NCSEJ WEEKLY NEWS BRIEF Washington, D.C. May 26, 2017

Hungarian state TV airs Iranian leader calling George Soros ‘evil Zionist-American’ JTA, May 26, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/26/news-opinion/world/hungarian-state-airs-iranian-rhetoric-calling-jewish- billionaire-evil-zionist-american

Hungarian Jews condemned a public broadcaster’s airing of an Iranian leader’s attack on Jewish-American billionaire George Soros, calling it anti-Semitic.

On Wednesday Hirado, the main news show of the state MTVA channel, included quotes by Iran’s supreme spiritual leader, Sayyid Ali Hosseini Khamenei, calling Soros “an evil Zionist-American multi-billionaire” who is responsible for destabilizing and defeating former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s regime.

Critics of the broadcast, including Mazsihisz, the umbrella group of Hungarian Jewish communities, say the broadcast risks stoking anti-Semitic sentiment. But others, including the leader of Hungary’s Chabad-affiliated EMIH Jewish group, say the government has not displayed any anti-Semitic tendencies in its fight with Soros.

Soros, whose pro-democracy philanthropies have funded groups opposed to the policies of the right-wing Hungarian government, recently became the subject of hostile statements by top Hungarian politicians.

Soros also funds various Israeli NGOs, many with a critical attitude toward the Israeli government’s policies.

Mazsihisz condemned the inclusion of the quote by Khamenei, saying it echoes the purest and most common form “of anti-Jewish sentiments in the Hungarian extreme-right media,” Mazsihisz said in a statement Friday.

The umbrella group also noted that the MTI state news agency declined to quote Mazsihisz’s statement or report about it, citing, according to Mazsihisz, concerns that it might “damage the credibility of the state media and its business interests.”

Zoltan Radnoti, the chairman of the rabbinical council of Mazsihisz, also condemned the anti-Soros rhetoric aired on public television, labeling it “anti-Semitic incitement during prime time” in a statement.

Even before the broadcast, the campaign against Soros was “not free of anti-Semitism and should be stopped in order to prevent hatred,” Radnoti said. “The hatred which is now spread with taxpayer money.”

Estonia blasts BDS, calls Israel 'a friend and partner' By Tamara Zieve Jerusalem Post, May 25, 2017 http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Estonia-blasts-BDS-calls-Israel-a-friend-and-partner- 493912

TALLINN- Attempts to isolate Israel or make it an international pariah state are unhelpful, Estonia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Sven Mikser told The Jerusalem Post in a wide-ranging interview at the ministry on Wednesday.

In line with the European Union and the majority of the international community, Estonia disapproves of Israel's settlement policy. “The international community deems that settlements are in contradiction to international law and an obstacle to peace and will not be approved as a legitimate way of advancing Israel's national interests,” he said.

But Mikser questioned the motives of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, saying "there is a subtle difference between understanding why people and groups act in a certain way and considering it appropriate and constructive. The way to go [forward] is [through] negotiations rather than making efforts to intimidate the other party."

Mikser also stressed that Estonia sees Israel "as a friend and partner."

The Estonian foreign minister said he was not deterred by US President Donald Trump's decision not to of mention the two-state solution during his visit to Israel and the West Bank. "When it comes to Trump's choice of words and rhetoric that he uses, we should probably not read too much into it. He's apparently not quite as careful in his choice of words as other presidents have been in past but I think he is sincere in the effort to be a constructive player," in finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he said.

Addressing the rise of the far right in Europe, Mikser says that while populism has always been present to a degree, he is more concerned about the polarization of politics caused by a perceived need to appeal to certain segments of voters. "Parties are trying to move away from the center, and that makes it increasingly more difficult to agree on anything and also it makes the political pendulum swing much more violently than would be desirable,” he said.

Brexit, he said, rang an alarm bell across much of the continent. “But while we do see movements with extreme ideologies doing relatively well in many European countries and here in Estonia, the rise in polls was stemmed by the shock of Brexit; after Brexit many believed victory for the Brexit camp could fuel an anti- European, anti-globalization trend on the continent, but that didn’t quite happen.”

In Estonia, the most populist party in parliament is the Estonian Conservative People's Party's (EKRE), which holds seven of the 101 parliament seats. Ahead of the elections in 2015, the party used slogans such as “Estonia for Estonians,” marginalizing the country’s minorities.

“EKRE is the most prominent of those groups that try to gain more traction by appealing to anti-immigrant sentiment,” Mikser noted, mentioning that it is the only party in parliament that has questioned Estonia’s EU membership. “They made it into parliament and got above 10% in the polls, so they are not to be totally disregarded as a marginal party but mainstream parties with much more liberal, open, pro-EU programs are still decisively ahead of the party,” he says.

Caution over becoming complacent is an underlying theme for Estonia, which has thus far avoided being targeted by the terror that has rocked other countries in Europe in recent years.

Mikser --a former Defense Minister who is privy to regular intelligence briefs-- tells the Post that the immediate threat of terror in Estonia is relatively low. “But we're not immune to the rising threat globally, and you can’t drop your guard because when they look for targets they go where they can act,” he hastens to add.

Mikser gives a number of reasons why Estonia is at low risk. The country’s tiny population (1.3 million) and its makeup are among these.

The largest ethnic groups in Estonia are Estonians, Russians, Ukrainians, Finns and Latvians. Immigration to the country is low, though in 2016 it saw the highest number of immigrants in 25 years.

“We monitor closely all activities that can be related to financing terror or any incitement of hatred, we keep an eye on potential radicalization,” Mikser says.

He notes that there have been a few individuals who have taken part, directly or indirectly, in Syria’s civil war and other conflicts. “But when we compare to other countries, the communities at risk of being radicalized are not that numerous either. It’s hard to act in Estonia undetected.” The country’s low profile is another factor. “When terrorists strike they want to have the maximum effect that will make CNN headlines, and Estonia is not that well-known,” he explains.

“But they look for targets of opportunity and we should not prove that,” he reiterates.

Four newly-fenced Jewish cemeteries in areas where Jewish communities were wiped out during the Shoah were rededicated last week. Golokarpat, May 25, 2017 http://goloskarpat.info/society/59246ea22fd9c/?utm_content=0312

The four cemeteries, all in Ukrainian Transcarpathia, were recently fenced by the ESJF European Jewish Cemeteries Foundation, a German-based non-profit which has fenced and protected some 70 such sites across Eastern Europe in the last two years.

Funding for the project has been provided by the Federal Republic of Germany.

Four Ukrainian Jewish cemeteries rededicated Ceremonies took place at Radvanka, Horinchovo, Lypcha and Vyshkovo, all sites in Transcarpathia, a region in SW Ukraine bordering Slovakia, Hungary and Romania.

The ceremonies were attended by descendants of Jews from these villages from the United States, Germany and Israel. Consuls and other diplomatic corps from Germany, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania attended the events as well as the mayors of the respective villages and the deputy governor of Zakarpatia oblast.

«The ESJF has set its task to protect all the thousands of abandoned Jewish cemeteries in central and eastern Europe, » Philip Carmel, ESJF Chief Executive Officer said. « The first stage of course is the physical protection through demarcation and fencing but the long-term protection requires the involvement of local people, most particularly in areas where there are no longer Jewish communities because of the Shoah. »

The ESJF currently works on fencing projects in Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Romania, Serbia and Moldova. It has recently launched a mass survey and monitoring project across the whole of Ukraine, a country with an estimated 2,000 Jewish cemeteries.

Chisinau Mayor, City Officials Detained In Corruption Case RFE/RL, May 26, 2017 https://www.rferl.org/a/moldova-chisinau-mayor-detained-corruption-case/28510200.html

Moldovan anticorruption prosecutors have detained the mayor of Chisinau and several other city officials on suspicion of corruption.

Dorin Chirtoaca and the other officials, including a deputy mayor, were taken to Moldova's National Anticorruption Center (CNA) on the evening of May 25 and ordered held for 72 hours after prosecutors searched city hall for several hours.

The CNA accuses Chirtoaca of instructing his deputy to sign a contract with Austrian company EME Parkleitsystem GmbH.

Chirtoaca suspended the contract with the company this month. Neither Chirtoaca nor the Austrian company have commented on the accusations.

The CNA said the company won contracts due to "concerted actions" from city hall officials.

Seven other officials, including the city's two deputy mayors, have been recently detained in the case.

Chirtoaca, 38, is the deputy chairman of the Liberal Party. He has been mayor of Chisinau since 2007 and supports reunifying the country with neighboring Romania.

All 11 Liberal Party lawmakers in Moldova's 101-seat parliament were absent from the May 26 session.

The Liberal Party recently kicked off a campaign to collect signatures for a referendum to suspend the country's pro-Russian president, Socialist Igor Dodon, for actions incompatible with his office.

Dodon's Socialists in turn have started a campaign to suspend Chirtoaca.

With reporting by Unimedia.md, AP, and News.yam.md

4 ISIS-linked terrorists plotting public transport attacks detained in Moscow – FSB RT, 25 May 2017 https://www.rt.com/news/389674-public-transport-terrorists-fsb/

Four members of an ISIS-linked terrorist network, who were managed from the territory of Syria and were preparing attacks on the Moscow public transport system, have been detained, the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) reports.

“The Russian Federal Security Service has detained four members of a terrorist group that consists of citizens of Russia and countries of the Central Asian region on May 25, 2017 in Moscow. They were preparing terrorist attacks on Moscow transport infrastructure using improvised explosive devices,” the FSB said in a statement .

The group was part of Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorist organization and was managed from the territory of Syria, the statement adds.

During the searches in the detainees’ houses, the FSB says it found an explosives production laboratory.

“An explosives production laboratory, a ready-to-use improvised explosive device with shrapnel and components for its production have been found during searches,” the FSB said, adding that they also found “automatic firearms, ammunition, grenades, as well as literature and videos of extremist and terrorist orientation.”

The terrorists planned to go to Syria and fight alongside ISIS militants after conducting the attacks in the Russian capital, according to the FSB.

In April, the security agency held a special operation in Vladimir Region, around 190km from Moscow, and after a standoff during an attempted arrest, “neutralized” two citizens from the Central Asian region who “were in contact with recruiters from international terrorist organizations.” Searching the site, the officers also found components of improvised explosive devices, a Kalashnikov AK-74 assault rifle, a PM handgun, and ammunition.

A suicide bomb terrorist attack hit the St. Petersburg Metro on April 3, killing 16 people and injuring dozens of others. No terrorist organization officially claimed responsibility for the attack. In raids following the assault, six suspected IS and Al-Nusra Front recruiters from Central Asian countries were detained in the city.

On Thursday, Abror and Abram Azimov, earlier detained in connection with the April attack, were charged with terrorism and possession of weapons, according to their lawyer Dmitry Dinze, as cited by Interfax. Eleven people remain in custody over case, the Russian Investigative Committee reported earlier in May.

Trump, European Union leaders remain at odds over Russia By David Jackson USA Today, May 25, 2017 https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/05/25/donald-trump-european-union-russia-donald-tusk- jean-claude-juncker/102137832/

BRUSSELS – As President Trump met with European leaders on Thursday, he couldn't escape the Russia controversy dogging him at home and now abroad.

The White House is grappling with multiple investigations into Russia's interference in last year's presidential election, including an FBI probe into possible collusion between Trump's campaign and Moscow. Still, Trump has openly sought warmer relations with Russia – and just this month welcomed top diplomats to a controversial Oval Office meeting in which he reportedly disclosed highly classified information in an apparent attempt to get Moscow to step up its fight against the Islamic State.

Yet in Brussels, home of the NATO and European Union headquarters, EU leaders publicly broke with Trump's more positive diplomatic approach to President Vladimir Putin's government.

"I am not 100% sure that we can say today ... that we have a common position, common opinion, about Russia," said European Council President Donald Tusk after meeting with Trump. Tusk added that both parties remain critical of Russia's military incursions into neighboring Ukraine.

Tusk also said "some issues remain open" with Trump, including climate change and trade policy.

Trump's meeting with Tusk, who presides over the European Council, and Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, preceded talks with leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The Brussels stop came in the middle of Trump's first foreign trip as president, one that began with visits to Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Rome. Trump is spending nine days away from Washington, which is still reeling from a spate of recent revelations related to Trump's links to Russia.

Trump's first foreign trip as president came a week after the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to look into possible ties between Trump campaign associates and Russians who sought to influence the 2016 presidential campaign. The U.S. intelligence community has accused Moscow of orchestrating a high-level campaign of cyberattacks, propaganda and fake news to try and influence the 2016 election, though the president and his aides have denied any collusion.

Still, EU members have long questioned Trump's warm comments toward Putin, who has backed many anti- EU candidates in elections throughout the continent. And countries such as France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have expressed concerns about similar Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns to undermine elections in their countries.

Trump's lean towards Russia was on full display one day after firing his FBI director, when Trump took an Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Sergey Kisylak, the Russian ambassador to the U.S. on May 10. The Washington Post subsequently revealed Trump divulged highly classified intelligence in that meeting about a terror plot, in a way the Russians could have deduced secret sources and methods.

This is notable not just because it potentially compromised a source of intelligence on the Islamic State – believed to be Israel – but because Russia has also backed Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, whom the U.S. and European countries accuse of widespread killing civilians and opponents in the name of fighting terrorism.

Trump also unnerved European Union leaders by supporting last year's "Brexit" vote in which the United Kingdom opted to exit the EU. Trump, who met with new president of France, Emmanuel Macron also had kind words for defeated French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, another EU opponent.

While Trump said better American relations with Russia would benefit all nations, he has also opposed Putin on occasion. The Trump administration supported Montenegro's admission to NATO, an addition Russia opposed. The president has made no move to lift sanctions on Russia over its activities in Ukraine.

Trump ends his journey this weekend at a Group of Seven industrial nations summit on the Italian island of Sicily. Trump is expected to air his concerns about what he calls unfair trade policies by other nations and the Paris climate change pact that obligates the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – two other issues on which the president and European Union leaders disagree.

The Trump-EU meeting did have its lighter moments, including the fact that complex European Union rules require the naming of two presidents: Tusk, who presides over the European Council, and Juncker, president of the European Commission.

“Do you know, Mr President, we have two presidents in the EU,” Tusk told Trump, who responded: “I know that."

Juncker chimed in by by joking, "there is one too much."

Later, when asked his impressions of Trump, Juncker simply said, "I hope he hasn't sent a tweet about me yet."

For a Russia-Friendly Town, Eastern Europeans Love Trump’s Washington By Emily Tamkin Foreign Policy, May 24, 2017 http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/05/24/for-a-russia-friendly-town-eastern-europeans-love-trumps-washington/

An affinity for Russia fills the air in some sections of Washington these days. President Donald Trump himself constantly talks of wanting to work well with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In the Oval Office, Trump apparently shared sensitive intelligence with Russian officials. Despite some reassuring noises from corners of the administration, Trump continues to browbeat NATO over its relevance and its cost.

All of which should make Central and Eastern European countries who’ve spent the last seventy-odd years under the heel or under the shadow of Russia more than a bit nervous. During the campaign, Trump seemed to imply the United States may not honor its NATO commitments if a member state like Estonia came under attack. And his first budget would slash aid funding for Eastern European states.

And yet, diplomats from those countries are thrilled with what they’ve seen, heard, and gotten from the Trump administration so far — belying some initial concerns that he might throw American allies under the bus and cozy up to Moscow.

“Really, looking at it, we have to say we have had amazingly good, high-level meetings that we didn’t have at this early stage of the last administration,” Kairi Saar-Isop, a counsellor at the Embassy of Estonia in Washington, told Foreign Policy. The three Baltic foreign ministers have already met with National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, she noted. “They never met Obama’s.” (Saar-Isop would not say who requested the meeting.)

“We have been able to talk substance,” Saar-Isop said. “From our point of view, it has been really, really good.”

And that’s not gone unnoticed in the region. Trump’s campaign trail rhetoric worried Estonians, noted Andres Kasekamp, a professor of Baltic Studies at the University of Tartu. But the appointment of McMaster, and U.S. troops on the ground and new F-35 jets patrolling the skies above Estonia “have been very reassuring,” he said.

The apparent shift from what Trump promised on the campaign to the reality of his early months in office is not limited to diplomacy. His first budget demolishes many programs for the poor and elderly that he promised to protect, for instance.

But explaining the Trump administration’s open-arms approach to previously nervous Europeans is a bit harder. It could be that all the sound and fury surrounding the FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump team’s possible collusion with Moscow to hack the election makes the administration particularly sensitive to upholding the traditional U.S. role of being a bulwark against Russia.

It could be a reflection of the lack of staffing in the new administration: High-level meetings are about the only kind of meetings you can get when most of the desks are empty. At present, the Trump administration still has yet to nominate 445 of the 559 key positions requiring Senate confirmation, including the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs.

Or the seeming contrast with the Obama years could be a reflection of President Barack Obama’s early efforts to reset relations with Russia, and kick-start the U.S. pivot to Asia, rather than doing much to bolster transatlantic ties.

Whatever the reason, attention to the Baltic states is arguably higher than it was during the Obama years, Andris Teikmanis, the Latvian ambassador to the United States, told Foreign Policy. He says he heard just what he wanted when it came to “commitment to American engagement on European soil, commitment to American presence in the Baltic region, commitment to NATO — all these questions were raised.”

“We are a neighboring country with Russia. We should be vigilant with Russia. But I should say the meetings we have had and experience we have had — we have got answers that are very much in the line we have expected.”

The Czech Republic has also had no trouble establishing ties with the administration (and likely will have an easier time if the Trump-esque Andrej Babis becomes the next prime minister, as he is expected to do.)

“We are a member of NATO, a member of the EU, we have a structured partnership with the United States,” said Zdenek Beranek, deputy head of mission at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, in a phone call on his way back from a meeting at the White House. “We meet on different levels regularly.”

One reason for that, beyond NATO ties, is the special role that Prague plays for the United States. Eva Filipi, the Czech ambassador to Syria, and the only European ambassador to Syria physically based in Damascus, serves as a protecting power for Americans and Syrian-Americans there, akin to the role that Sweden plays in North Korea and Switzerland carries out in Iran.

Even further afield, countries in Russia’s shadow are getting plenty of attention from the Trump administration. Georgia, for example, is neither a NATO nor EU member. Nevertheless, Ambassador David Bakradze told FP in an email, “We have the found the White House and State Department to be highly accessible and engaged on both economic and security issues of importance to Georgia. On numerous occasions, the administration has shown strong support for Georgia’s territorial integrity and NATO aspirations and expressed an interest in enhancing trade relations.”

And, indeed, the prime minister of Georgia was able to meet with both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence in early May — and signed a U.S.-Georgia General Security of Information Agreement with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson the next day. And the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2017 bans funds appropriated by that act to assist those countries that recognize the autonomy of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the Georgian regions occupied by Russia — Russia, Nicaragua, Nauru, and Venezuela are the four main ones. It was signed into law in early May.

But gains aren’t unique to Georgia, either. Tillerson and Trump have both reaffirmed U.S. commitment to the implementation of the Minsk accord regarding the ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine; good news for Kiev. And Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin met with Trump on May 11 — the same day Trump regaled Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the Oval Office.

U.S. soldiers arrived in Poland as part of a NATO initiative in April. And, for all his talk of wanting to work with Putin, Trump risked the Russian president’s ire by greenlighting Montenegro’s accession to NATO.

The good vibes aren’t entirely clear of clouds, though. Staffing remains a big issue. “I’m waiting, very much, like my colleagues are, [for] when the officials in the State Department will be appointed,” Teikmanis said.

More importantly, the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign continues: Ousted FBI Director James Comey will testify before Congress next week, and Congress keeps subpoenaing more and more information from former Trump officials linked to Russia. On Tuesday, former CIA Director John Brennan told lawmakers there were “unanswered questions” about the connections between Russian operatives and people in Trump’s orbit.

“With the rumors still popping up, it is more difficult to have a satisfactory awareness of the situation,” one diplomat from the region said. “Nobody can really sure what happened, and there seem to be different lines of response from the administration and the president himself on the same questions.”

War shatters lives in eastern Ukraine as the world looks away By Daniel McLaughlin Irish Times, May 25, 2017 http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/war-shatters-lives-in-eastern-ukraine-as-the-world-looks-away- 1.3096129

As Kiev prepared to host the final of Eurovision Song Contest earlier this month, 700km away in eastern Ukraine Yelena Aslanova was holding her own modest party.

She had returned from the capital to spend the weekend in her hometown, Avdiivka, to check on her house and catch up with friends during an apparent lull in a three-year war between government troops and Russian- backed separatists.

Aslanova planned to spend the Saturday evening with her son and three friends in the leafy yard of her small home. Inside, her daughter Zhenya (7) watched cartoons with Sasha (4), the daughter of one of her guests, Maria Dikaya.

Just after 7pm, when in Kiev street parties and laser shows were launching a night of the lightest entertainment, a shell landed in Aslanova’s garden.

“Arms, legs and heads were scattered around the yard. Not a single body was left in one piece,” said Yevgeny Kaplin, the leader of the Proliska aid group whose members were quickly on the scene.

Aslanova (48) and Dikaya (34) were killed with their friends Olga Kurochkina (51) and Oleg Borisenko (50). Aslanova’s son, Artyom (27), was airlifted to hospital with terrible head injuries and remains in a coma.

“The girls survived because they were inside the house,” Kaplin said. “But they saw what had happened to their parents. The seven-year-old ran out into the street screaming ‘My mum’s head has been cut off’.”

Avdiivka is inured to the sounds of artillery and gunfire from the frontline on the edge of town, but this carnage and the children’s plight shook its people.

Despite nightly shelling and skirmishes close to town, most residential areas have suffered little damage since eight civilians were killed in late January, and Aslanova’s neighbourhood was seen as relatively safe.

The bloodshed banished any semblance of security in Avdiivka and – coming as a global television audience tuned in to Kiev’s Eurovision extravaganza – it heightened a feeling among locals that the world has forgotten about this war.

Power cuts

Valentina Grigoryevna (62) lives only a few hundred metres from a ravaged industrial district that is the epicentre of fighting in Avdiivka. Every day she talks to soldiers going to and from the frontline, but she is happy to have other visitors.

Her property was hit several times and now she has moved in with friends to have some company. Every house here on Turgenev Street bears the scars of damage and makeshift repair but many residents still refuse to leave.

“They said I could go to live in a hostel, but what would I do with my five dogs?” Valentina asked, tucking her headscarf behind one ear to hear more clearly. “I’m not moving out now – if they kill me, they kill me.”

Power to the area is regularly cut, leaving Valentina and her neighbours without heat, light and running water. Aid groups bring coal and wood in winter, and she fills bottles with water from a nearby spring, despite the danger and difficulty. She even made it to her allotment to plant vegetables earlier this year.

“I’d have lots of time to do work there. But honestly, it’s a bit scary,” she said, adding by way of explanation: “Phut-phut-phut!” – the sound of bullets zipping past.

The frontline in eastern Ukraine has barely moved since a second so-called Minsk peace agreement was signed in the capital of Belarus in February 2015.

But fighters on both sides are still killed or injured every day, the political points of the deal are not being implemented, and Russia shows no sign of accepting Ukraine’s pivot to the West or ending its support for and control over separatist forces based in Donetsk – just 20km from Avdiivka.

Ukraine is more stable and stronger militarily than at the start of a war that has killed 10,000 people and displaced 1.5 million. It still faces huge challenges in the east, however, where connections with and affection for Russia remain strong.

“I see nothing good coming from Russia. But most people here blame Ukraine for what’s happening and they’re just waiting for them [Russia and the separatists] to come,” said a man living close to where Aslanova and her friends were killed.

“I’d say 90 per cent of people on this street think that way. So please don’t use my name. My house might be targeted.”

Devastating violence

The strongest television signals in Avdiivka come from the east, allowing the Kremlin and separatist-controlled television channels to dominate the airwaves and stoke anger against a Ukrainian state that struggles to provide basics like work, decent healthcare and compensation for homes hit by shelling.

“Damage to housing, social institutions and infrastructure are beyond the government’s capacity to manage,” said Vanessa Merlet, country director for Czech-base NGO People in Need, which works extensively in frontline towns and villages.

“Though the conflict in eastern Ukraine has perhaps fallen off international radars, there is still a very real risk of the humanitarian situation deteriorating even further,” she added.

When shelling in 2015 killed Sergei Tretyakov’s mother, he relied on help from People in Need and other NGOs to rebuild his small family home in Avdiivka. “The state gave us nothing,” he said.

Tretyakov (23) lives with wife Alyona (28) and their 17-month-old son Dima just down the road from where a shell orphaned Zhenya and Sasha on May 13th.

The girls are now staying with family members, who live in areas of Avdiivka that are considered to be more dangerous than where their mothers were killed.

“We are organising psychological support,” said Kaplin, the aid worker. “One of the girls didn’t talk for several days. But now they say their mums are in heaven.”

Relatives are expected to raise the children but it is not known if they will stay in Avdiivka. About one-third of its pre-war population of 35,000 has already fled the grinding misery and sudden, devastating violence of this war.

As she cradled Dima, Alyona said people still living here had a single, simple plan: “To survive.”

Fighting corruption, Ukraine starts to judge its judges By Natalia Zinets Reuters, May 25, 2017 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-corruption-insight-idUSKBN18L0HC

Ukrainian judge Artur Yemelianov has acknowledged in an online declaration that he owns a Breguet watch worth nearly a third of his annual salary and keeps piles of cash.

On Jan. 12 he was suspended for three months after prosecutors opened a criminal case against him related to how commercial law cases were allocated to judges, according to statements by the Ukrainian High Council of Justice and Yemelianov himself.

They accused him of rigging the process, which is supposed to be random, by setting out rules establishing that only particular judges could hear particular cases, court documents show.

The prosecutors also claim that Yemelianov nudged the judges to deliver his preferred verdicts and would take judges off cases if they refused to comply.

Ukraine is trying to show its international supporters and lenders that it can tackle entrenched corruption, including in the judiciary.

The next payment of a $17.5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund will depend on Kiev showing progress on reforms including anti-graft measures.

Yemelianov denies any wrongdoing and says his businesswoman ex-wife gave him money that helped to fund his lifestyle.

He says the allegations that he rigged the case allocation process were trumped up by his enemies in revenge for his attempts to stamp out bribe-taking and to stop him securing a seat at a newly established Supreme Court. His application could not be considered because of the criminal case against him.

“The main goal was achieved - as soon as I was taken out of the running in the competition (for the Supreme Court),” he said earlier this month.

The case is still ongoing and until it is closed, he is unable to travel abroad and his 1.5 million hryvnia ($56,944) bail money stays with the court.

The prosecutors, according to their publicly available statements, opened the Yemelianov case after tip-offs from other judges. The prosecution service declined to comment on this story.

The Ukrainian government, activists and anti-corruption officials have said the judiciary acts as a shield for corruption and distorts the business environment.

The central bank complains that the judicial system has hampered its efforts to shut down banks it believes are engaged in nefarious practices such as money-laundering. It says that courts have given rulings that allowed 12 banks to stay open when they should have been closed, according to several central bank statements, most recently on May 11.

"We are all living in the real world and are well aware that the judicial system is not clean, and bribery, and corruption and cronyism exist there," Justice Minister Pavlo Petrenko told Reuters in January.

“The weakest link in our fight against corruption is the Ukrainian court,” Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman said at a press conference in April.

He was speaking shortly after Transparency International released figures showing that Ukraine ranked 131 out of 176 countries in the World Ranking of Corruption Perception.

CASH AND PORSCHES

The government launched a drive to fight corruption last year under which judges and other public sector workers are required to detail their wealth in an online database.

About 30 judges, with annual salaries ranging from $10,000-$13,000, own Porsches, according to their declaration for 2015 and others have big sums of cash.

Yemelianov declared a 2015 salary of 226,181 hryvnias ($10,354), a watch costing 68000 hryvnias and Blaser Repetierbuchse R8 Carbine worth 113,000 hryvnias ($5,173), and cash in hryvnias, euros and dollars worth the equivalent of $383,000, according the 2015 average rate.

In 2013, his family income included 930,000 hryvnias in presents, prizes and wins.

The wealth declarations of some of Ukraine’s most famous politicians and public officials have been pored over by the media and anti-corruption activists. If the prosecutors are right, Yemelianov and others judges have a pernicious influence on Ukraine’s business climate.

Yemelianov says the prosecutors accused him of rigging thousands of cases but have not produced any evidence.

He submitted his grievances to the European Court of Human Rights in April, and hopes the Court will take up his case and vindicate him.

He said he hopes the Court would “affirm the illegality of the conduct of Ukraine and Ukrainian bodies, including law enforcement, towards me and the violation of my rights as a citizen.”

"PANDORA'S BOX"

As part of the anti-corruption drive, the National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption (NAZK), which is responsible for checking the online declarations, is carrying out separate investigations into whether officials obtained the wealth they detailed honestly.

An official at Ukraine's anti-corruption bureau NABU told Reuters it had also begun investigations into the declarations of judges but declined to name them or provide further details.

The IMF has urged NAZK and NABU to work more closely together and said legislation must be passed by June to set up an anti-corruption court as a condition of its aid program, according to an IMF country report released in April.

As well as the online data base, the setting up of a Supreme Court and anti-corruption court, Ukraine has removed judges' automatic immunity from prosecution and stripped lawmakers of the power to appoint judges.

But Petrenko said it will be hard to reform the judiciary while judges have an interest in throwing out corruption cases against public officials to try and make sure other judges don't eventually turn the focus on them.

"Will that judge take an objective decision? I think he will not, because he understands that he will open Pandora's box and this practice can be used against him," he said.

Reformist officials and ministers in the Ukrainian state have complained their efforts to root out graft are resisted by MPs, ministers and officials who profit from the current system.

"We feel the resistance of the old, unreformed system," Artem Sytnyk, the head of the NABU told Reuters.

MONEY FROM HIS WIFE

Yemelianov says the bulk of his recent income comes from his ex-wife, Svitlana Yemelianova, who is now in Vienna and gave him a 3 million hryvnia ($137,333) loan in 2015 to finance his travel expenses to see their three children.

"She's a wealthy woman, she has this money, she earns as she did before. In order to regularly fly to see my daughter, I need to have the necessary money. My salary is not enough for this," he said.

He says he was a successful lawyer until 2001. He says that his ex-wife became a wealthy businesswoman and psychologist in Donetsk, which has been under the control of Russian-backed separatists since an uprising erupted in 2014.

She fled Donetsk as the fighting started and left behind most of the documents related to her firms, Yemelianov said.

Efforts by Reuters to reach Svitlana Yemelianova in Vienna were unsuccessful. Yemelianov declined to pass on her contact details to Reuters.

Yemelianov said he did not know any details of his wife's current businesses.

“I can’t tell you what kind of profits there were (at her businesses), but it’s a fact that none of them had zero income.”

(Additional reporting by Matthias Williams in KIEV and Shadia Nasralla in Vienna; writing by Matthias Williams; editing by Anna Willard)

Russian Lawmakers Target Anticorruption Group Transparency International By Carl Schreck RFE/RL, May 24, 2017 https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-lawmakers-target-transparency-international-corruption- watchdog/28504550.html

Transparency International is coming under renewed pressure in Russia, where senior lawmakers are calling for the global anticorruption watchdog’s local affiliate to be investigated -- or even banned altogether -- for allegedly threatening a member of parliament.

The escalating standoff between the officials and Transparency International Russia follows anticorruption protests across Russia in March that resulted in scores of arrests, and comes amid a push by Kremlin critics to make graft a central issue in next year’s presidential election.

The furor erupted over the weekend when Natalya Poklonskaya, a deputy in the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of parliament, suggested Transparency International Russia and opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s anticorruption foundation were themselves mixed up in malfeasance.

"Maybe it would be a good thing to investigate them for corruption. Because, as they say, a guilty mind betrays itself. Maybe that’s why they yell louder than everyone else," Poklonskaya, the former Russia-installed prosecutor-general in Crimea, told Rambler News Service in an interview published May 20.

Investigations of officials’ assets by anticorruption crusaders and independent media outlets have become a central weapon in the opposition’s battle against the country’s ruling class.

These probes have, in a few cases, helped force officials out of office but have yet to lead to electoral breakthroughs for Kremlin opponents in Russia’s tightly controlled political landscape under President Vladimir Putin.

They have, nonetheless, long irritated the Kremlin and its loyalists, who have accused Navalny and others of acting as agents of foreign powers in a bid to destabilize Russia.

The deputy head of Transparency International Russia, Ilya Shumanov, fired back on Facebook on May 20 following Poklonskaya’s interview, writing: "I wanted to relax a little bit, and instead we’ll have to launch an investigation against Madame Ex-Prosecutor."

Shumanov’s organization has previously been the target of officials’ ire, most notably in connection with its receipt of foreign funding -- income that is heavily scrutinized by authorities and often used to exert pressure on NGOs and other organizations under legislation critics call draconian.

But his post triggered an avalanche of official outrage against the group, which set up shop in Russia nearly two decades ago.

Senior lawmakers in Putin’s ruling United Russia party denounced Shumanov , suggesting he may be trying to "blackmail" or "threaten" Poklonskaya.

And on May 22, a senior United Russia official said he had formally asked federal prosecutors to examine whether Shumanov’s post was an attempt to exert "undue influence" on Poklonskaya, who heads a Duma commission that oversees lawmakers’ income and asset declarations.

"If any violations of Russian law are uncovered, we request that prosecutors respond with appropriate measures," Vasily Piskaryov, head of the Duma’s security and anticorruption committee, said in a statement.

'Enemies Of Russia'

Shumanov said in an interview with RFE/RL that the reaction to his Facebook post demonstrates a "narrow" thought process by officials.

"They think this is some kind of blackmail, an attempt to influence or pressure them," he said. "No. If you publicly announce a desire to investigate [someone], you have to be ready to be investigated yourself."

United Russia deputy Yevgeny Fyodorov, meanwhile, said Transparency International Russia should be shuttered under a 2015 law targeting foreign groups deemed to pose "a threat to Russia's defense capabilities, security, public order, [or] public health."

Fyodorov told RFE/RL that, under this law, he and his colleagues would ask federal prosecutors to declare Transparency International Russia an "undesirable" organization and end its work in Russia.

"It’s simple: Enemies of Russia should not befoul Russia," he said.

Shumanov and other Transparency International Russia representatives note that the organization is actually a registered Russian entity and that authorities regularly scrutinize its finances due to its "foreign agent" status. Russia introduced that designation in 2012 for organizations that receive foreign funding and are deemed to engage in "political" activities.

The organization was designated a “foreign agent” in 2015 for funding it received from Transparency International’s global headquarters in Berlin and for a 2014 press release on corruption that prosecutors deemed "interference" in the government’s anticorruption efforts.

Transparency International Russia, which has also reported receiving financing from the U.S. State Department, says the designation is without legal merit.

Both the "foreign agent" and the "undesirables" laws have been criticized by rights activist and Western governments as efforts to stigmatize and marginalize civil-society groups.

'Rich Prospective Bride'

Shumanov said the onslaught may be a reaction to his organization’s high-profile investigations, including one last week on United Russia lawmaker Vladimir Resin’s alleged ties to firms reportedly seeking tenders in a massive -- and controversial -- Kremlin-backed housing project in Moscow.

Yury Dzhibladze, an activist and a former member of the Kremlin’s human rights council, said efforts to discredit Transparency International Russia and Navalny’s anticorruption group could be tied to the March 26 anticorruption protests and fresh ones Navalny is planning for June 12.

Any group conducting "anticorruption investigations in this situation is seen as a threat," Dzhibladze told RFE/RL.

Navalny and his team have published numerous investigations of senior Russian officials and their assets, including one of Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev that was the focus of the March protests.

Transparency International Russia in April asked Putin in a letter to look into potential conflicts of interest involving Medvedev and other individuals cited in Navalny’s report.

Meanwhile, Poklonskaya, a Kremlin loyalist who has come under criticism for pronouncements she has made on a range of issues, said she’d welcome scrutiny of her assets.

"If they plan to pin yachts, fairy-tale palaces, airplanes, and helicopters on me, then I’d at least like to be invited to such a viewing," she said in an audio statement posted on SoundCloud. "What if it turns out I’m a rich prospective bride and I don’t even know it?"

Ukraine Arrests More Than 20 Former Tax Officials In 'Biggest-Ever' Corruption Crackdown RFE/RL, May 24, 2017 https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-corruption-crackdown-tax-officials-arrested/28506910.html

KYIV -- Ukrainian law enforcement agents have arrested 23 former high-ranking tax-administration officials suspected of helping the government of ex-President Viktor Yanukovych to defraud the state of nearly 97 billion hryvnyas ($4 billion) in what authorities called the largest-ever operation of its kind here.

Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and Chief Military Prosecutor Anatoliy Matios told reporters that the former officials were taken into custody over the course of 454 raids in 15 regions across Ukraine on May 24. They said the operations involved 1,700 National Police officers and about 500 military prosecutors.

Matios said the raids and arrests were part of an inquiry into the operations of Ukraine's Income and Tax Ministry under its former minister, Oleksandr Klymenko. Klymenko, like his ally, Yanukovych, fled to Russia at the height of antigovernment protests in February 2014. He is believed to be living in Moscow.

Matios said Ukraine's economy had "suffered" from the activities of the Yanukovych-linked officials and warned others that this was only the "first wave" of arrests.

"During the course of the criminal investigation we foresee detaining and charging employees of the Prosecutor-General's Office, Ukraine's SBU Security Service, and employees of the state tax administration," Interfax-Ukraine quoted Matios as saying.

Avakov, who called the raid "the biggest anticorruption operation the country has ever seen," said some suspects tried to evade arrest, including one official nabbed at the airport.

Matios said some of top suspects were being brought to Kyiv by helicopter.

"The courts now will become the battleground," Avakov said.

Activists praised authorities for the arrests, but noted that the bigger challenge will likely be prosecuting them.

Ukraine, which has struggled to combat pervasive corruption since Yanukovych's ouster, has not convicted a single senior-level official accused of corruption since the pro-Western government of President Petro Poroshenko came to power in May 2014.

With reporting by Interfax-Ukraine

Why did a Russian Orthodox family restore a Siberian Jewish cemetery? By Renee Ghert-Zand Times of Israel, May 24, 2017 http://www.timesofisrael.com/why-did-a-russian-orthodox-family-restore-a-siberian-jewish-cemetery/

On an evening in early May, Russian grandmother Taisya Chernykh and her family collapsed into chairs in the lobby of their Jerusalem hotel after long hours of touring. As they rested their sore feet, they reflected not only on their travels that day, but also on the improbable seven-year journey that brought them on a two-week trip to Israel from their home in the small Siberian town of Babushkin.

This journey began with a book. In 2010, Chernykh, a librarian, read a memoir titled “In Defiance of Fate: Joy From Sadness,” by Vladimir Rott , a Soviet Jew of Hungarian descent who defected to Canada in 1974. Rott wrote about his wife Iya’s ancestors, the Gutermans, who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Babushkin, then known as Mysovaya Station, a key point along Tsarist Russia’s Great Tea Road trading route.

The Russian Orthodox Chernykh had never heard of the Gutermans, nor did she know anything about the Jews who once — but no longer — lived in Mysovaya Station. However, Rott’s book intrigued her and she contacted him asking him for more information. With Rott’s encouragement Chernykh started digging for historical records on the Jewish community, which in 1907 numbered 1,600 out of a local population of 5,000.

In 2011, Rott and his wife traveled to Babushkin, where they met Chernykh and her family. In the ensuing years, restoring the memory of Mysovaya Station’s Jewish community became a project for the entire Chernykh family. Chernykh’s husband Petr, son Valentin, daughter-in-law Svetlana, and young grandsons Vladislav and Vadim joined her in the strenuous physical labor of restoring town’s abandoned, desecrated Jewish cemetery. There they constructed and erected a “Shalom” memorial to the Jewish community designed and funded by the Rotts.

The Chernykhs didn’t think twice about taking on the arduous challenge.

“We like history, and we have a tight family. So we all did it together,” Taisya Chernykh told The Times of Israel.

“The erasure of Jewish history from our town was such a tragedy, so we felt obligated to do it,” said her husband.

The memorial was dedicated in a ceremony attended by the rabbis of Tomsk and Irkutsk in June 2014. Only 14 toppled gravestones remained in the cemetery, but research efforts spearheaded by Chernykh and Rott recovered 59 names of the approximately 400 people believed to be buried there. Those are inscribed in the granite monument, and 19 additional names have been discovered in the three years since the ceremony.

“This page of history was covered and did not exist. We hunted for synagogue registration books, and found a mohel’s book of birth records in a government office. We also found mention of Jewish names in railroad record books,” Chernykh said, referring to Mysovaya Station’s having been the eastern terminus for the train ferry across Lake Baikal, which was used as part of the Trans-Siberian Railway until the rail line around the southern shore was completed in 1905.

It was the business opportunities related to trade and shipping in the area that attracted Jews such as Iya Rott’s grandfather Shlomo Chaim Guterman and his young family, who fled pogroms in Poland in 1896.

This trip to Israel was the Rotts’ way of thanking the Chernykhs for their dedication to preserving Jewish history in their corner of Siberia on the southeast shore of Lake Baikal, just north of the Mongolian border.

Also on the trip, courtesy of the Rachel Guterman-Yaroslavskaya Buryat-Mongolian Jewry Fund (a charity supported by the Rott family and donors from their Toronto synagogue), were Luiza Maltceva, and Anton and Svetlana Gordienko from Ulan-Ude, the capital city of Buryatia Republic, located 177 km east of Babushkin. Like the Chernykhs, they are not Jewish, but keep local Jewish history alive, and also take care of the basic health and living needs of the several hundred elderly Jews still residing in Ulan-Ude.

“We pay for dentures for older Jews, and make sure there is firewood for their homes. We get them furniture, canes and medicine. And we make sure they get Jewish burials when they die,” said Anton Gordienko.

There is no Jewish cemetery in Ulan-Ude, so Jews are buried in the general cemetery. But the bodies of deceased Jews are no longer cremated, and Jewish rituals are followed during funerals and burials.

Rott planned a packed itinerary for the Siberian group’s Israel trip. They covered the entire country in just under two weeks, squeezing in a special meeting with Speaker of the Knesset and former Soviet refusenik Yuli-Yoel Edelstein on May 9.

The Chernykhs have friends in Russia who have visited Israel, but they didn’t know what to expect until they got here themselves.

Svetlana Chernykh said she found Israel to be a beautiful country, and its people warm and welcoming. Her mother-in-law was amazed by how such a small country can be so rich in history.

“I was really surprised by Tel Aviv,” said Valentin Chernykh. “The buildings there don’t look anything like the ones where we live. Tel Aviv has such a modern, industrial look to it.”

Vladislav Chernykh, 15, will surely have a lot to share with his friends and schoolmates back home in Irkutsk. He has already gained attention for a presentation he made to a multicultural student conference in Moscow about Jewish history in Mysovaya Station and his family’s extraordinary project.

This Israel trip was a high point, but certainly not an end point for Taisya Chernykh, who continues looking for names to add to the Shalom memorial in the Jewish cemetery in Babushkin.

She doesn’t quite understand a reporter’s curiosity about why she and her family would care so much about preserving Jewish history in their small Siberian town.

“Where we live, we don’t have the anti-Semitism that is found in other parts of Russia. We are a tolerant family,” she said.

Ukraine's Babi Yar suffers damage following incident By Tamara Zieve Jerusalem Post, May 25, 2017 http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Ukraines-Babi-Yar-monument-desecrated-again-493902

An incident caused damage to the monument in Kiev that commemorates the lives of 33,771 people who were slain by the Nazis in the mass killings at the ravine.

The large menorah atop the Kiev monument commemorating the Jewish victims of the Babi Yar massacre was found splattered with red paint by visitors on Wednesday.

It was initially believed to be a case of vandalism, as the monument was repeatedly desecrated in the past. However, on Thursday afternoon Ukrainian community leader Eduard Dolinsky learned that the state of the menorah was a result of wax spilling from candles lit by Hasidic Jews who visited the site earlier.

The monument commemorates the 33,771 Jews killed in just two days in September 29-30, 1941, located at the ravine where the mass killings by the Germans and their collaborators were perpetrated.

The community is used to finding the monument desecrated, as such acts of vandalism happened at least six times in 2015 alone. Then-Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk addressed the attacks, saying they were designed to destabilize the internal political situation in Ukraine. The vandalism has continued at the site since.

Dolisnky told The Jerusalem Post the incident is far from unusual, with vandalism of this kind happening on a daily basis at Holocaust mass graves, monuments and Jewish cemeteries across the country.

"It doesn't matter if it's at Babi Yar or 100 kilometers from Kiev," he said.

"No case of Holocaust vandalism was ever investigated nor was anyone ever caught or brought to justice," he stressed.

Books stolen from Polish Jewish communities during WWII donated to foundation JTA, May 23, 2017 https://www.jta.org/2017/05/23/news-opinion/world/books-stolen-from-polish-jewish-communities-during-wwii- donated-to-foundation

Some 33 rare books stolen during World War II from Jewish communities located in present-day Poland were donated to the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland.

The ceremony took place last week at the National Library in Warsaw.

Representatives of the Central and Regional Library in Berlin and of the Judaicum Center in Berlin jointly donated the books to the foundation director, Monika Krawczyk.

Most of the books handed over come from the former collections of the Jewish Theological Seminary of the Fränkel Foundation in Wroclaw. The oldest book, published in 1644, is signed by the German-Jewish theologian David Rosin, who lived from 1823 to 1894.

There are also two books from the collection of the Great Synagogue in Warsaw: Ludwik Wachler’s “Literature Handbook of 1833” and a pastoral letter from 1785. One of the books comes from the synagogue in Legnica and contains fictional literature.

The books have been identified as part of a provisional study conducted by a team of specialists at the Berlin library and center.

A public database of these institutions contains more than 35,000 volumes. Among them there are thousands of books containing traceable names or surnames, and identifiable volumes owned by specific individuals or organizations.

Czech Parliament resolution calls for recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital JTA, May 24, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/24/news-opinion/world/czech-parliament-resolution-calls-for-recognition-of- jerusalem-as-israels-capital

The Czech Parliament passed a nonbinding resolution calling on the country’s government to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

A majority of lawmakers voted for the measure on Tuesday ahead of the 50th anniversary of the reunification of Jerusalem, the Czech news agency CTK reported . The report did not include the text of the resolution, which also did not appear in the relevant section of the website of the Czech Parliament.

According to CTK, the resolution states that the Czech government should advocate a position respecting Jerusalem as the Israeli capital and impede steps that distort historical facts and are motivated by an anti- Israeli hateful approach.

The reference to distortion was in reaction to a resolution passed earlier this month by the executive board of UNESCO, the educational and cultural arm of the United Nations, stating that Israel has no right to control the city’s eastern part, which Israel took from Jordan in 1967.

The resolution passed in Prague also urged the government to deny funding for UNESCO if it persists with policies deemed anti-Israel.

Last year, UNESCO passed a resolution that refers to the Temple Mount only by its Muslim name, Haram al- Sharif, and to the Al-Aqsa mosque.

The UNESCO resolution “confirms a permanent, biased and hostile stance of UNESCO on one of its member states as well as an unacceptable politicization of this organization,” Jan Bartosek, a deputy speaker of the Parliament, was quoted as saying by CTK in connection with the Parliament’s vote.

Another lawmaker, Jana Cernochova, said “the only possible sanction” against UNESCO was to stop supporting it financially.

“The contributions should not be paid,” she said, “unless UNESCO gives up its hostile stance on Israel.”

Poland school honors 87 Jewish girls expelled under Nazis By Vanessa Gera Associated Press, May 23, 2017 https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/05/23/world/europe/ap-eu-poland-holocaust-remembrance.html

WARSAW, Poland — A school in Poland unveiled a plaque Tuesday that commemorates 87 Jewish girls who were expelled in 1939 during the Nazi occupation of the country.

The event in Krakow is one in a growing number of efforts by teachers and children to commemorate the Jews who lived in Poland before the Holocaust, which was perpetrated by Nazi Germany largely in occupied Poland.

The event was held to mark the 125th anniversary of the founding of the No. 2 middle school in Krakow, which before World War II was an all-girls school.

Lital Beer, director of Yad Vashem's Reference and Information Services, said her researchers worked for nearly two years at the school's request to determine the fate of the 87 girls. She said 21 were killed in the Holocaust and 24 survived, but the fate of the others could not be determined. Continue reading the main story

The task of tracking down girls was made especially difficult due to the fact that many of them changed their names more than once, first taking on Hebrew names if they settled in Israel, and then changing surnames again upon marriage. It was not clear if any of the girls are still alive.

The research project began nearly two years ago when principal Gabriela Olszowska contacted Yad Vashem after finding a trove of records that included a list of the 87 Jewish girls expelled on Dec. 9, 1939, following orders from the German Nazi authorities.

Beer said Yad Vashem gets a lot of requests to do private research for individuals, and is usually not able to accommodate most of them, but gave special attention to this case.

"I was very moved by the principal's initiative to research the girls and commemorate them," Beer said. "We want to embrace those initiatives as much as we can."

Zvia Fried, who conducted much of the research for Yad Vashem, took part in the ceremony, saying by phone from Krakow that it was "very moving" and included prayers led by a rabbi and a Roman Catholic priest.

Romania’s Parliament passes law providing more money for Holocaust survivors JTA, May 21, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/21/news-opinion/world/romanias-parliament-passes-law-providing-more-money-for- holocaust-survivors

Romania’s Parliament passed legislation that would provide increased direct financial support for Holocaust survivors.

The funds, a monthly payment of up to $97.98 per month for each year of deportation or detention, will be available beginning in July to those who were persecuted in Romania between 1940 and 1945, including deportees to ghettos and concentrations camps, survivors of the death trains and forced labor detachments, refugees and those who were imprisoned for ethnic reasons or forcefully removed from their homes in that period.

Survivors who no longer have Romanian citizenship or reside in the country, as well as the spouse of a deceased Holocaust survivor if they did not remarry, also are eligible.

The law was initiated by Silviu Vexler, a Parliament member representing the Federation of the Jewish Communities in Romania, the vice chairman of the Romania-Israel Parliamentary Group of Friendship and the vice chairman of the Labor and Social Protection Committee in the Chamber of Deputies.

“This law is a symbolic gesture to further recognize the terrifying suffering of people who have been through the darkest of moments,” Vexler said in a statement before the Chamber of Deputies following the final vote on the law. “Even though nothing can change what happened in the past, through this act, the Parliament of Romania does a true gesture of humanity and dignity.”

Before World War II, Romania had a Jewish population of over 700,000. Between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died during the Holocaust in Romania and the territories under its control, according to the Final Report of the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania published in 2004.

Swastikas painted on synagogue, rabbi’s headstone smashed in Ukraine JTA, May 19, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/19/news-opinion/world/swastikas-painted-on-synagogue-rabbis-headstone- smashed-in-ukraine

Two swastikas were painted on the front door of a synagogue in western Ukraine and, in a separate incident, the headstone of a prominent rabbi’s grave was smashed.

The incident involving the swastikas was discovered last week in Chernivtsi, a city located some 250 miles southwest of Kiev, according to the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. The local community leaders reported the incident to police and removed the offensive symbols.

Last year, the words “death to the Jews” were spray-painted on the main synagogue of Chernivtsi. And earlier this month, a monument that was erected last year in memory of Holocaust victims was spray-painted with Nazi slogans and symbols.

Meanwhile, in the town of Storozhynets, which is located 12 miles southwest of Chernivtsi, the headstone was smashed last week at the resting place of Rabbi Yechiel Hager — a grandson of Menachem Mendel Hager, the 19th-century founder of the Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty.

There are no suspects in either case.

The European Jewish Cemeteries Foundation announced Friday that it would rededicate four Jewish cemeteries in western Ukraine next week as part of its multi-phase mission to protect such sites.

“The first stage of course is the physical protection through demarcation and fencing, but the long-term protection requires the involvement of local people, most particularly in areas where there are no longer Jewish communities because of the Shoah,” the Germany-based foundation’s chief executive officer, Philip Carmel, wrote in a statement Friday.

His nonprofit foundation has fenced the cemeteries that are due to be rededicated with an initial budget of $1.35 million. It has fenced and protected some 70 burial sites across Eastern Europe in the past two years.

Russian court orders a 2nd Chabad rabbi deported this year JTA, May 19, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/19/news-opinion/world/russian-court-orders-a-2nd-chabad-rabbi-deported-this-year

For the second time this year, Russian authorities have ordered out of the country a foreign Chabad rabbi who had lived there for years.

This week, a Moscow district court ordered Yosef Khersonsky, an Israeli who heads one of the capital’s communities, to leave the Russian Federation in connection with his “setting up without permission a for-profit foreign entity,” the RIA Novosti news agency reported . The court did not specify the nature of the entity.

In a hearing, Khersonsky denied the allegation, arguing that he acted as a consultant on religious matters for existing Jewish institutions, the report said. He intends to appeal the ruling.

In March, a Russian appeals court affirmed an expulsion order issued against an American rabbi working in Sochi in what a local leader of the Chabad movement called a “dark day” for Jews.

In its ruling against Ari Edelkopf , the Krasnodar Court of Appeals accepted the determination of a Sochi tribunal that Edelkopf, who had been working as Chabad’s emissary to the city, was a threat to national security.

Boruch Gorin, a senior Chabad rabbi in Russia, told the AFP news agency that both expulsion orders were part of an attempt by Russian authorities “to replace our foreign rabbis with Russian ones, to head communities so that they [the authorities] could control them better.”

Approximately half of the 70 rabbis working for the Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia are foreign. At least eight of them have been denied permission to work in Russia over the past decade, Gorin told JTA in March.

Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian Jews have experienced a cultural revival in which Chabad has played a leading role. Dozens of synagogues and Jewish community property have been returned to communities, while the authorities and judiciary have been relatively intolerant of anti-Semitic violence and hate speech against Jews.

But Putin has also led a crackdown on human rights and religious groups in general, particularly those with international affiliations. Since 2012, Russia has slipped in international rankings of free speech and human rights: Freedom House, a U.S.-based nongovernmental agency, recently moved the country to “not free” from “partly free” on its Freedom on the Internet index.

Under legislation from 2012 that imposed major limitations on the work of groups with foreign funding, a Jewish charitable group from Ryazan, near Moscow, was flagged in 2015 by the Justice Ministry as a “foreign agent” over its funding from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and its reproduction in a newsletter of political op-eds that appeared in the L’chaim Jewish weekly.

Last year, a court in Sverdlovsk convicted a teacher, Semen Tykman, of inciting hatred among students at his Chabad school against Germans and propagating the idea of Jewish superiority. Authorities raided his school and another one in 2015, confiscating textbooks, which some Russian Jews suggested was to create a semblance of equivalence with Russia’s crackdown on radical Islam.

Jewish group gets information on mass graves with appeal on radio station accused of anti-Semitism JTA, May 19, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/19/news-opinion/world/jewish-group-gets-information-on-mass-graves-with-appeal- on-radio-station-accused-of-anti-semitism

A Jewish group’s appeal led hundreds of radio listeners to provide information about mass graves and burial sites of Jews to a Catholic radio station that has been accused of promoting anti-Semitism.

Some 300 calls have been received by the call center at Poland’s Radio Maryja with information about sites of mass executions of Jews, stolen tombstones and unknown hiding places of Jews during the Holocaust, according to the From the Depths group, which made the appeal for information last week and again Wednesday on Radio Maryja.

The hosting at Radio Maryja’s studios of Jonny Daniels, the London-born Israeli Jew who founded the From the Depths group in 2013, follows a controversy over a visit last year by the station’s director, Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, to the Israeli Embassy in Warsaw.

Rydzyk spoke there with Ambassador Anna Azari in a meeting that liberal watchdog groups said was inappropriate in light of accusations that Radio Maryja and Rydzyk personally promote anti-Semitic hate speech.

According to a U.S. State Department report from 2008, “Radio Maryja is one of Europe’s most blatantly anti- Semitic media venues.” A Council of Europe report stated that Radio Maryja has been “openly inciting to anti- Semitism for several years.”

In July 2007, Rydzyk was recorded making “a number of anti-Semitic slurs,” the report also stated. Rydzyk said Jews were pushing the Polish government to pay exorbitant private property restitution claims, and that Poland’s president was “in the pocket of the Jewish lobby,” according to the report.

Daniels disagrees with individuals and groups that believe this background should preclude cooperation by Jewish groups with Radio Maryja.

“More often than not this so-called Polish anti-Semitism is based on a lack of knowledge and openness,” Daniels said.

He was interviewed on Radio Maryja, which has millions of listeners, for the first at the end of 2016. Daniels’ group has received some 200 emails and phone calls with information on execution and burial sites, which the group attempts to preserve.

In a statement, Rydzyk claimed the airing of content that is deemed anti-Semitic by his radio station represents its commitment to free speech.

“After 50 years of communism, our radio is the only live radio in Poland where whoever wants can call and be put on air, every opinion is welcome. This creates an honesty and openness,” he said. “Sometimes there are controversial opinions, but we still let people talk.”

Polish alderman wants pogrom’s reference deleted from historical graphic novel JTA, May 19, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/19/news-opinion/world/polish-councilman-wants-pogroms-reference-deleted-from- historical-graphic-novel

A Polish alderman is seeking the removal of references to anti-Semitic violence in the history of Bialystok from a graphic novel about the city.

Marek Chojnowski, who represents the ruling Law and Justice party on the Bialystok City Council, was quoted this week by the news site Onet as protesting references to a 1906 pogrom in the booklet published with municipal funding. The 2014 booklet commemorates Ludwik Zamenhof, a Polish Jew who invented the international language Esperanto.

One page that Chojnowski wants censored shows dozens of civilians wielding clubs and hitting a group of Jews while they are prone on the street. Another shows four men dressed like Polish farmers beating three people — a woman wearing a torn dress and two young men.

The illustrations refer to pogroms carried out by Bialystok residents that were enabled by Russian authorities when they controlled the area. Some 90 people died in the violence.

But the inclusion of these scenes, which biographers of Zamenhof said had a profound effect on the linguist who was born in the eastern city, is unacceptable, Chojnowski said.

“This must show the city in the best light,” he said. “It is unacceptable that they are presented as anti-Semites.”

I may have ‘horsed around’ in Nazi camp in my youth, Bulgarian deputy PM said JTA, May 21, 2017 http://www.jta.org/2017/05/21/news-opinion/world/i-may-have-horsed-around-in-nazi-camp-in-my-youth- bulgarian-deputy-pm-said

A leader of Bulgarian Jews condemned his country’s deputy prime minister, who said jokingly that he may have behaved inappropriately when visiting a former Nazi concentration camp.

Valeri Simeonov, vice-president of the United Patriots and Bulgaria’s deputy prime minister, told the Sega newspaper on Tuesday he and some his friends may have taken spoof pictures of themselves in Buchenwald during the 1970s.

Simeonov, 62, said this in downplaying the significance of a political scandal that earlier this week forced a member of Simeonov’s party, Pavel Tenev, to resign from the position of deputy minister. Tenev had been photographed performing a Nazi salute at a Paris museum while standing next to mannequins dressed in Nazi uniform.

Dismissing Tenev’s actions as harmless buffoonery, Simeonov recalled traveling with his friends in the 1970s to Buchenwald, where the Nazis killed more than 43,000 people, including dissidents, Soviet prisoners of war and many Jews — before nearly all the Jewish inmates were transferred to the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi- occupied Poland.

The newspaper quoted Simeonov recalling how he himself had “horsed around” on the Buchenwald trip as a student.

“Who knows what gag photos we made there,” Simeonov told Sega.

In a statement Friday, Alexander Oscar, president of the Shalom Organization of the Jews in Bulgaria, condemned Simeonov’s flippancy.

“We are witnessing an ugly manifestation of disrespect toward the millions murdered in the concentration camps during World War II,” Oscar said. “Such behavior demonstrates a lack of political culture and sensitivity vis-à-vis the greatest tragedy in human history. When we talk about the Holocaust, joking is inappropriate.”

Rebuilding Tbilisi Jewish community, with Malcolm Hoenlein (audio, 11min) John Batchelor Show, May 16, 2017 https://player.fm/series/the-john-batchelor-show-96788/rebuilding-the-jewish-community-of-tbilisi-georgia-after- the-russian-disaster-of-the-last-century-malcolm-hoenlein-conf-of-pres-ephraim-hasenfeld-thevaadcom