Posted on 08/15/2005 12:39:03 PM PDT by jb6
Ukrainian nationalists have asked President Viktor Yushchenko to open criminal proceedings against "judeo-Nazis" in Ukraine, singling out Chabad rabbis and the main work of Chabad hassidic literature, the Tanya, according to the web site of the Federation of Jewish Communities of the CIS.
In an open letter to Yushchenko, members of the Ukrainian Conservative Party and several far right-wing editors demanded that Jews be prevented from teaching the Tanya in Jewish schools and synagogues, so as to stop the spread of "this misanthropic religious system."
At the Ukrainian Embassy in Tel Aviv, cultural attache Maksym Osavoliuk said on Wednesday that his government would investigate the incident.
"Our official stance is to fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia as much as possible," he said.
Jewish organizations, meanwhile, warned of a possible escalation in anti-Semitism. Only a few weeks ago in Dnepropetrovsk, two synagogues were vandalized.
"This is not a sporadic event, but part of the long-term activity of anti-Semitic groups," said Eduard Dolinsky, executive vice-president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine. "We are constantly fighting against this sort of thing."
Those involved are tied to the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (known in Ukraine by its acronym, MAUP), a sizable college and unabashedly anti-Semitic publishing house. MAUP recently presented a blacklist of "media and organizations who distribute and defend or support Jewish racism, Judeo-Nazism and Jewish organized crime in Ukraine." In June, its conference titled "Dialogue of Civilizations: Zionism as the Greatest Threat to Contemporary Civilization" attracted the likes of white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
The campaign is strikingly similar to letters sent to the Russian authorities earlier this year, signed by members of Parliament and academia, which attempted to outlaw other Jewish religious books as inhumane and claimed that Jews had staged anti-Semitic attacks to besmirch the name of patriotic Russians.
The Federation of Jewish Communities in the Commonwealth of Independent States, which criticized the Russian government at the time for practically ignoring that campaign, called on Ukraine to hold those involved accountable for inciting hatred against Jews.
"Surely those responsible are saying, 'In Russia they got away with it, so we'll get away with it in Ukraine,'" said Rabbi Avraham Berkowitz, executive director of the FJC.
"We will turn to the president and prime minister to ask them to denounce the parliamentarians involved," he added. "They must be held accountable, even if they are minority members. Serious repercussions have to come from this."
The letter could revive concerns about Yushchenko's commitment to protecting the country's Jewish population.
According to The Kyiv (Kiev) Post, Yushchenko, Foreign Minister Borys Tarasyuk and Finance Minister Viktor Pynzenyk have previously served on MAUP's board of trustees. Some Jewish groups defended Yushchenko, however, noting that he had gone to Auschwitz for the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of its liberation, and that he joins a Kiev synagogue each year to light Hanukka candles.
One of Yushchenko's defenders was Ukrainian Chief Rabbi Yaakov Bleich, who told The Jerusalem Post in March that Yushchenko "is definitely not anti-Semitic, but he is maybe too tolerant of people who are."
Bleich is also one of the public Jewish figures named in the letter (although he is not a Chabadnik), and has been the frequent target of MAUP's criticism in the past
UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS WANT COMRADES OUT OF JAIL. Some 50 members of the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian National Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) picketed the presidential administration building on 17 June, demanding that the authorities release 13 UNA-UNSO supporters who were jailed following clashes with riot police during an anti-presidential protest in March 2001, UNIAN reported. UNA-UNSO leader Andriy Shkil, who was elected to the Verkhovna Rada in the 31 March election, was released from jail in April. "The day of reckoning will come -- the UNA-UNSO people will be free while Kuchma will be behind the bars," one of the picket's slogans read. JM
Ukraine: Ultra-right groups support Yushchenko
Justus Leicht In its enthusiasm for the Ukrainian opposition, the Western media has conveniently overlooked the fact that ultra-right groups are active inside the opposition movement known as the "Orange Revolution". Members of fascist organisations represent a small minority among opposition supporters and have not played a leading role in the ongoing demonstrations in Kiev. Nevertheless, their participation in the mass rallies is not coincidental. They are neither unwanted fellow travellers, nor troublemakers smuggled in by the regime of President Leonid Kuchma. Both of the most prominent opposition leaders, former prime minister Viktor Yushchenko and multi-millionaire and former deputy prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, have maintained political relations for several years with organisations that have expressed and defended fascist and anti-Semitic viewpoints. Alongside anti-communists, neo-liberals and Christian Democratic parties, Yushchenko's parliamentary group "Our Ukraine" includes an organisation calling itself the "Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists" (KUN). The KUN was founded in 1992 as the political exile organisation of the "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists Stepan Bandera fraction". The followers of Bandera espouse a fascist ideology and a militantly anti-communist, anti-Russian and anti-Polish policy. Bandera's movement fought in the Second World War initially on the side of Nazi Germany against the Soviets and demanded "independence" for the Ukraine in those regions invaded by the German army. Following the conquest of Ukraine, the Nazis no longer needed the assistance of "Slavic sub-humans". They rejected independence for Ukraine and began to persecute Ukrainian nationalists. The Bandera faction was forced to oppose the German army, but during and after the war it focused its activities against the Soviet army. This is the tradition which the KUN represents. Up until July of this year, Yushchenko's "Our Ukraine" included a second fascist group, the "All-Ukrainian Party of Liberty" (Svoboda), led by Oleh Tyahnybok. It was originally called the "Ukrainian National Socialist Party" (SNPU), and used a combination of a trident and swastika as its party symbol. At the start of 2004, in preparation for the presidential election campaign, the party changed its name and symbol. Nevertheless, in July, Tyahnybok publicly praised nationalist Ukrainian partisans in the Second World War who had "cleansed the country of Russians and Jews". "There is a need", he explained, "for Ukraine to be finally returned to Ukrainians" and liberated from the "Muscovite Jewish mafia that runs Ukraine today". Media outlets close to the government took up this statement to attack the opposition. As a result, Yushchenko banned Tyahnybok and his group from "Our Ukraine". The forces aligned with Yulia Tymoshenko also include extreme right-wing organisations, e.g., the "Ukrainian Conservative Republican Party" (UCRP), which was founded in 1992 by the former dissident Stepan Khmara. The group is fanatically anti-communist and calls for the "overthrow of the Russian Empire". In the course of public protests against Russia, the UCRP collaborated with the "Ukrainian National Assembly Self-Defence" (UNA UNSO), led by Andrei Shkil, which likewise belongs to the bloc headed by Tymoshenko. The Ukrainian National Assembly was created in 1990, and its paramilitary arm (UNA UNSO) in 1991, following the attempted putsch in Moscow. It is reputed to have more than 1000 fighters, who are alleged to have been active in the first Chechnya war on the side of the Chechens, in the Yugoslavia war on the side of the Croats, and also in Georgia. The English-language section of its web site includes such items as a statement of solidarity with the Chilean ex-dictator General Augusto Pinochet, a report on a congress of the UNA UNSO, at which the organisation signed an agreement for "friendship and cooperation" with representatives of the German neo-Fascist NPD, and a long essay on the ideology and politics of UNA UNSO. The essay states that Andrei Shkil, the editor-in-chief of the magazine Nationalist, sports the emblem of the Ukrainian division of the Nazi SS Galicia. In the Nationalist, Shkil not only praises the racist ideologists Count Gobineau and Walter Darri, but also the book Mein Kampf and its author (Hitler's name is not mentioned) for "re- examining these ideas (of Gobineau and Darri) at the highest level". It is therefore not surprising that Shkil has used his position as parliamentary delegate to call for the transfer of the bodies of Stepan Bandera and Simon Petlyura. The latter's troops fought against the Bolsheviks in 1918-19 and killed some 30,000 Jews in pogroms. In March 2001, Shkil and his organisation generated headlines when they fought street battles with the police in the course of protests against President Kuchma. As a result, Shkil was condemned 18 months later to a term of imprisonment. Following the sentencing of Shkil, Yushchenko and other politicians of the opposition condemned the court decision as a political judgment. Speaking in parliament, Tymoshenko called 15 members of Shkil's organisation sentenced to prison terms of 2-5 years "the best representatives of the nation".
'Tanya' is Aramaic for 'it has been taught', a first phrase in some Jewish commentaries.
Today's Tanya lesson, for example, contains these comments:
'I have become small from all the favors and from all [the truth].'
"These words were uttered by Jacob as an introduction to his plea to G-d that He save him from Esau. Although G-d had previously assured him that He would accompany and protect him wherever he went, Jacob nonetheless feared that all the kindnesses that G-d had already shown him had made him 'small', i.e., had reduced his merits. He thus feared that he was possibly in a state in which he would have to ask G-d anew, 'Save me'."
http://www.chabad.org/dailystudy/tanya.asp?tDate=8/15/2005
"Don't forget that the Kremlin is responsible for killing far more Jews than the Nazis - and that two thirds of those killed at Babi Yar were non Jewish Ukrainians - including the national soccor team that beat the German team desptie the warning they would be executed if they did humiliate the Germans. "
Communist Kremlin definitely responsible directly for the death of tens of millions of people throughout fmr. USSR and indirectly for tens of millions more round the world where it was successfull in exporting this murderous system. I am definitely not going to defend it for all the terrible suffering it brought to the world.
However, for truth sake Kremlin could not have killed far more Jews than Hitler. There wouldn't be any Jews left then in the world if it did. In 1939 there were about 15 million Jews world wide. After Holocaust there were 9 million--6 million perished in Holocaust. Certainly among estimated 40 million of Lenin-Stalin victims were Jews, but they were murdered not because they were Jews but for other reasons, like being "enemies of people" during 1937-1938 great purge. The whole number of Jews was never more than 4 million throughout USSR existence, so Stalin simply could not have found that many Jews to murder.
At the end of his bloody tenure in power, Stalin wanted to target specifically Soviet Jews. He planned deportation of Soviet Jewry to the Far East in 1952-1953, starting with Doctor show trials, blaming them for plot to poison top Communist Party officials--the latest Stalin paranoia. Fortunately this bastard died before he could have put his evil plan in motion and the Soviet Jewry was saved from deportation.
In Babi Yar, the bulk of the victims were Jews murdered after German Nazi authorities ordered all Jews of Kiev to gather and were shipped to Babiy Yar to be shot there. Jews were murdered because they were born Jews--that's was the essense and horror of Holocaust. Non Jews were shot there too because they were Soviet POW's, Ukrainian Intellectuals opposing Hitler, etc--for political or military activities against German Reich. But Jews were shot simply because they were BORN Jews (from little children to elders) and its amoral to belittle this.
Russia, as well as all of the provinces of the late Soviet Union, has an ancient tradition of anti-Semitism. In his last years Stalin was preparing a mass persecution and liquidation of the Jews. I can recommend a couple excellent books of this subject should anyone be interested.
Estimates of total deaths at Babiyar are 150-200,000 and of these it is estimated that 35-50000 were Jews.
The Russians made many gains by deflecting attention away from their own antisemitism by making false claims about other groups like the Ukrainians and Poles.
Estimates of total deaths at Babiyar are 150-200,000 and of these it is estimated that 35-50000 were Jews.
The Russians made many gains by deflecting attention away from their own antisemitism by making false claims about other groups like the Ukrainians and Poles.
Russia, as well as all of the provinces of the late Soviet Union, has an ancient tradition of anti-Semitism. In his last years Stalin was preparing a mass persecution and liquidation of the Jews. =
Stalin is NOT russian he is soviet georgian. Was borned in Georgia.
What anciaent tradition odf anti-semitism Russia has? All czar time anti-jewish acts happened to be on teritory of Ukraine and Moldavia.
Stalin was also killed off my his very inner circle. It wasn't just Jews he was going after, he was going after all those near him, a new purge. Which is interesting that he died on the evening before the new purge was to start with bloody foam (cynide poisoning symptom) on his lips.
Care to quantify/qualify your accusation? I bet you can't. But we'll wait.
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Russia and the PogromsAlthough the Haskalah movement was active in Eastern Europe, particularly in Russia, the civil emancipation of the Jews in no way enjoyed the support of the non Jewish population. The Jews of Czarist Russia suffered persecution and discrimination. They were restricted in the areas in which they could reside, and were not equal with other citizens before the law. Czars issues numerous decrees against them, and the priests encouraged hatred of the Jews among the peasantry. This reached a climax toward the end of the 19th century in a series of pogroms. In 1881, after a malicious rumour that the Jews had assassinated the Czar, pogroms took place in the Ukraine in more than 30 towns, the most serious of them in Kiev. Later, on Christmas Day, the Jews of Warsaw were attacked and on Easter, those of Balta. In 1883 there were more pogroms, and in 1891 - 1892 the Jews were expelled from Moscow. The first six years of the 20th century saw another series of hundreds of pogroms, particularly in Kishinev (where 45 Jews were killed and hundreds injured in 1903) and Odessa (over 300 dead and thousands wounded in 1905). In this atmosphere a proposal for a debate in the Duma on the abolition of the Pale of Settlement was shelved, while a suggestion to exclude the Jews from military service was not accepted for the sole reason that the government could not dispense with the service of about 40 000 Jewish soldiers. In 1913 the government held a blood libel trial in Kiev, accusing Mendel Beilis, a Jew, of having murdered a Christian child to use his blood for ritual purposes. Anti Semitic propaganda was intensified and the government mobilised its police and judicial cadres to obtain his conviction. A strong defense was mustered which concluded in the jury, consisting of 7 Russian peasants, acquitting the accused. These manifestations of Antisemitism discouraged even those who had pinned all their hopes on emancipation. Jewish youth reacted by joining either the revolutionary movement, or the Jewish nationalist groups. Mass emigration took place and the Jewish population of the United States grew from some 280 000 in 1880, to about 4 500 000 in 1925. The Jews of Eastern Europe had always traditionally looked forward to the return to the Promised Land, and the pogroms, especially in regions ridden by poverty, gave a major impetus to practical Zionist activity. Groups such as the Bilu (founded in 1882) promoted settlement in Palestine. Next Step : Zionism the Beginning Index to Footsteps through Jewish History
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is part of the History of the Jews in Bessarabia.
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The Kishinev pogrom was an pogrom (anti-Jewish riot) that took place in Kishinev, which was part of the Bessarabia province of Imperial Russia (currently Chiºinãu is the capital of independent Moldova) on April 6-7, 1903.
First Pogrom
The riot started after an incident on February 6 (Russian Easter) when a Christian Russian boy, Michael Ribalenko, was found murdered in the town of Dubossary (now Dubãsari), about 25 miles north of Kishinev. Although it was clear that the boy had been killed by a relative (who was later found), the anti-Semitic newspaper "Bessarabetz", published by Pavolachi Krusheven, insinuated that he was killed by the Jews. Another newspaper, "Svet," used the ages-old blood libel against the Jews (that the boy had been killed to use his blood in preparation of matzo).
The Kishinev Pogrom spanned three days of rioting against the Jews. Forty-seven (some put the figure as high as 49) Jews were killed, 92 severely wounded, 500 slightly wounded and over 700 houses looted and destroyed. Vyacheslav von Plehve, the Minister of Interior, supposedly gave orders not to stop the rioters, but, in any case, no attempt was made by the police or military to intervene to stop the riots until the third day.
The New York Times described the First Kishinev pogrom: "The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plain for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken- up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews." ("Jewish Massacre Denounced," New York Times, April 28, 1903, p 6). Actual casualty figures ended up being lower than this initial description.
[edit] Second Pogrom
A second pogrom took place on October 19-20, 1905. This time the riots began as political protests against the Czar, but turned into an attack on Jews wherever they could be found. By the time the riots were over, 19 Jews were killed and 56 were injured. Jewish self-defense leagues organized after the first pogrom stopped some of the violence, but they were not wholly successful.
Outside of Russia
Pogroms spread throughout Eastern Europe, and anti-Jewish riots broke out elsewhere in the world. Pogroms happened in Warsaw in 1881, and in 1918 and in the 1930s there were large-scale pogroms in Poland. In 1927, there were pogroms in Oradea, Romania. In the Americas, there was a pogrom in Argentina in 1919, during the Tragic Week.
During the Russian Revolution
Many pogroms accompanied the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the ensuing Russian Civil War, an estimated 70,000 to 250,000 civilian Jews were killed in the atrocities throughout the former Russian Empire; the number of Jewish orphans exceeded 300,000. In his book 200 Years Together, Russian historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn provides the following numbers: out of estimated 900 mass pogroms, about 40% were perpetrated by the Ukranian forces led by Symon Petliura, 25% by the Green Army and various nationalist and anarchist gangs, 17% by the White Army, especially forces of Anton Denikin, and 8.5% by the Red Army. .
The pogroms in Ukraine I know perfectly well.
All sides were murdering or abusing Jews--White Guard Army, Red Army, Various chieftians, Petlura Forces. My great grandma was a survivor of this pogroms. Pogroms in Russian Empire starting in 1880's after assassination of Alexandr II were also brutal that brought exodus of millions of Jews from Russian Empire to US and Western Europe.
However, the Russian Jews were able to leave the Russian empire and find a decent life in America. Hitler did not gave German, Polish and other Jews that came in the site of Nazis the chance to escape in WWII. Also Britain closed British controlled Palestine for Jews to appease Arabs.
We in America turned back two cruise ships full of Jews in 1938 and they sailed a bit longer trying to find a port but eventually returned to Germany and the camps.
Of course Stalin was from Georgia but Georgia became part of Russia in the early 19th century and it was indeed part of the Soviet Union. If you don't know about the pograms and persecutions of the Jews that were a constant part of Russian history I can recommend some good histories. By the way, would you like to know the books I referred to about Stalin's planned holocaust?
Here's an insight, Ukraine "experts"- far right parties are an insignificant minority (1-2% of electorate) and if you report what fringe parties are doing and attempt to present it as mainstrean, then all is not well in your head. This is on par with Soviet-era style reports that America is nothing but race riots and a poverty-stricken hell hole.
I'm sensing that jb6 is Russian (who else would slam Ukraine so much?). Russian treatment of its Jews is nothing to be proud of. Guess which nation had the following motto: Biei zhydov, spasai Rosiyi. (transl. "Kill Jews, save Russia"
Problem is, I'm not slamming Ukrainians, I'm slamming the Yushchenko-Tymoshenko Road Show and their allies, like Una-Unso. It's interesting that individuals such as yourself associate that crew with the state and people of Ukraine. Very autocratic of you. Politicians are not the state nor are they the people, but its interesting when your type associates any criticism of the government with an insult on the people. That is what is soviet and you're the one practicing it.
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