About a million, probably more like two or three million by now, Russians "remembered" they are Jewish and emigrated to Israel, after the fall of the Soviet Union.

#3 | Posted by snoofy at 2025-08-14 04:12 PM

One of the guys I worked with, he and his family were Jewish and they immigrated to the US from Leningrad when he was 17-years old. Now they could have gone directly to Israel, with new passports in hand, if they had wanted to, but an uncle had immigrated to the US a few years earlier and they wanted to join him, however, that meant that they had to wait something like seven-months in a fleabag hotel in Stockholm waiting for the US government to process their application for asylum.

I first met Mike (his actual name was Mikhail) years after he had graduated from engineering school and was working for our company out here in SoCal (for a short period of time, he actually worked for me). Anyway, he was quite proud of the fact that he'd learned to speak English without any trace of a Russian accent (I've met several Russians who've managed to accomplish this, which was always a bit scary). The problem was that his family, when they came to the US, settled in New Jersey, and so when Mike was honing his English skills, he was also acquiring a New Jersey accent, which we always kidded him about.

OCU