London will be the scene for an unprecedented High Court battle between two Jewish oligarchs.

A £2 billion lawsuit against Russian businessman Roman Abramovich will go to trial after the Chelsea owner lost an appeal to quash a claim brought by his former business partner Boris Berezovsky.

The pair, who are among the world’s richest men, worked together following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky has marked 25 years since he escaped from behind the Iron Curtain.

Mr Sharansky, now the chairman of the Jewish Agency, spent almost ten years in a Siberian gulag as punishment for his political activism.

His lengthy struggle for freedom finally came to an end in February 1986, when he stepped across a bridge in Berlin and was then able to make aliyah to Israel.

In 1947, The Soviet Union was one of 33 countries to vote in favour of the United Nation’s partition plan for Palestine. Almost immediately after Israel declared its independence on May 14 1948, the Soviet Union offered recognition, along with the United States and other Western powers.

It was not to last. The Soviet Union, as would almost all of its satellites, cut ties with Israel less than five years later.

For the next 35 years, the Soviets pursued largely pro-Arab policies and Israel was a pawn in a much wider game between the US and USSR.

Russia has halted the loan of artworks to major American museums because of a row between the Russian government and Chabad.

Works by Gauguin, Cézanne and Canaletto will be missing from exhibitions opening this month at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

Russian officials ordered state-run museums, such as the State Hermitage Museum and the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, not to release the works for fear they may be confiscated by US courts.

The Russian president has said that the country will adopt Israeli-style security procedures in order to prevent a repeat of yesterday’s devastating suicide bombing.

Speaking less than 24-hours after a bomber blew themselves up in the middle of Moscow's Domodedovo airport, Dmitry Medvedev said "comprehensive checks" as used in Israel would be the only solution.

At least 35 people were killed in the attack, and many more were injured. Islamist militants from the Northern Caucasus region of Russia, which includes conflict-zone Chechnya, are believed to be behind the attack.

In the terrible and tragic history of the Jewish experience in the post-war communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe, one incident in particular stands out. It began with an editorial published in the Pravda newspaper.

The article accused a group of nine high-profile doctors, two-thirds of whom were Jewish, of conspiring to assassinate the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin by poisoning him.

An antisemitic writer who has been described by anti-Fascist campaigners as a Holocaust denier is believed to be working as a Russian distributor for WikiLeaks.

Israel Shamir, a Swedish resident who also uses the names Jöran Jermas and Adam Ermash, has been identified as the WikiLeaks staff member responsible for choosing which leaked documents are distributed in Russia.

It is also claimed that his journalist son Johannes Wahlström, known to share some of Mr Shamir’s views and previously criticised for faking reports, works for WikiLeaks in Scandinavia.

The story of Tevye the milkman, his meddling wife and five willful daughters needs little introduction.

With songs including If I were a rich man and Matchmaker, Matchmaker, it has become one of most popular shows in history and been revived across the world.

Set against the backdrop of Tsarist Russia and the pogroms, the show had its origins in the Shalom Aleichem story Tevye and his daughters, and took its title from Marc Chagall’s painting The Fiddler.