The stroke the Soviet leader suffered in 1953 coincided with a Purim ceremony at a New York synagogue, Moshe Reuven Azman has claimed

Jews caused the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in 1953 by chanting special prayers during Purim celebrations at a New York synagogue, Ukraine's chief rabbi, Moshe Reuven Azman, has claimed.

In a Facebook post on Monday, he wrote that the ceremony took place at the synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, New York - the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement.

According to Azman, on March 2, 1953 - the day Stalin suffered a stroke - hundreds of attendees at the synagogue chanted "He is evil!" and "He is a villain!" The Soviet leader died three days later, he added.

"This happened just when Stalin was about to complete what [Nazi Germany leader Adolf] Hitler couldn't - the annihilation of the Jewish people," Azman claimed. He alleged that the freight wagons were already in place, and that an order had been issued to "deport all [Soviet] Jews to the Far East and destroy them on the way." 

No documentary evidence confirms that such a deportation plan existed.

In November 1947, the Soviet Union voted in favor of the UN General Assembly's partition plan for British-mandate Palestine, which called for the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states.

After Israel declared independence in May 1948, Moscow formally recognized the new state within days, becoming the first country to grant it de jure recognition. Historians generally agree that Stalin viewed the move as a way to weaken British influence in the region and potentially gain strategic leverage in the Middle East.

However, once it became clear that Israel was aligning more closely with the United States in the 1960s, the Soviet Union shifted course and began backing Arab states opposed to Israel in the Middle East.

Domestically, Stalin launched a campaign against so-called "rootless cosmopolitans" and "Jewish bourgeois nationalism," with Jews - particularly those accused of Zionist sympathies - becoming frequent targets. It culminated in the 'Doctors' Plot,' in which Soviet authorities alleged that a group of prominent doctors, many of them Jewish, had conspired to kill senior government and party officials on behalf of Western intelligence services.

Shortly after Stalin's death in 1953, the new Soviet leadership dropped the case and later acknowledged it had been fabricated. 

In the 1930s, the Soviet government established the Jewish Autonomous Region in the country's Far East, presenting it as a potential center of Jewish cultural life. For some time, authorities encouraged Jews from within the USSR - as well as from abroad - to settle the region.