The figures of the recent population census, saying that there are 230,000 Jews in Russia (130,000 of them in Moscow), are not true to fact, he said.
"We suppose that there are in Russia at least six times more Jews than the census says", Gorin objected. For this reason, the Jewish Federation is going to carry out its own census in cooperation with the genealogical societies, drawing up genealogical trees and special community books.
"Without that we cannot imagine how the Russian Jewish community is to develop, how many more synagogues and how many rabbi we are to have", said the spokesman for the RJCF.
He said that the United States' Jewish community has a genealogical database on the 19th-century Russian Jewry, totalling six million names. "There are vast databases accumulated over the ten years of existence of the communities in Russia. Summed up plus the use of the sociological science in Russia, this data will make possible carrying out a poll more in correspondence with the real state of affairs", Gorin said.
He also said that most Jews live in Moscow, St.Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk, Birobidzhan, Nizhni Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don. "It is known from the Soviet times that up to ten percent of the people in industrial centres were Jews. Today the figure has come down to one percent due to various reasons. But this does not mean that 10,000 Jews live in a million-strong city", Gorin said.
The rate of Jewish migration from Russia to Israel has fallen off in recent years. While in the early 1990s about 100,000 Jews left annually, now it is about 10,000", Gorin said.
Simultaneously, the number of Jews returning to Russia above all from Israel is increasing, he stressed. "Last year 50,000 more people returned than left", Gorin said.
In his opinion, this is due to terrorism in Israel, more so that in Russia today Jews can "live a full-fledged religious and community life, though with more calm and wealth".
"Mostly young people are coming back. For older people life in Israel is better than here", the FJCF spokesman explained.
