Religion in The Soviet Union - Judaism

Judaism

By 1950 it was estimated that there were 2 million Baptists in the Soviet Union, with the largest number in Ukraine.

Many Protestants were apprehended under Communist rule of law, including imprisonment and execution. Vladimir Shelkov (1895–1980), the leader of the unregistered Seventh-day Adventist movement in the Soviet Union, spent almost all his life from 1931 on in prison; he died in Yakutia camp. Large numbers of Pentecostals were imprisoned, and many died there, including Ivan Voronaev, one of their leaders.

In the period after the Second World War, Protestants in the USSR (Baptists, Pentecostals, Adventists and others) were sent to mental hospitals or tried and imprisoned, often for refusal to enter military service. Some were deprived of their parental rights.

The Lutheran Church in different regions of the country was persecuted during the Soviet era, and church property was confiscated. Many of its members and pastors were oppressed, and some were forced to emigrate.

According to western sources, various Protestant religious groups collectively had as many as 5 million followers in the 1980s. Evangelical Christian Baptists constituted the largest Protestant group. Spread throughout the Soviet Union, some congregations were registered with the government and functioned with official approval. Many other unregistered congregations carried on religious activity without such approval.

Lutherans, the second largest Protestant group, lived for the most part in the Latvian and Estonian republics. In the 1980s, Lutheran churches in these republics identified to some extent with nationality issues in the two republics. The regime's attitude toward Lutherans was generally benign.