Crimean Karaites, accepting the state's records that they were ethnic Tatars (or Khazars). Post-WW2 Following their massacre in the Holocaust, the Subbotniks came to have an increasingly nationalist self-identification as Jews. However, after the War, the Soviet government ceased to recognize the "Subbotnik" as a legal ethnic category. They counted these people as a subset of the ethnic Russian population. Between 1973 and 1991, the Subbotniks of Ilyinka in Voronezh Oblast emigrated to Israel. Post-Soviet era After the fall of the Soviet Union, a few thousand Subbotniks left Russia for Israel. This coincided with the 1990s Post-Soviet aliyah to Israel of more than a million Russian Jews and members of their immediate families. Since that period, Subbotniks remaining in Russia have encountered status-related problems. In the 21st century, the Shavei Israel organization for outreach to "lost Jews" and related communities, appointed a rabbi for the Subbotniks at Vysoky in Voronezh Oblast. The objective of teaching them Judaism and facilitate their formal conversion to Orthodox Judaism would make them eligible for aliyah to Israel. State of Israel In the early 21st century, the issue arose of the Jewish identity of some members of Moshav Yitav, located in the Jordan Valley north of Jericho in the West Bank, who were Subbotniks, immigrants from former Soviet Georgia. In 2004, the Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel Shlomo Amar ruled the Subbotniks were not defined as Jewish and would have to undergo an Orthodox conversion. The Interior Ministry classified the Subbotniks as a Christian sect and ineligible for aliyah to Israel, because no one knew if their ancestors had formally converted to Judaism (and there is much historic evidence that they did not). The ruling was abolished in 2014, with an attempt by the Interior Ministry to allow remaining Subbotnik families to immigrate to Israel. Statistics It has been difficult to estimate the exact number of Subbotniks in Russia at any given time. The discrepancies between government statistics and the membership have varied widely. Official data from tsarist times placed the membership of the sect at several thousand. The writer E. Deinard, who was in personal contact with the Subbotniks, said in 1887 there were 2,500,000. Deinard may have included in his figures all of the Judaizing sects, and not just the Subbotniks, as this estimate is not supported by any other historians. Apart from their religious rites, the Subbotniks were generally indistinguishable from Russian