For the first time, Russian-speaking Jews are running their own slate in the World Zionist Congress elections, which are now underway and will continue through February.

According to Lenny Gusel, national campaign director of Russian-American Jews for Israel (RAJI), the RAJI list has met the requirements to participate in the elections, registering 760 voters by mid-October. RAJI is now engaged in get-out-the-vote efforts, running ads in the Russian media and registering voters here and throughout the country.

The fruits of this effort, Gusel hopes, will be the election of at least 12 RAJI delegates to the next WZC, which meets every four years; its next meeting will take place in Jerusalem next June. There will be a total of 145 American delegates to the congress.

Gusel, 34, is the founder of 79ers, a San Francisco/Bay Area group of Russian-speaking Jews in their 20s and 30s that has served as a model for other young Russian-speakers around the U.S.

“We believe it is important there should be a Russian-speaking American Jewish voice at the World Zionist Congress, not only to raise the profile of our community, but for very practical reasons,” Gusel said. “The World Zionist Organization has a budget of over $300 million a year. If we can elect a slate of RAJI delegates, we should be able to secure a portion of those funds for Jewish education programs in the Russian-speaking Jewish community.”

Mail balloting for the Zionist Congress, which draws delegates from 33 countries, began last month.

The 50-member RAJI list is noteworthy in that every fourth candidate is a person under 30. The top two members, RAJI President Igor Branovan and Vice President Dmitri Shiglik are on the right-wing side of both the American and Israel political spectrums, but others like Gusel and Leonid Petlakh, associate executive director of the Hebrew Free Loan Society, are decidedly more dovish.

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