first brought him wider renown. He then returned to Russia to get married and start a family. In 1917, while broke and going hungry for days, Chagall was offered a job as arts commissar in Vitebsk. He accepted, and went on to found the Vitebsk Arts College which would go on to become the top art academy in the USSR. A few years later, Chagall moved to Moscow to be the stage designer of the State Jewish Chamber Theater, where he produced some of his most famous murals. In 1923, Chagall moved yet again, back to France, and partnered with Ambroise Vollard. The latter commissioned many of Chagall’s greatest works, including illustrations from the Tanakh. For inspiration, Chagall moved to Tel-Aviv and stayed at the home of Meir Dizengoff, the city’s first mayor. (That home was where the State of Israel would be proclaimed in 1948, and is today known as Independence Hall.) The Holy Land made a huge impact on Chagall, causing him to become something of a ba’al teshuva and return to his Jewish faith. He immersed himself in Jewish studies, and worked diligently on his “Old Testament” collection (which took until 1956 to complete, and was then hailed as being “full of divine inspiration”). Chagall returned to France shortly before the Nazi invasion. He was imprisoned and had his citizenship revoked. Pressure from the United States got him released, and he arrived in New York in the summer of 1941. His favourite hangout was the heavily-Jewish Lower East Side, where Chagall felt at home and spent much of his time socializing in Yiddish. Meanwhile, Chagall worked as a set and costume designer for the Ballet Theatre. He would return to France after the war, and in his later years produced sculptures, ceramics, tapestries, and stained glass. He painted the ceiling of the Paris Opera (covering 2400 square feet and using 200 kilos of paint), and wrote an autobiography, too. Chagall has been called the “greatest image-maker” of our time, and Picasso said that he was “the only painter left who understands what colour is.”

Words of the Week

I did not see the Bible, I dreamed it. Ever since early childhood, I have been captivated by the Bible. It has always seemed to me and still seems today the greatest source of poetry of all time.
– Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall’s “Abraham and the Three Angels”

Jew of the Week: Yitzhak Sadeh

Israel’s First Commando

Yitzhak Sadeh

Izaak Landoberg (1890-1952) was born to a religious Jewish-Polish family in Lublin, then part of the Russian Empire. He was a student of Rabbi Hillel Zeitlin in his youth, but drifted towards secularism as a young adult. An avid athlete, Landoberg particularly enjoyed wrestling, and was once crowned St. Petersburg’s wrestling champion. When World War I broke out he joined the Russian Army and fought valiantly, receiving a medal. During this time, he met Joseph Trumpeldor and became a Zionist. He helped Trumpeldor establish the HeHalutz movement, which trained young Jews in agricultural work to settle the Holy Land. In 1920, he made aliyah and changed his last name to Sadeh, “field”. He joined the Haganah, and co-founded Gdud HaAvoda, the Labor and Defense Battalion, along with 80 others who worked tirelessly to drain swamps, pave roads, plant farms, defend Jewish settlements, and build kibbutzim. Sadeh defended the Jewish residents of Haifa and surrounding towns during an Arab uprising in 1929, and again during the Arab riots between 1936-1939 as the commander of the Jewish Settlement Police. It was during this time that he created two new fighting units. The first was Nodedet, a troop unit that started going on the offensive instead of always being on the defence from Arab violence. The second was Plugot Sadeh, “Field Companies”, the Haganah’s commandos, the first Jewish elite strike force. This evolved into the Palmach in 1941, which Sadeh commanded until 1945. At that point, he was made Chief of Staff of the Haganah, and set the foundations for the future IDF, crafting its first protocols, structures, and training procedures. Sadeh played an instrumental role during the War of Independence, commanding several brigades and creating Israel’s first armoured (tank) brigade, too. Sadeh retired at the war’s end with the rank of major general, and went on to have a successful literary career, publishing a variety of books, essays, and plays. Today there is a Yitzhak Sadeh Prize for Military Literature given in his honour, as well as several kibbutzim and many streets named after him in Israel. There is also a “Yitzhak Sadeh Wandering Song Club” with hundreds of members (mostly soldiers) that gather over bonfires, food, Israeli folk songs, and Sadeh’s wise words, seeing in Sadeh their spiritual mentor. Sadeh is recognized as one of the “fathers of the IDF”. This friday is his yahrzeit.

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Words of the Week

If I am to understand that you are inquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.
– J.R.R. Tolkien