Rab­bi Jonathan Porath attend­ed Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty and Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty, received an MA in his­to­ry from Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty, and was ordained by the Jew­ish The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary of Amer­i­ca. He served as the pul­pit rab­bi at Tem­ple Beth O’r in Clark, New Jer­sey, before mak­ing aliyah to Israel in 1984 with his fam­i­ly. From 965 through 2019, he vis­it­ed the Sovi­et Union and FSU 175 times, pri­mar­i­ly as leader of the Unit­ed Syn­a­gogue Youth Russ­ian Pil­grim­age (1969 – 1974) and as a senior staff mem­ber of the Amer­i­can Jew­ish Joint Dis­tri­b­u­tion Committee’s Russ­ian Depart­ment (1993 – 2008), where he was Coun­try Direc­tor for St. Peters­burg, Cen­tral Rus­sia, the Urals and Belarus, and respon­si­ble for aca­d­e­m­ic and stu­dent pro­grams. His pre­vi­ous books include Jews in Rus­sia: The Last Four Centuries.