At the small pharmacy she manages on a rutted side street next to the trolley car line, Alla Chudnovskaya is much in demand with her customers: She speaks Hebrew, a language once heard on the streets of Moscow about as often as Swahili.
Today, in the rapidly gentrifying Jewish neighborhood around her shop, many of Chudnovskaya's customers are Israeli businessmen or people of various nationalities who teach at the nearby Jewish community center, or, like Chudnovskaya herself, Russians who lived for several years in Israel, came back and want to keep up their Hebrew.
The seven-story, $20-million Moscow Jewish Community Center complex behind her shop stretches across two city blocks, offering a kosher restaurant, fitness club, Jewish literature library, computer center and theater for Moscow's Jews — increasingly numerous and increasingly out.
Chudnovskaya, 38, was one of the estimated 1 million Jews who emigrated to Israel in the face of repression and discrimination in the Soviet Union during the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.
Now she is among as many as 57,000 who have come back to Moscow. Their return is the most visible hallmark of a renaissance of Jewish life in a land that historically was among the most antagonistic in the world to Jewish religion and culture. Since 2000 alone, the number of distinct Jewish communities in Russia has swelled from 87 to more than 200.
"It's a growing phenomenon. And the signs are that more and more people are going to come back," said Berel Lazar, one of Russia's two chief rabbis.
Chudnovskaya, who made little of her Jewishness while growing up in the Soviet Union, now sends her 13-year-old daughter to a Jewish Chabad school. Family members have begun to introduce a few Jewish practices into their routines. They observe Shabbat and follow the Jewish dietary laws of kashrut. Chudnovskaya's daughter wears modest long skirts instead of the skin-tight jeans sported by most teenage Russian girls.
"I came home, and I saw the Jewish center here. I saw how many Jews are here. No one points a finger at me in the street and says, 'Look, she's Russian,' like they did all the time in Israel," Chudnovskaya said. "I feel more confident being Jewish here than I did before. In Israel, I was always a Russian. Here, I can be a Jew."
But the Jewish revival is eliciting an anti-Semitic backlash from nationalist Russians threatened by the new visibility of the once-submissive minority.
An Orthodox rabbi was severely beaten while walking near his central Moscow home in January, and a recent nationalist rally in a central square of the capital featured signs with such sentiments as "Jews are the plague of society and its greatest foe" and "For those who are ready to fight the Jewish yoke."
President Vladimir V. Putin issued a public apology at recent ceremonies commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in Poland. His remarks were apparently in response to the incidents, which culminated with a group of 19 nationalist lawmakers, whose numbers have been growing in recent elections, issuing a mid-January letter to the prosecutor general demanding the possible outlawing of all Jewish organizations in Russia. The letter was later condemned by the full parliament.
"The German chancellor said just recently that he is ashamed of the past. But that is the past. There are many of us who should feel ashamed of the present. Even in our country that did so much to vanquish fascism we see, unfortunately, manifestations that are cause for shame," Putin said.
"Russia will always not only condemn any such manifestations but will also fight them with the force of the law."
The distance Russia has traveled since the Communist years, with their official bans on public worship and discrimination in jobs and education — the latter hardship facilitated by the hated designation of Jews' ethnicity on Soviet internal passports — was apparent last month, when Jewish pop artist Efim Alexandrov-Zitzerman sang a concert of Yiddish songs to a sold-out hall in the prestigious Rossiya Hotel, in the shadow of the Kremlin.
"We are the link whose mission is to reconnect the broken tradition. The songs of our grandmothers and grandfathers must be heard by our children, and then by the children of our children," Alexandrov-Zitzerman told a hall of emotional concertgoers.
"Because such a concert can be performed in Russia's central concert hall, it means that there's a certain mood in the country, and we as Jews in Russia enjoy tremendous support," said Mikhail Golodny, a construction industry businessman.
Golodny, 58, emigrated to Israel more than a decade ago and took Israeli citizenship. But in the last few years, he has been flying between his business in Moscow and his family in Israel, which has become settled there with jobs and friends. They don't want to leave.
Golodny, who had been a well-educated, successful engineer in Russia, found that most of the available jobs in Israel required little education or experience.
"I think the people who have come back have realized that life is not that rosy in Israel, either," Golodny said. "They were under some sort of illusion that life was full of beauty in Israel. And life there has turned out to be much more prosaic than they thought."
Chudnovskaya said she was able to quickly find a job as a pharmacist in Tel Aviv but never felt entirely at home. Coming from chilly Russia, Israel seemed "hot, just too hot," she said. Tel Aviv had a small-town feel compared with Moscow, and she often found the quirks of the Israelis irritating.
Everything was so close in Tel Aviv, she complained, she could run three errands and be home by noon, wondering what to do with herself.
Still, "Israel gave me 11 years of teaching. It did not go to waste. I came back being proud of being a Jew," she said. "My daughter and I always speak Hebrew. Sometimes in the Metro she says, 'Keep quiet, I'm afraid to speak Hebrew.' But I bear my Jewishness with an uplifted head."
In the neighborhood around her pharmacy, rents have skyrocketed as Jews take up the vacancies, eager to be close to the amenities at the community center.
On Saturdays, the sidewalks are filled with Orthodox Jews in long coats and tall hats walking to the synagogue.
International Jewish organizations that now have relatively free entree to Russia are working to combat the years of repression that forced many Jews to hide — and, in some cases, to forget — their heritage. The Russian Jewish population is "one of the most assimilated in the world," said Sam Amiel, deputy director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Moscow.
"In today's demographic post-Soviet makeup, if you happen to find a Jewish person who happens to be married to another Jewish person, it's probably … an accident," he said.
Amiel is amazed that there are any public Jews at all, after the decades of strife they endured on Soviet soil.
"Try to understand how deeply, how tightly they would have had to hold on to something, some piece of knowledge from their grandparents, whatever, to walk into a synagogue today," he said.
"In essence, it's a modern-day miracle."
Anna Purinson, a 26-year-old gynecologist and the director in Russia of Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, remembers growing up in St. Petersburg in a family that kept its religious life veiled from others.
"I remember when my father took me to the St. Petersburg Choral Synagogue, and it was so beautiful, I was just amazed. But it was empty. No one was there. And I said, 'Why don't we go there all the time?'
"My dad said maybe it was not a safe option."
But even in the new, more tolerant Russia, the last year has been marked by frequent political rants against a number of Russian billionaires, commonly known as oligarchs, who are Jewish. Among them is Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the onetime oil magnate and Putin opponent who is now in prison on charges of fraud and tax evasion.
In February, a popular confrontation-style talk show on the NTV network featured former cosmonaut and defender of liberal values Alexei Leonov debating State Duma Deputy Albert Makashov, who is frequently criticized for anti-Semitic views. The host of the program was popular Jewish television personality Vladimir Solovyov.
In an hour of television that shocked even unflappable Moscow, Makashov complained about the alleged illegal privatization of the nation's industries by the oligarchs. "Explain to me how the entire wealth of our nation has turned up in the hands of just one diaspora!" he thundered, as the studio audience applauded.
"I won't call them Jews, OK. I will call them lawyers or something. All I'm saying is that most oligarchs represent mostly one diaspora: Jewish…. They stole everything God gave us."
Some of the parliamentary deputies and others who signed the letter on Jewish organizations — later officially retracted amid the storm of controversy that followed — said they were objecting to state funding going to Jewish schools they accused of teaching from ancient texts promoting Jewish superiority over non-Jews.
"Why is it that our legal system does not take any measures when faced with Jewish extremism?" asked Nikolai Leonov, a former KGB spy and a deputy from the Rodina (Motherland) party who signed the letter.
"The fact is that our bourgeoisie is not an ethnic Russian bourgeoisie," he said.
"Try not paying taxes in the United States! Here, you'll live comfortably and call it 'tax optimization.' "
The primary beneficiaries of improper privatizations and tax breaks have been Jewish oligarchs, he said.
"They would go to prison in any country except this one. Because they are the masters now!"
Few Jewish leaders take the recent incidents of anti-Semitism as evidence of a permanent backlash. Most believe the Jewish revival has gained such momentum that it is irreversible, and they credit the Russian government with a genuine commitment to repairing the wrongs of the past.
Yet the last two months have been worrying, they acknowledge.
"I think the climate is worsening," said Rabbi Alexander Lakshin, who was attacked Jan. 14 by six thugs as he walked with an associate and two young boys through a road underpass. When, with blood streaming down his face, he asked the employees at a nearby market to phone the police, they refused.
"That shocked me even more than what happened before," he said.
"They said, 'Please go outside, because you'll stain the counter in here.' "
On the other hand, he said, the police have already arrested three suspects in the attack. "When Putin spoke at Auschwitz about acts of anti-Semitism and religious intolerance in Russia, he said that many should feel ashamed of the present. He personally has nothing to feel shame about. The problem is that part of society here resorts to xenophobia in an attempt to find a scapegoat. And this is nothing new in Russia."
Sergei Skorik, a young computer physicist who recently returned to Russia after studying and working for several years in Los Angeles and Israel, said the deputies' letter was "a very typical letter, a very old letter." It had, he said, been written many times over the centuries.
"These people feel like they lost out on the distribution of property during the 1990s by some oligarchs who happened to be Jews. Now their only chance to struggle, to fight, is to write these letters," he said.
"They are poor people, because their minds are occupied by this miserable idea that Jews are responsible for their problems."
Skorik kept his Israeli citizenship; he even works for an Israeli computer communications firm. But when he took the job, it was on one condition: that he could work out of his home in Russia.
He bought an apartment in Moscow and married a nice Russian girl — part-Jewish.
"I felt lonely in Israel, and I felt somewhat bored, I think. In Israel, there is sea to the left, Arabs to the right, and you feel that space is pressing in on you. In Russia, I was used to a much bigger scale," he said. "I felt nostalgic for Russia."