Larisa Svechin came to Florida with her parents at age 6 from what is now Belarus and was then the Soviet Union, part of a wave in 1979 of Soviet Jews seeking religious asylum. Today, as mayor of Sunny Isles Beach in Miami- Dade, Svechin, 50, holds a dual distinction: She’s said to be the only Belarus native and Russian-speaking mayor of an American city.
Sunny Isles is sometimes tagged locally as “Little Moscow.” It’s an oversimplification, Svechin says. She says the Census undercounted the city’s foreign-born population, but she and it agree Russians aren’t a majority. The Census says Latin Americans are the largest group of immigrants — 61% of the foreign-born — while Eastern Europeans make up 21%. Svechin believes the split is more like 50-50 between Latins and East Europeans. She says the Eastern European group can be further divided in rough thirds among Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Overall, the Census estimates 63% of the city’s 22,000 people are immigrants. She believes the share is closer to 80%.
The Census doesn’t ask whether people are Jewish but until recent decades, Eastern European immigrants in Florida meant Jewish immigrants — like Svechin’s family who first lived in Miami Beach before moving to Sunny Isles. “Sunny Isles has a very large Russian Jewish population,” says Ira Sheskin, a University of Miami geography professor who studies Jewish population trends.
But when Svechin arrived, Russian speakers were rare. She learned English fast out of necessity. “I can literally count on one hand how many of us spoke Russian and we were different ages,” she recalls. After graduating in 1991 from North Miami Beach Senior High, Svechin went to the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New School in New York. She rose to become a print advertising director at a major New York firm. In 2009, pregnant with the third of her four children, she returned to Sunny Isles with her husband, Steven Hildrew, a native of England.
Sunny Isles has a growing center for Jewish people from Russia. She observes that, lately, more Christian Eastern Europeans have been immigrating. Also, immigrants are trying to assimilate faster, though they also send their children to cultural schools to keep up the native language and heritage. Russian parents expect their children to recite Pushkin poems, read Dostoevsky and act in Chekhov plays in the mother tongue.
When the Ukraine war began, Svechin says, reporters descended on Sunny Isles to look for conflict among the city’s Russians and Ukrainians. It didn’t exist then, Svechin says, but now, “I’m seeing it more with the younger people. It’s because of what they see in the media. It divides them.”
Notable Trends
Florida accounts for 7.6% of the nation’s 2.2 million Eastern European immigrants. Florida’s Poles account for 6.2% of the nation’s Polish immigrants.
Broward ranks among the top 15 counties nationally for Eastern European immigrants. Cook County, Ill., leads the nation with 187,500. Broward is 12th nationally in Russian immigrants while Miami- Dade is 14th with 4,200.
Florida’s Russian immigrants account for 7.6% of the national total from Russia. Florida’s Ukrainian immigrants account for 5.7% of the Ukrainian total.