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 1965 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.