A few thousand Hasidic Jews now stranded at the border between Belarus and Ukraine want just one thing this Rosh Hashanah: entrance into Ukraine to visit the grave of Rabbi Nachman. Citing COVID-19 restrictions, Ukraine says no, but these pilgrims believe faith overcomes obstacles.
In Russia, where 114 have tested positive for COVID-19, no coronavirus quarantine yet exists within the Russian Orthodox Church, the country’s majority religious belief. Instead, despite advice against close contact with others, hundreds of believers in St. Petersburg are opting to shore up their defenses by visiting the city’s Kazan Cathedral.
Russian authorities in the Jewish Autonomous Region in Siberia have charged eight Jehovah's Witnesses with extremism amid what activists say is an escalating campaign of persecution of the religious group.
Aleksandr Dolgopolov wasn't afraid to joke about Christianity or Vladimir Putin during his standup routine in Moscow. But when he became the subject of a criminal probe, he decided it was time to leave the country.
In a distant corner of Russia’s Far East, along the border with China, the world’s only official Jewish territory other than Israel has existed peacefully for the last 85 years. The Jewish Autonomous Oblast was established under Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1934, ostensibly to provide a homeland for ethnic Jews living in the USSR.
Three children look happy and healthy now with their grandparents in Georgia, but that's after living for a year with their mother in an Iraqi jail. Their father, an Islamic State militant, was killed in Iraq, and the Georgian government is still trying to bring her home.
Apparently playing on a prominent media host's remarks likening those protesting plans to build a church in a Yekaterinburg park to demons, a road sign welcomes travelers to the "City of Demons."
In Georgia, members of a small Christian sect called the Dukhobors preserve the faith they brought with them from Russia in centuries past. Their forebears were persecuted and exiled for their unconventional beliefs and refusal to serve in the army.
For more than a millennium, the city of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan, had been home to one of the biggest Jewish communities in Asia. But their numbers have dwindled after decades of Soviet rule.
Top figures in Ukraine's new Orthodox Church are meeting in a synod amid an apparent power struggle between Patriarch Filaret, an early vocal supporter of the independent Ukrainian church, and the new church's elected head, Metropolitan Epifaniy.
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