RJC Monitor - 10.24.2003

 

The Russian Jewish Congress

60th Anniversary Since the Annihilation of the Jewish Ghetto in Minsk 

A commemorative evening was organized October 23 at the Memorial Synagogue on Poklonnaya Gora in Moscow to mark the 60th anniversary of the elimination by the Nazi occupation forces of the Jewish ghetto in Minsk, Byelorussia. The meeting was organized by the International Union of Former Jewish Prisoners of Fascism. The tragic occasion was also observed in Byelorussia, Israel, the United States and other places in Russia. 

More than 100,000 Jews were murdered by the German troops in the Byelorussian capital during those three days in late October 1943. Most of the victims were residents of Minsk or other cities and towns of Byelorussia, but some had been brought to Minsk from Germany.

The meeting at Moscow’s Memorial Synagogue brought together several survivors from the Nazi ghettos and concentration camps, leaders of Jewish organizations, members of the diplomatic corps as well as prominent politicians and representatives of the artistic community. The meeting, which was hosted by Yefim Gologorsky, president of the International Union of Former Jewish Prisoners of Fascism, heard the addresses of chief rabbis Berl Lazar (FEOR) and Adolf Shayevich (KEROOR), RJC President Evgeny Satanovsky, and Minister of Labor of the Russian Federation, Alexander Pachinok, as well as several people who miraculously survived the extermination of the Minsk ghetto. 

Six candles were lit in a big iron menorah in memory of the innocent victims, as the cantor sang the caddish. 

The evening was concluded with a new concert program of the Jewish chamber choir led by Alexander Tsalyuk. 

War Veterans Endorse RJC Election Appeal at October Meeting 

The October session of the Presidium of the Union of Jewish Veterans and Invalids of World War Two (UJWV) strongly supported the Appeal of the Russian Jewish Congress in connection with the upcoming Duma elections. The Appeal was presented to the members by Retired Col. Vladimir Tzeitlin, who told his UJWV comrades about the September 24 special session of the Presidium of the Russian Jewish Congress, the Conference of Presidents of the Leading Jewish Organizations and the Committee of Solidarity with the People of Israel, which adopted the appeal. 

The participants in the meeting adopted a letter to the editor-in-chief of the “Moskovsky komsomolets” newspaper, Pavel Gusev, in which they thanked him for the publication of an article by the prominent Jewish journalist Mark Deutch, entitled “The Insolent Classic,” in which he strongly criticizes Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s latest book. 

Reports of Anti-Semitic Occurrences in September 

The monitoring service of the World Jewish Russian-speaking Community and the Russian Jewish Congress www.antisemitismu.net published its report for the month of September 2003. The report lists the following instances among others:

In another outburst of signboard terrorism in Russia, a guard at the synagogue in the city of Veliki Novgorod saw an anti-Semitic sign bent against the façade wall and covering an instrument plate with wires attached. Federal security experts called to examine the gadget found it was a fake. According to one of the versions pursued by the investigators, the incident, which occurred in the morning of September 2, might be linked to the trial at the local court of Pavel Ivanov, the founder and editor of the local newspaper “Russkoye veche,” charged with instigation of national hatred and anti-Semitism. 

Seven days later, however, the court acquitted the editor. In one of the issues of his newspaper, which calls itself a “paper of constructive opposition” and is distributed throughout the Veliki Novgorod Region, Mr. Ivanov claimed that he had uncovered “a plot of the Yids and ‘free masons’ against the people”--organized by representatives of the regional authorities. 

On September 20, a home-made bomb went off in a nursery school in the city of Kaliningrad, wounding Eduard Sapozhnikov, 14, who inadvertently touched a sign with an anti-Semitic insult attached. The nursery school runs a group for Jewish tots and is sponsored by the Jewish community of Kaliningrad. 

In Munich, Germany, the police arrested a group of nine neo-Nazis suspected of preparing an act of terrorism on the construction site of a new synagogue. According to reports, the neo-Nazis were planning their attack during the laying of the foundation stone, a ceremony to be attended by Germany’s President Johanes Rau, the prime-minister of Bavaria and the leader of the German Jewish community, Paul Spiegel. 

Also in Germany, a demonstration by neo-Nazis took place in Nuremberg September 6, which was followed by a more powerful demonstration by internationalists.

Acts of vandalism accounted for the biggest group of incidents, the report says. Thus, three acts of desecration of Jewish cemeteries were registered in September: in Latvia, the United States and Argentina. Neo-Nazi hooligans attacked synagogues in Detroit and Melbourne/ community centers in Briansk and Taganrog in Russia and the Jewish library in Meden, a suburb of Paris. In the Ukraine, vandals painted graffiti on the newly opened monument to the victims of the Holocaust for the third time. 

Leadership in public insults and slander in September probably belongs to the newspaper called “The Patriot of Marii El,” which carried an article by the leader of Russia’s People’s Patriotic Party and the country’s former defense minister, Igor Rodionov. The ex-minister sounded very much like a straightforward soldier when he designated the main enemy of Russia—“international Zionism as a network of organizational structures operating with reliance on the postulates of Judaism.” 

Chairman of the Jewish community of the city of Stavropol, Yefim Fainer, was summoned to the regional department of the Ministry of Justice for “clarifications” after a local nationalist newspaper, “Aleksinform,” carried a material claiming that the Jewish organizations in Russia are publishing and disseminating “extremist” literature. The newspaper referred to the Kitsur Shulhan Aruh.