This article describes the results of field research into religious Jewry of St. Petersburg. I analyze biographies of Modern Orthodox and Hasids of Lub-avitcher traditions (or the Chabads as they call themselves), who in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s disintegration in the 1990s chose ob-servance as their self-identity and lifestyle. The paper is aimed at answer-ing the following questions: how do modern Jewish identities differ from one another among the St. Petersburg observant Jewry raised in non-reli-gious families and Soviet schools? How do they coordinate their collective identity with other Jewish communities around the world? To conceptu-alize my research, I have used Giddens and Beck’s theories of modernity, while my methodology draws on the use of biography and biographical narrative in ethnographic studies. I argue that individual reflexivity gained new importance for both Modern Orthodox Jews and the Chabads in the post-Soviet religious liberation and the arrival of new religious in-fluences. However, whereas Modern Orthodox Jews emphasize the auton-omy of their subject position and stress the meaning of individual dogma, the Chabads foreground the primacy of tradition when reflecting on their identity as religious Jews.