Fear Ripples Among Community in Ukraine

The aftermath of a 2007 anti-Semitic attack on the Chabad house in Uzhgorod, Ukraine.

Matt Siegel
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Moscow
Rabbi Nochum Tamarin doesn't like to talk about what happened last year on a street in Ukraine. Enough has been written about the Zhitomir attack, he says, and besides, last year is already long gone.

Pressed, however, Tamarin opens up a bit, and it is apparent that the incident, in which he and his wife were set upon and beaten by thugs, still affects him and his family.

"I'm not afraid," he says, "but my wife is."

The attack on Tamarin, a Chabad emissary, was one of a string of anti-Semitic attacks in Ukraine late last year that shook local Jewish communities.

To some, the violent episodes in Sevastopol, Odessa and Uzhgorod, where a local Chabad rabbi's house was burned, made it seem as though anti-Semitism was on the march in the birthplace of the pogrom. Yet theories differ about the violence.

The Eurasian Jewish Congress, which runs the most respected program monitoring anti-Semitism in Ukraine, says that anti-Semitic attacks did not spike in 2007. The Chabad-led Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine notes that the statistics it has been keeping as part of a new program show an increase.

Whether or not the attacks constituted a surge in violence, it's clear that they left Jews in Ukraine -- particularly its most visible members, the Orthodox -- concerned about their safety.

"I've met people in Odessa -- Jews that are very established and feel comfortable -- and they are afraid," says Mayer Stambler, the chairman of Chabad's federation. "The situation over there is very serious."

The Eurasian Jewish Congress' report on anti-Semitism in Ukraine in 2007 details incidents that have led to a sense of anxiety and siege among Ukraine's Orthodox Jews. They range from the distribution of anti-Semitic leaflets by MAUP, a notoriously anti-Semitic publishing house and business school, to the beating of a rabbi in Sevastopol.

But Eurasian Jewish Congress program director Vyacheslav Likhachev was careful to note that the report showed no more attacks in 2007 than in 2006 or 2005.

"There was a kind of informal [violent] campaign that was in Ukraine last August, but real statistics were not higher than the previous two years and maybe a little bit less than the previous two years," he says.

One major reason for the disagreement over the numbers stems from the difficulty in collecting accurate data.

According to the 2007 country-by-country Hate Crime Report Card published by Human Rights First, Ukraine collects no data on hate crimes. Not a single person has been convicted under the country's hate crimes statute in its post-Soviet history.

After Ukraine's president, Victor Yuschenko, was criticized for his government's lackluster response to the attacks, he met with Jewish leaders and said that he ordered the Ukrainian Security Service to establish a special department to combat hate crimes. He also proposed a bill to criminalize the denial of the Holocaust and Ukraine's Moscow-created terror famine of 1932-33.

Despite Yuschenko's rhetoric, observers say the government has taken no further actions on anti-Semitism.