Chabad-Lubavitch Synagogue

Built in 1915 by a community that technically wasn’t supposed to exist, Jews were barred from settling in Kazan under the Tsars, this synagogue became an unlikely refuge decades later. During the 1960s and 70s, when Ukrainian and Belarusian Jewish students faced strict university quotas back home, they fled to Kazan where authorities were more lenient. The Soviets seized the building in 1929, converting it into a teachers’ cultural center, but in 1996 the keys were ceremonially returned, just an empty shell awaiting revival.

By then the shell had a portrait of Lenin built into its walls, discovered only once the community started peeling back seventy years of Soviet renovation. It took another two decades of fundraising to get the building looking the way it had before anyone thought to nationalize it.

In 2017, Chabad opened a yeshiva next door, on the same plot of land as the synagogue, in what Russia’s largest Muslim-majority republic’s own officials called a historic first. The president of Tatarstan showed up to the opening. So did the mayor of Kazan and the chief rabbi of Russia, all of them standing in a courtyard built by Volga Tatars for a religious school that, on paper, had no obvious business existing there either.