Adolf Shayevich

Adolf Solomonovich Shayevich (born 28 October 1937; Russian: Адольф Соломонович Шаевич; the first name is sometimes also transcribed as Adolph, and the surname as Shayevitch or Shaevich) has been since 1983 (after the death of Yakov Fishman) the rabbi of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, which has been traditionally considered as Moscow's main Jewish house of prayer.

During the waning days of the Soviet Union, Shayevich was sometimes unofficially referred to in the West as the "Soviet Union's Chief Rabbi".

Presently he is considered the Chief Rabbi of Russia by the Russian Jewish Congress, one of the two major Jewish organization in Russia (of which he also is a member of the presidium). His claim to this title is not universally recognized, however, because the country's other major Jewish organization, Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, has its own Chief Rabbi of Russia, Berel Lazar who is a member of Chabad, while Shayevich is Modern Orthodox.

While the Russian Federation is a secular state, the federal government has referred to both Lazar and Shayevich as the "Chief Rabbi of Russia".

Adolf Shayevich was raised in Birobidzhan during the years under Joseph Stalin in far-eastern Siberia near the border with China, in a fairly secular family of Belarusian Jewish descent.

In the early 1970s he left his job as a chief mechanic with a local government agency and moved to Moscow. According to his own recollection, he was looking for a change of environment, a more meaningful life where people are not tempted to spend their free time drinking. He found it difficult to find a job in Moscow: as he remembers it, employers were wary about hiring a Jew, as they would not want to have any problems on their hands if the employee were to decide to migrate to Israel. However, in 1972 he was admitted to the small religious school affiliated with the Moscow Choral Synagogue, the main synagogue of the city.

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