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By Haaretz Service and News Agencies
A Russian-Jewish oligarch and one of the owners of the Yukos oil giant urged Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko to provide protection for the country's Jewish community in the wake of an attack on two yeshiva students.
Leonid Nevzlin, who is thought to be one of Yuschenko's biggest supporters and who aided the president during his campaign six months ago, called Monday for immediate action to increase security for the Jewish community.
Ukraine police said Monday that an attack on two yeshiva students in Kiev the previous day was not motivated by anti-Semitism.
One of the yeshiva students was critically wounded in the attack while the other sustained light wounds. Ukraine police said that the perpetrators of the attack were not skinheads, as was previously reported.
Rabbi Yaakov Zilberman, the head of Kiev's Jewish community, said the skinheads approached the two in an underground tunnel in the city center and attacked them with bottles, rods and knives.
According to other reports, the yeshiva students provoked drunks, who then attacked them with bottles.
Mordechai Ben Avraham, 28, who was critically wounded in the attack, underwent surgery late Sunday.
Zilberman said that Jewish residents of Kiev continuously encounter acts of anti-Semitism. He said that they have appealed to the municipality with a request to protect the city's Jewish community.
"It's a flagrant crime ... unfortunately, that is today's reality in Ukraine," said Vadim Rabinovych, head of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress. "It's a murder attempt on racist grounds."
Jewish Agency chairman Zeev Bielski offered the Agency's assistance to the Kiev community rabbi Moshe Asman, and regarded the incident as very grave.
Acts of vandalism at Jewish sites occur often in Ukraine, which has a Jewish population of about 100,000. Hundreds of thousands of Jews perished over the centuries in pogroms staged by Ukrainian nationalists, and millions died during the Holocaust.