Meylakh Sheykhet, Ukraine director for the American Union of Councils for Jews in the Former Soviet Union, told JTA, “Jewish principles of justice and truth [compelled Jewish] Ukrainians to fight lies, falsifications, radical pro-Russian propaganda orchestrated by Putin.” Had Ukrainian Jews said nothing, Sheykhet said, “It would resonate as supporting Putin, and Jews would be seen as a fifth column in Ukraine.”
Ukraine’s interim government has a Jewish vice prime minister, Volodymyr Groysman, but also three Svoboda ministers. One of them, Environment Minister Andriy Mokhnyk, in an interview last year accused Jews of destroying Ukrainian independence. Mokhnyk also defended party members’ insistence on using the word “zhyd” as the standard Ukrainian-language designation for Jews, despite complaints by Ukrainian Jewish leaders that the term is derogatory.
“This party, Svoboda, they are part of the government,” Lazar told JTA. “So you have ministers who are open anti-Semites, which are part of this interim government. This is a concern.”
Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Vaad spokesman and the organization’s researcher on anti-Semitism, said ultranationalists have little power in the interim government. The revolution, he added, has not resulted in a substantial increase in anti-Semitic attacks. Likhachev also suggested, as have other Jewish leaders in Ukraine, that some of the attacks may have been pro-Russian provocations, a suggestion brushed aside by Lazar.
“No one knows for sure,” Lazar said. “But in the last 15 years, I’ve never seen in Russia anything similar. And sadly, in Ukraine, and in certain parts of Ukraine especially, there is a history of anti-Semitism.”
Lazar is considered very close to Putin, leading the Russian president on a tour of the Western Wall in 2012 and attending receptions at the Kremlin, including an event on March 18 at which the formal process of annexing Crimea was begun. Several Ukrainian Jewish leaders dismissed Lazar’s statements as coming from a Kremlin mouthpiece.
“When Lazar speaks, it is as a person holding an official position, that of a religious leader in contemporary Russia. And as such, it is impossible for him or any other person in his position to express views that do not align with the Kremlin’s official line and propaganda,” Likhachev said.
Rabbi Shmuel Kamenetsky, one of the main Ukrainian figures in Lazar’s own Chabad movement, declined to sign the March 17 letter. He suggested the difference between the Ukrainian and Russian leadership owes something to the varying goals of those countries’ respective Jewish communities.
“Rabbi Lazar takes very good care of Russian Jews,” Kamenetsky said. “What he says corresponds with their goals. His excellent ties with the government are very beneficial to Russian Jewry and to Jews in remote places who, thanks to those ties, are protected.”
Ukrainian Jews, Kamenetsky said, “want something different. We want a free, united and European Ukraine.”
Boruch Gorin, a spokesman for Lazar, told JTA that Lazar’s attendance at the March 18 event was ceremonial and did not imply the rabbi had any position on Russia-Ukraine relations.