Jewish officials and foreign dignitaries on Friday opened the new Saint- Petersburg Jewish community centre, the first such opening since the Soviet 1917 revolution.

The building will house many of the major Jewish organisations and programs serving the Russian city’s 100,000-strong Jewish population.
The public Jewish house of Saint Petersburg is situated in the centre of the old imperial capital in a building with 7,200 squares metres of floor space.

"This centre is to become an important place of Jewish life in Russia, and one of the most important events in the life of Saint-Petersburg Jews for the last 100 years," Arkady Mil-Man, Israel’s ambassador to Russia, said at the opening ceremony.

US-funded project

The 8 million euros building was built with the financial aid of American Jewish bodies and includes offices for voluntary organizations, a library, an art studio, kindergarten, a sports center, a computer center and a cafe.

Ellen Heller, president of the Joint Distribution committee, said the opening of such a big centre was another sign of the revival of Jewish life in Russia.

"Jewish communities once suffered from the repressive Soviet governments, but here today we see Jewish renaissance and rebirth in the country," Heller said.

The city of Saint-Petersburg has a population of five million.

The latest census, in 2002, put the Jewish population in Russia at about 224,000.

In 1989 it had been 540,000 but there has been a massive exodus to Israel following the collapse of the Soviet Union.