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Text Box: Editor's Note:  Some of the information on this page has been obtained from the Union of Councils for Jews in the former Soviet Union, Washington, D.C. Text Box: RUSSIA ANTISEMITIC ATTACK IN VOLZHSKY Two young men attacked a Jew in a Volzhsky, Russia (Volgograd region) cafe, according to a June 18, 2008 report by the web site Jewish.ru. Oleg Polonksy, age 40, went to the cafe to eat dinner, but when he placed his keys on the table, the two men sitting nearby noticed that he had a Star of David key chain. they approached him and asked, "are you a Jew?" to which he answered in the affirmative and was savagely beaten. Mr. Polonsky is currently in the hospital recovering from his injuries. The head of the local Jewish community has appealed to the city's mayor to oversee the investigation of the crime. Police so far have not detained any suspects.  NIZHNY NOVGOROD CEMETERY VANDALISM Police arrested an 18-year-old suspected of vandalizing a Jewish cemetery in Russia's fourth-largest city. Thirteen gravestones were knocked over or split in two sometime before May 28, 2008 when the damage was found, according to the local State Department of Internal Affairs. The Krasnaya Etna cemetery in Nizhny Novgorod was attacked several more times including June 8. Police are investigating four suspects between the ages of 14 and 18. The arrested 18-year-old confessed to damaging the cemetery. The other youths said they stood by but did nothing to stop him. In a rare departure from standard prosecutions of similar cases, the youths face charges of "mockery over the bodies of the dead and their burial motivated by ethnic hatred." Text Box: BOBRUISK JEWS MARK 500 YEARS Belarusian Jews celebrated the 500th anniversary of the Bobruisk Jewish community. The head of the Bobruisk community, Leonid Rubinstein, marked the celebration by writing a musical about its history that was performed by local children and adults. "Jews have lived in Belarus for a long time, and three other towns' Jewish communities have celebrated their 500th anniversaries in recent years," the head of the Belarusian Jewish community, Leonid Levin, told JTA.   Bobruisk, a city of 227,700 located 81 miles southeast of Minsk, now has a Jewish population of approzimately 1,350. Some 20,000 Bobruisk Jews were shot by the Nazis during World War II and buried in mass graves. Most of the remaining Jews were killed in ghetto and labor camps established in the town. Levin said historical documents note the 500-year presence of Jews in Bobruisk. He added that the Mogilev community would celebrate the same anniversary in 2020. Text Box: UKRAINE LVIV POLITICIAN CALLS FOR PURGE OF JEWS A former member of President Yushchenko's "Our Ukraine" party has called for "tough, merciless" action against Jews and Russians who have supposedly seized power in Ukraine, according to UCSJ's Lviv monitor. Oleg Tyagnybok, the former head of the National Socialist Party of Ukraine whose "Freedom" party holds several seats in the Lviv regional parliament, was expelled from "Our Ukraine" in 2004 after a speech that strongly implied the need for violence against Jews and Russians, whom he habitually labels with the pejorative terms "kikes" and "moskali."  In a July 1, 2008 speech, the former member of the Ukrainian parliament lashed out at his former ally by claiming that President Yushchenko's surrogates are beginning to use the words "kike" and "moskali" in their speeches, words that four years ago got him expelled from the president's party. "So now it's OK to use those words?" Mr. Tyagnybok asked in his speech. "But it's too late now! The kikes and moskali and their minions have seized power, and without a tough, merciless purge, there is nothing we can do about it." HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL VANDALIZED IN LVIV A Holocaust memorial in Lviv, Ukraine was vandalized, according to UCSJ's local monitor. the plaque at the Kleparov train station informs passersby that the Nazis shipped 500.000 Jews through the station to death camps in Poland during the was. A group of Jewish tourists noticed that someone had painted a hangman and a Star of David on the plaque. It is not clear if police are investigating the crime. UKRAINIAN JEWS PROTEST CONSTRUCTION Authorities of the western city of Lviv will allow a private construction firm to erect a high-rise hotel on the site of an old synagogue complex that is under UNESCO protection. Meylakh Sheykhet, the director of the Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union in Ukraine, told JTA (Jewish news agency) that representatives of the local Jewish community expressed their concern in letters to city and national leaders as well as to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. Local Jewish activists and Sheykhet say workers are building a hotel for the Euro-20-12 soccer tournaments on the site of the 16th century synagogue Ture Zahav, or Golden Rose, which was burned down by the Nazis in 1942 but is listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site. A mikveh remains on the site; another building was recently demolished. Local leaders say they believe that national authorities will stop the illegal destruction of the remainder of the Jewish complex in Lviv. BOBRUISH HE

 

 

Text Box: RISING NEO-NAZISM Russian sociologists have struggled to explain the phenomenon of rising neo-Nazism and xenophobia in a country that lost millions of its citizens fighting against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Last month neo-Nazis daubed swastikas on a memorial in Moscow to members of the Jewish anti-fascist committee and hacked into the Holocaust Centre's website, decorating it with Nazi symbols. Jewish cemeteries are regularly desecrated. Text Box: RUSSIAN PROFESSOR ENDORSES BLOOD LIBEL  A professor at a Russian state university reportedly endorsed blood libel against Jews during a lecture. Svetlana Shestakovaya, an assistant professor of sociology at Tyumen State University in western Siberia, said during a lecture linked to a state-sponsored educational program that she believed Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to make bread for Passover, according to a report by the Slavic Law Center. The lecture came as part of a training course for a government-sponsored program called the "Fundamentals of Orthodox Culture" that has been implemented in several of Russia's regions. According to the law center, Shestakovaya said the Jews perform "a Jewish Eucharist tht uses a small quantity of blood of [Christian] Orthodox people whom they martyred." Leading figures in the Russian Jewish community have spoken out against compulsory Orthodox education in Russia, where the church has taken on a prominent role in Russian national identity. Shestakovaya also lashed out a Islam for being motivated by an "occult, evil spirit," Protestantism for being a collection of "pseudo-Christian sects" and Catholicism as a "heresy," the center reported. Text Box: TAJIKISTAN LONE TAJIK SYNAGOGUE RAZED Takikistan's lone synagogue was demolished. The 19th century Dushanbe shul was razed to make way for a park, the Tajiki Jewish community reported. The Government has promised to allocate land for a new synagogue, though details on the plan are sketchy. "It's painful to lose something very dear, something that cannot be valued in money terms," said rabbi, Mikhail Abdurakhmanov, in an interview with Reuters. "At the moment the existence of Tajikistan's only Jewish community is under threat. We do not have a place to hold our worship. We also have no place to feed the elderly and the poor." He said the community has not held any worship since the end of May, and has had to stop its food program for poor and elderly members of the community. He complained that the city authorities offered no financial compensation or another plot of land to build a new synagogue. "Even if they gave us another suitable place to build a synagogue we do not have any funds to do it." Rabbi Abdurakhmanov reported that the community has only been involved with the technical details of the eviction from the synagogue. "The district court bailiffs brought a notification signed on May 26 saying that we should leave the building at the latest by May 29. But in fact the Chief Engineer of the City Architecture Department came to the site with the bulldozer and workers already on May 28. They did not even give us enough time to pack up and leave decently." The community, which numbers some 350 people, is descended from Persian-speaking Bukharan Jews who have lived in Central Asia for centuries. Many Tajiki Jews left for Israel after Tajikistan won independence from Soviet rule.