Amidst ’91 Coup, Russian Jewry Kept Summer Camps Open
Children and their counselors pose for a group photo at a Chabad-Lubavitch run summer camp outside Moscow in the early 1990s.
As the world watched hard-line Communists make their last-ditch effort 20 years ago to reclaim control of the fracturing Soviet Union, a young Rabbi Berel Lazar was due to return to Moscow. Lazar, a Chabad-Lubavitch emissary who was then rabbi of the Russian capital’s Marina Roscha district, had been in New York attending to his wife and newborn baby. The August coup of 1991 – known popularly as the Putsch – began a day before their scheduled return.
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