Jews under threat in Ukraine

While we read reports of Russian troops surrounding military basis’s and two airports in Ukraine, reports also came of Jews under threat in Simferopol in the Crimerian peninsula of Ukraine. Unknown individuals painted swastikas and the phrase “Death to the Jews” on a synagogue in the Crimea region of southern Ukraine. The graffiti was found Friday on the door and facade of the Reform Ner Tamid synagogue in Simferopol .

Anatoly Gendin, head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Crimea, said that the perpetrators needed to climb a 2-meter wall to reach the building. Clearly, it was important for the perpetrators to commit this crime. “As usual, Jews are blamed for these disasters and Jews are held responsible. I am afraid to think how this will progress,” he wrote in a statement sent to media by the World Union for Progressive Judaism.

Earlier this week, firebombs hit the Chabad-run Orthodox Giymat Rosa Synagogue in Zaporizhia, located 250 miles southeast of Kiev. That attack caused only minor damage.

Ukraine is the country where the grave of a 13-year-old boy whose mysterious death 103 years ago triggered the infamous Beilis Trial, the last blood libel in Europe. It is still a site of pilgrimage for thousands of Ukrainians who continue to believe he was murdered by the Jews on the eve of Passover who then used his blood for matzo bread. Openly anti-Semitic parties have been a fixture on the political scene here since independence in 1991.

And over the last few weeks, as law and order broke down in Kiev and other cities, there has been a rise in attacks on Jews which has barely gone noticed in the wider story of the Independence Square revolution.

The greatest worry now is not the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents but the major presence of ultra-nationalist movements, especially the prominence of the Svoboda party and Pravy Sektor (right sector) members among the demonstrators. Many of them are calling their political opponents “Zhids” and flying flags with neo-Nazi symbols. There have also been reports, from reliable sources, of these movements distributing freshly translated editions of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Independence Square.

“The government doesn’t allow any anti-Semitism in Russia,” said the Chabad Rabbi of Sochi Ari Edelkopf in an interview with Haaretz last month. “In Ukraine it’s another matter.” On Saturday, the Jewish Agency announced that it would extend emergency aid to the Ukrainian Jewish community in order to strengthen its security.

Are we going to see a wave of aliyia (emigration to Israel) from the Ukraine? Only time will tell.

This video was published on 12 November 2012