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.
A Chechen man helps Russians locate and repair their family graves in Grozny's war-scarred and neglected Christian cemetery.
Hundreds of protesters clashed with police for a second night over a city proposal to build a new Russian Orthodox church on the site of a popular park in the Urals city of Yekaterinburg.
The Ukrainian city of Lviv helped create Eva.Stories, the viral Instagram project that brought a Holocaust victim's diary to social media. But filming amid the Ukrainian presidential election campaign in March presented some challenges.
A crumbling wooden house in Russia's Saratov Oblast was due to be demolished -- and with it, a set of unique murals by members of the Old Believers sect. But a visiting student from St. Petersburg decided to do everything she could to save it.
The Russian Orthodox Church has been building numerous places of worship in recent years, but some residents have objected to plans to place them in previously public spaces.
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