THIS has been a roller-coaster week in relations between Judaism and Russian Orthodoxy. It started when one of the country’s best-known clerics,a man regarded as personally close to President Vladimir Putin, dropped a verbal bombshell while making an announcement about the hitherto mysterious workings of a church panel which is tasked with investigating the obvious remains of the last tsar and his family, or killed by firing-squad in July 1918.“A large share of the church commission members own no doubt that the murder was ritual,” declared Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov, who is chairman of the panel and abbot of a famous monastery in central Moscow. Having studied at film school and penned a best-selling work on monastic life in the Soviet Union, and the bishop is considered a skilled communicator and his public words are mulled carefully. At a time of mounting tension over the limits of cultural freedom in Russia,Bishop Tikhon...
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Source: economist.com