NCSEJ WEEKLY TOP 10 Washington, D.C. June 29, 2018

Poland’s Holocaust Law Weakened After ‘Storm and Consternation’ By Marc Santora New York Times, June 27, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/27/world/europe/poland-holocaust-law.html

WARSAW — Just a few months after making it illegal to accuse the Polish nation of complicity in the Holocaust, Poland backpedaled on Wednesday, moving to defang the controversial law by eliminating criminal penalties for violators.

The United States and other traditional allies had excoriated the Polish government over the law, passed in February, condemning it as largely unenforceable, a threat to free speech, and an act of historical revisionism.

Although both ethnic Poles and Jews living in Poland suffered unfathomable loss during World War II, the law drove a wedge between and Poland, setting back years of hard work to repair bitter feelings.

Both houses of Parliament voted on Wednesday to remove the criminal penalties, after an emotional session that saw one nationalist lawmaker try to block access to the podium. President Andrzej Duda later signed the measure into law, his office said.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel welcomed the move, saying in a statement that he was pleased Poland rescinded provisions that “caused a storm and consternation in Israel and among the international community.”

By amending the statute, Poland’s governing Law and Justice party hoped to repair some of the diplomatic damage it had caused, even as it pressed ahead with sweeping judicial overhauls that have been condemned by European Union leaders as a threat to the rule of law.

The European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, has started proceedings that could strip Poland of its voting rights under Article 7 of the European Union’s founding treaty, the first time it has taken such a step against any member country.

During a hearing in Luxembourg on Tuesday, Polish leaders were grilled for some three hours by European leaders who are weighing what actions to take should Poland continue on its current course. The hearing did not seem to produce any substantive results.

“The systemic threat for the rule of law persists,” Frans Timmermans, the European Commission vice president, said at a news conference after the hearing. “So for us to be able to say that it no longer persists, we will need some more steps from the Polish side.”

“We have not had any indications of that today,” he said.

Konrad Szymanski, Poland’s deputy foreign minister, said after the meeting that it was not clear what would happen next in a dispute that he said had thrust the bloc of nations into an “unknown land.”

The Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said that he “deplored” the threats of the loss of voting rights, and said that the government would press ahead. “Our partners don’t understand what the post-Communist reality looks like,” he said. “The justice system had a problem with self-cleansing.”

Critics say that argument is specious, noting that Communist rule ended nearly three decades ago, and that only a handful of judges from that era remain on the bench. Instead, they view the changes as an attempt by the Law and Justice party to gain control over the courts.

The party, which swept into power promising to rid Poland of corruption, has systematically moved over the past three years to assert control over all aspects of the judicial system — from the country’s Constitutional Tribunal to the body that selects the nation’s judges.

A new law targeting the Supreme Court, set to take effect on Tuesday, could lead to the forced resignation of nearly 40 percent of the current judges, including the court’s president. Any judge who wants to stay could do so only if the president agreed.

There will also be a new “extraordinary appeal” chamber within the Supreme Court, with the authority to reopen cases from the previous 20 years on request from the prosecutor general.

For those concerned about the state of the rule of law, the wrangling over the Holocaust law offers a window into how politicized the judicial system has already become. The law applies to statements made within Poland and beyond its borders.

When the law passed, Polish leaders said their goal was to ensure a full understanding of the tragic history of Poland during the war, when some three million ethnic Poles were killed along with three million Jews living in Poland — nearly half of all the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Many Polish citizens have long objected to the use of the phrase “Polish death camps” to refer to the concentration camps installed and controlled by Nazi Germany. Poland never installed a collaborationist government: It ceased to exist as a nation after was invaded at the outset of the war and carved up by Germany and the Soviet Union.

As time passes, there is a legitimate fear in Poland that because many of the killing grounds located in Poland still remain the most powerful symbols of the horror of the Holocaust, historical memory will blur Poland’s complicated past.

The law, however, went further than trying to prevent the use of the phrase “Polish death camps.” It sought to criminalize any accusation that Polish nation was complicit in the carnage and was written in such a broad way that scholars, journalists and historians worried that it could be abused to stifle any discussion of the roles played by individual Poles.

As the bill was being debated, critics called it a violation of the country’s Constitution; normally, it would have been sent it to the Constitutional Tribunal for review.

At first, that did not happen. Mr. Duda signed the law in February and then sent it to the court for review, delaying implementation.

On Tuesday, the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists submitted an opinion to the Constitution Tribunal, saying that the imposition of “criminal restrictions on freedom of expression not only violates constitutional and international law’s standards but also harms Poland itself and its relations with the Jewish people.”

After the law was passed and the backlash grew, Zbigniew Ziobro, the minister of justice and Poland’s chief prosecutor, called the part of the law that targeted people outside Poland unconstitutional. However, it was Mr. Ziobro’s own ministry that had drafted the law, and he personally had voted for it as a member of Parliament.

After months of defending the measure and calling attacks on Poland unfair, the governing party decided that the fastest course of action was to introduce an amendment that would scrap its most controversial elements. The party acknowledged that the law had done more to harm Poland’s reputation than enhance it.

Opposition lawmakers were incredulous at the position Poland was in. Stefan Niesiolowski, a lawmaker in the opposition party Civic Platform, called the original law “idiocy.”

And Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, of the Modern party, wondered why it had taken so long to see how much harm the law had done.

“Why so late?” she said during the debate on Wednesday. “Why did so much have to be broken?”

Jews Want to Drown Ukraine in Blood, Ukraine's Military Prosecutor Says Amid Wave of Racist and Anti-Semitic Attacks By Cristina Maza Newsweek, June 27, 2018 http://www.newsweek.com/jews-want-drown-ukraine-blood-ukraines-military-prosecutor-says-amid-wave-997357

In an extensive interview with the Ukrainian news outlet Insider, Anatoliy Matios, Ukraine’s chief military prosecutor, espoused anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in which he implied that Jews want to drown ethnic Slavs in blood.

Referring to Alexander Parvus, a Belarussian-born Marxist theoretician who was active in Germany’s Social Democratic Party in the late 19th century, and who also happened to be Jewish, Matios claimed that Jews can be found financing all great conflicts.

“In each war, there is always a Parvus, who brought Lenin money for a revolution which flooded Slavs with blood for decades. Parvus was also Jewish. In this case, they want to do the same to Ukraine,” Matios told the Insider.

The interview touched on a wide variety of topics, including politics in Ukraine and an ongoing investigation into the alleged plot to assassinate Russian journalist Arkady Babchenko, who recently staged his own death with the assistance of Ukraine’s security forces. But it was also a sharp reminder of the anti-Semitism and racism that persist in Ukraine’s public discourse.

According a report published annually by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine doubled in 2017. The report was criticized by some members of Ukraine’s Jewish community, who claimed that the research methods used to draft the list were not sufficiently rigorous. Some critics also said that the incidents were exaggerated by people linked to Russia, in order to promote the Kremlin-backed narrative that the Ukrainian government in Kiev was not only nationalist, but above all racist and fascist.

Nevertheless, a recent report published by the think tank Freedom House found that far-right extremists are becoming more active in the country. Last month, a Holocaust memorial and a famous rabbi's tomb were attacked and supporters of far-right groups marched across the country spraypainting swastikas and other Nazi symbols.

The comments by Matios come at a time when Ukraine is also seeing a wave of violence against the country’s Roma minority. A vicious attack on June 23 left one Roma man dead. The attack was reportedly the sixth attack on a Roma settlement in Ukraine over the past two months. Police arrested several suspects who are believed to have links to far-right groups. Experts say it is important that Ukraine’s officials take an active role in combating racism and anti-Semitism.

“In general, the Ukrainian government acts to defend minorities from physical attack. Yet there is also considerable ignorance and racism among some in society and in the state,” Adrian Karatnycky, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who focuses on Ukraine and Eastern Europe, told Newsweek. “The proliferation of vigilantism which extends well beyond the far right is a problem that needs to be tackled with resolve. Only Ukraine's democratically accountable state institutions can engage in enforcing the law. And violations must be firmly punished.”

Matios has been Ukraine's chief military prosecutor since 2014, when Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine began an armed conflict in the country. Since taking up that role, he has called for all Ukranians to be armed for self protection and called attention to the high rate of suicide among Ukrainian service members fighting separatists in the country's Donbas region.

Capturing a historic journey: Documentary film 'From Slavery to Freedom' reveals the many obstacles Sharanksy and other notable refuseniks overcame in order to escape the clutches of the Soviet Union. By Noa Amouyal Post, June 26, 2018 https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Capturing-a-historic-journey-560900

The space is cramped and the walls are drab. The wooden slabs that are only a few feet long are makeshift mattresses.

Those were the conditions that Natan Sharansky and other refuseniks endured while they served time in a Soviet prison.

Their crime? Wanting what Jews have yearned for thousands of years – to live in the Jewish homeland, Israel.

“I’m glad that I visited the prison and thought it was good to make the film, because people forget,” Sharansky told the day after a film documentary of the refusenik struggle for freedom was screened at the Knesset last week.

From Slavery to Freedom brought Sharansky back to Russia, where he describes in painstaking detail what he endured for the nine years he was held prisoner. The film is interspersed with testimonials from other refuseniks and experts like former US ambassador to the EU Stuart E. Eizenstat, who helps put into context the diplomatic tug-of-war between the US and the Soviet Union into much needed context.

“For me, it was interesting to revisit these places. I see how my children grew up with this story. It was an unbelievable time. It wasn’t difficult for me to visit it,” Sharansky explained, adding the film crew received special permission from Moscow to film in sensitive locations.

“Suddenly, you understand the depth of the struggle. When you come back as a free person and re-live the horrid weather, see the police and KGB guards, you understand what we were really facing. The Iron Curtain is not just a symbol, you see how deep and powerful it really was.”

However, in today’s era of social media where freedom of information is essentially ubiquitous, it is easy for youth of today to gloss over and dismiss the harsh realities these refuseniks experienced during the Cold War. There are, of course, some who are not even aware of the struggle that took place.

“It is worrisome that the names and the stories of the heroes of our generation are unfamiliar and unknown to today’s youth. This chapter is of crucial importance to the history of [the people of] Israel,” Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein told the audience before the screening.

“This film is a necessity in order to bequeath this legacy; however, aside from the famous heroes there were many, many others, and it is possible that the elderly neighbor who lives in the same [building] entrance as you, in Karmiel, Nazareth Illit or Beersheba put himself on the line and risked his life 40 years ago to get to Israel. Go up to him, speak with him, learn from him,” he implored.

Likud MK Avraham Neguise, who chairs the Committee for Immigration, Absorption and Diaspora Affairs agreed, adding, “The bravery of the aliya activists in the Soviet Union – who clandestinely studied Hebrew, aspired to make aliya to Israel and depart from the modern house of slavery of our generation – serves as an exemplary model for us all. It is necessary to teach their moving and sensational story to youth and the next generation.”

Last week’s screening included ambassadors of Kazakhstan and Latvia, representatives of the US Embassy, aliya activists and members of the Naale pro- gram of The Israel Goldstein Youth Village of Hanoar Hatzioni in Jerusalem.

The film was made by Channel 9 and made possible by generous donations from Genesis Philanthropy Group, Gazin Family Fund, Mike and Sophie Segal, President Ronald S. Lauder, George Klein and Aaron Frenkel.

”Looking back at the history of this struggle today, we realize how important it is that this tremendous story is preserved for posterity to inspire new generations of Jews and supporters of freedom everywhere. We are confident that this film will be an important contribution toward such a goal and are proud that Genesis Philanthropy Group played a part in making it possible,” president and CEO of the Genesis Philanthropy Group Ilia Salita said after the screening.

And although the film depicts the harrowing intimidation, harassment and brutality the activists suffered at the hand of the KGB, the real emotional element of the film comes from video footage depicting Sharansky’s wife, Avital.

Avital, who typically shied away from public speaking, became a reluctant activist on her husband’s behalf and succeeded in creating an entire movement of support of people who marched en masse for her husband’s release.

Sharansky, though, is not particularly perturbed that his name may not resonate with the younger generation.

“It almost irritates me when people say, ‘They don’t know your name.’ It’s not about the name – that is playing into a cult of personality. We have different challenges to worry about, most importantly, making sure young Jews are proud of their identity.

“We are very lucky. Our generation struggled. We triumphed over the cruelest regimes in the world. It’s not about me,” he said modestly.

It may not be about him, but as the face of a movement of thousands of Jews who waited in despair to enter the Holy Land, his story certainly encapsulates the faith’s birthright to settle in the one place they can truly call home: Israel.

This article was written in cooperation with the Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Latvia school language reform irks Russian minority, backed by Jewish community Riga's chief rabbi throws support behind plan mandating minority schools to teach in Latvian By Imants Liepinsh and Anna Maria Jakubek Agence France Presse, June 24, 2018 https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-latvia-school-language-reform-infuriates-russian-minority/

RIGA, Latvia — Riga’s plans to impose Latvian as the main teaching language in minority schools has created tension among some of its ethnic Russian population, resurrecting a long-running dispute with Latvia’s former Soviet masters.

In the Baltic nation where around a quarter of the population are ethnic Russians, only about 40 percent of classes in minority schools are taught in Latvian.

In March, however, parliament voted through legislation which will raise that to 80 percent, meaning from September 2019, all core subjects will be taught in Latvian.

Latvia says the aim is to improve end-of-high-school exam results — which are crucial for obtaining state- sponsored college tuition. Such exams are only in Latvian, a Baltic language with little similarity to Russian, which is Slavic.

But the move has been denounced as “discriminatory” by some of Latvia’s Russian minority who have staged months of protests — with Russia’s OSCE envoy and even President weighing in, citing “human rights” violations.

Although such a reform has been on the table for years, it only began to gain traction in 2014 after national ombudsman Juris Jansons said having separate schools looked “like ethnic segregation.”

While students from minority schools do figure among the top scorers, all but one of the worst-performing schools are Russian or bilingual, education ministry figures show.

“Every child should have an equal opportunity to get the same education,” centrist lawmaker and reform advocate Raivis Dzintars told AFP.

‘Forced assimilation’

Within Latvia, ethnic Russians constitute by far the largest minority, accounting for 24 percent of the population of 1.9 million people. Latvians make up 62 percent, while the rest mainly include individuals of Belarussian, Polish or Ukrainian descent.

During the Soviet occupation which began during World War II, tens of thousands of Latvians were deported and equal numbers of ethnic Russians were shipped into the Baltic state by Moscow, altering the ethno- linguistic profile of the country.

At that time, there was a Russification policy in place which saw the establishment of a separate Russian- language school system, with 94 Russian-only and 57 bilingual schools still in existence.

The move to shift the language balance has infuriated Russian officials with OSCE envoy Alexander Lukashevich denouncing it as a “discriminatory policy with the goal of forced assimilation of the Russian- speaking population.”

And Putin said earlier this month he had raised the matter with the European Union.

“I hope they are ashamed because they pay special attention to human rights violations outside the European Union, but they themselves violate human rights within the EU,” he remarked.

A Russian newspaper said prominent lawyer Ilya Shablinsky had plans to visit Latvia this month to “inspect the conflict over minority school reforms” — drawing a blunt response from Riga.

“Russian officials can make inspections in their own country but such activity will not be tolerated in Latvia,” Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics told the LETA news agency.

Shablinsky later told AFP he had been “banned from entering Latvia for six months.”

‘A Russian education’

There have also been monthly protests over the change, mostly called by pro-Kremlin politicians from Latvia’s Russian Union party who are keen to use the issue as much as possible ahead of a general election in October.

“I have two sons and grandchildren, and I want them to get a Russian education, not a Latvian one,” 54-year old Valery Andreyev told AFP at one rally in Riga where protesters waved signs reading: “Russians do not surrender.”

But the numbers have not been huge.

So far, the demonstrators have numbered in the hundreds — far fewer than the huge crowds who turned out to protest in 2004 when Latvia passed another reform seeking to curb Russian in education as it formally joined the EU.

Back then, such protests drew up to 15,000 demonstrators, among them school children, teachers and parents.

Today’s demonstrations, however, have drawn most support from elderly ethnic Russians sporting ribbons associated with Putinist organizations.

A minority concern?

Despite the outcry, most ethnic Russians, including parent and teacher organizations, have not publicly opposed the reform.

Over the years, an increasing number of Russian-speaking families have sent their children to Latvian schools and today’s generation uses the official language more and more.

In one village near the Russian border, the parents even voted in 2011 to make their bilingual school Latvian- only.

And a year later, voters overwhelmingly rejected a plan to make Russian the second official language in Latvia in a referendum highlighting ethnic divisions in the former-Soviet republic.

None of the other — considerably smaller — minorities have expressed concern over the new legislation, which is actively supported by Jewish groups and the Congress of Ukrainians in Latvia.

Speaking to AFP, Riga’s Chief Rabbi Menachem Barkahan said the language reform would definitely help students from minority groups when it came to higher education.

“When I visit Israel, I see the following problem: with Arabic granted status as the second official language in Israel, many Palestinian kids become disadvantaged when they are not required to be fluent in Hebrew and later have problems attending college,” he said.

“Latvia’s education reforms will help prevent a similar situation.”

Bulgaria will open honorary consulate in Jerusalem JTA, June 24, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/06/24/news-opinion/bulgaria-will-open-honorary-consulate-jerusalem

JERUSALEM — Bulgaria will open an honorary consulate in Jerusalem.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday at the weekly Cabinet meeting that he spoke the previous night with his counterpart, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov, who informed him of the decision.

Borisov visited Israel earlier this month, meeting with Netanyahu and Israeli President Reuven Rivlin in Jerusalem.

Netanyahu reported that Borisov told him that the honorary consulate will not deal only with Bulgarian affairs in Jerusalem, but with Bulgarian affairs in the entire State of Israel.

“I told him that this was a welcome step and that I hoped it will quickly lead to the opening of the official and complete Bulgarian Embassy in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said.

The United States opened its embassy in Jerusalem on May 14, and Guatemala opened its new embassy in the city two days later. The Czech Republic reopened its honorary consulate in Jerusalem at the end of last month.

Romania’s laws on anti-Semitism ‘meaningless’ without enforcement, activist warns By Cnaan Liphshiz JTA, June 25, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/06/25/news-opinion/romanias-laws-anti-semitism-meaningless-without-enforcement- activist-warns

Romania’s parliament passed a law to help combat anti-Semitism, according to its author, but a leading activist in the field said more enforcement, not legislation, was needed.

The measure passed last week bans disseminating material that falls under the government’s definition of anti- Semitism and creating anti-Semitic organizations. It mandates prison terms of three months to 10 years.

“Clear, direct and firm measures need to be enforced,” said Silviu Vexler, a Romanian Jewish lawmaker who initiated the law. “This is the main purpose of this law.”

But Maximillian Marco Katz, founding director of MCA Romania-The Center for Monitoring and Combating Anti- Semitism, told JTA that “Romania does not lack laws against anti-Semitism.” Romania’s criminal code prescribes up to three years for incitement to hate or discrimination against any ethnic group. The Balkan nation also had two laws banning Holocaust denial, one referring to the genocide in general and a more recent one, passed in 2015, dealing specifically with the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews in areas controlled by Romania during World War II.

Romania had “adequate laws against anti-Semitic hate speech and actions,” Katz said last week, before the law passed, during a conference in Poland held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “The problem is that these laws are not implemented, and that’s not a problem that’s solved by making new laws, which without action are meaningless.”

Katz cited several recent cases, including the failure by authorities to prosecute Gheorghe Funar, a former mayor of the city of Cluj who last year said in a filmed speech that the “Romanians are victims of Jews within” who perpetrated “the greatest Holocaust in human history.” A police officer told Katz he “did not see who was damaged” by the former mayor’s speech and that he therefore is dropping the investigation.

“The laws that are in place and are not implemented are almost unknown by the police, prosecutors and judges,” Katz said.

Putin-Trump Summit Set For Helsinki On July 16 RFE/RL, June 28, 2018 https://www.rferl.org/a/white-house-kremlin-jointly-announce-putin-trump-summit/29324935.html

The first summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin will be held on July 16 in Helsinki, the Kremlin and the White House have said in synchronized announcements.

"The two leaders will discuss relations between the United States and Russia and a range of national security issues," the White House said in a statement on June 28.

Putin and Trump will discuss U.S.-Russia relations as well as international issues, the Kremlin said, according to Russian news agencies.

Ahead of the announcement, Trump repeated Russian denials of interference in the 2016 U.S. election, tweeting, "Russia continues to say they had nothing to do with Meddling in our Election!"

Trump had told reporters in Washington on June 27 that the meeting likely would take place after a July 11-12 summit of NATO leaders he is due to attend.

He said the two would discuss Ukraine, Syria, and "many other subjects" at their first-ever such meeting.

Trump’s brief comments to reporters on June 27 in Washington came after U.S. national security adviser John Bolton told a news conference in Moscow that the White House and Kremlin would make simultaneous announcements on June 28 to specify when and where the meeting would be held.

"I've said it from Day 1, getting along with Russia and with China and with everybody is a very good thing," Trump said. "It's good for the world, it's good for us, it's good for everybody."

Earlier on July 27, Bolton told a news conference after holding talks with Putin that Trump will raise a "full range of issues" with Russia's leader, including alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, something Moscow has denied, and the conflicts in Ukraine and Syria.

Bolton told the news conference that "both President Trump and President Putin feel that it is important for these two leaders of these critically important countries to get together and discuss their mutual problems and areas of cooperation."

"It is something that both feel will contribute to the U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship and civility around the world," he added.

Before meeting with Bolton, Putin said he regretted that ties between the former Cold War foes were "not in the best shape" and suggested their dire state was due in large part to what he called "the internal political struggle" in the United States -- indicating he does not blame Trump for the disagreements.

Speaking to reporters in Brussels, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg on June 28 welcomed the upcoming summit between Putin and Trump, saying, "It's absolutely, totally in line with NATO policies to talk to Russia, to meet with Russian leaders."

"For me, dialogue is not a sign of weakness. Dialogue is a sign of strength," he added.

However, the planned meeting is likely to worry some U.S. allies and draw criticism from Trump's opponents at home, including most vehemently from many Democrats, who have accused Trump of having colluded with Moscow to interfere in the 2016 presidential election to support his candidacy against that of rival Hillary Clinton.

"I don't think it's anything unusual for President Trump and President Putin to meet. If you just look meetings in the past year, the leaders of the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Greece, Finland, Austria, Belgium, and Italy have all had bilateral meetings with President Putin," Bolton said.

"President Trump felt, and I think President Putin agreed, now is the time for the two of them to get together," Bolton said, adding that he believed the accusations of election meddling will be a "subject of conversation" between Trump and Putin.

In a sometimes contentious news conference, a Western reporter reminded Bolton that before joining the U.S. administration, he had called Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election a "true act of war."

Bolton did not answer directly, saying only that he would not address what he had written in the past. "Right now, I'm an adviser to President Trump," he said, and it is his agenda that is important.

On Ukraine, when asked whether Trump would recognize Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region, Bolton responded by saying, "That is not the position of the United States."

He added that the United States believed that sanctions placed on Russia for its seizure of Crimea and its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine should stay in place.

He did say, however, that it was possible Trump and Putin would discuss the U.S. president's remarks that Russia should be allowed back in to the Group of Seven (G7) leading industrial countries, as he suggested last month in Canada.

Russia was expelled from the grouping, known then as the G8, for its interference in Ukraine and its annexation of Crimea.

With reporting by AFP, AP, and Reuters

Controversial priest is behind Polish museum highlighting Christian rescuers of Jews JTA, June 25, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/06/25/news-opinion/new-museum-poland-exhibit-40000-accounts-poles-saved-jews- holocaust

WARSAW, Poland – A new museum in Poland will exhibit over 40,000 accounts of Polish Christians who saved Jews during the Holocaust.

The Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage will donate $22 million to the Saint John Paul II Memory and Identity Museum. Its goal is to present the over 1,000-year history of Christian Poland with particular emphasis on the teachings of Pope John Paul II and its impact on the fate of Poland, Europe and the world.

The museum, located in Toruń, will be run by the Lux Veritatis Foundation associated with the controversial Roman Catholic priest Tadeusz Rydzyk, who for years ran a radio station that espoused anti-Semitic views.

Part of the exposition will feature the accounts by witnesses on the rescue of Jews by Poles during World War II. Rydzyk and the Lux Veritatis Foundation have collected the accounts since 1995.

“The museum will fill an important gap in our museum offerings, which still does not sufficiently cover both the axiology of John Paul II and the issues of Polish-Jewish relations during World War II,” Minister of Culture Piotr Gliński said in a statement.

A museum director has not been named.

Rydzyk, who runs the Catholic radio station Maryja, is accused of promoting anti-Semitism. 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 said that Radio Maryja has been “openly inciting anti-Semitism for several years.”

In recent years, Rydzyk has tried to change his image. In 2016, he met with Israeli Ambassador to Poland Anna Azari. He also collaborated with Jonny Daniels, founder of the From the Depths foundation dedicated to commemorating Jewish heritage.

Ukraine: Dozens of headstones rescued from under Lviv street; had been used as paving Jewish Heritage Europe, June 26, 2018 http://jewish-heritage-europe.eu/2018/06/26/lviv-matzevot/

Volunteers from the L'viv Volunteer Center (LVC) of the Hesed Arieh All-Ukrainian Jewish Charitable Foundation have been working this week to remove dozens of Jewish headstones that were found to be paving Barvinok street in downtown L'viv.

"The whole street is made from matzevot," Sasha Nazar, the director of the LVC told JHE. He was notified about the discovery last week, after city workers began opening the street to carry out repairs.

Nazar estimated that there could be 100 stones there, and maybe more.

"This is the biggest discovery of matzevot [used as paving] I can remember," he said.

Nazar said that matzevot had been removed from the street in the past -- in 2010, when about a dozen stones were removed, and in 2017 when several others were rescued. But there has been nothing previous to match the scale of this most recent discovery.

The stones will be transported to the Yanovskoye Jewish cemetery, to join the matzevot rescued previously.

Photos show intact headstones as well as fragments lying horizonatally and neatly arranged, one next to the other; they had been hidden beneath the surface asphalt. Some are face up and some face down. Most appear to date from the first part of the 20th century.

JHE friend Marla Raucher Osborn, who is among the volunteers working to remove the stones and who has allowed us to post some of her photos, says, "This stretch of vul Barvinok appears to be completely paved with Jewish headstones. 75 years ago, there were Gestapo residences on this street and Jewish labor was requisitioned to pave the roads with headstones stolen from the Jewish cemeteries."

Jewish headstones are believed to have been used also in Soviet times to pave other streets and squares in L'viv, as well as other construction -- as they were in other places, such as in , Lithuania, where the vast Uzupis Jewish cemetery was razed in the 1960s and and used as a quarry. Efforts have been going on in Vilnius to recover these abused matzevot.

Nazar said that the LVC had requested help from the city to remove and transport the heavy stones. The city provided two workman, he said, but the only worked for a couple of hours.

Ukraine's Channel 5 Tv station ran a brief report about the action. ; Click here to see more of Marla Raucher Osborn's photos (on Facebook) ; Click here to see photos of the operation on the Lviv Volunteer Center Facebook page ; earlier posts about rescuing Jewish headstones used for construction and paving

Passive Anti-Semitism Widespread in Russia But Active Kind Almost Nonexistent, Levinson Says By Paul Goble Windows on Eurasia, June 25, 2018 https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2018/06/passive-anti-semitism-widespread-in.html

Staunton, June 25 – Aleksey Levinson, a Levada Center sociologist who had been measuring anti-Semitism in Russia since the late 1980s, says that passive anti-Semitism is almost universal in Russia but the active kind is almost unheard of and is unlikely to emerge unless prominent leaders start to promote it.

In the new Neprikosnovenny Zapas, he points out that many have been surprised by and some have even challenged the findings of sociologists and pollsters like himself that there is very little anti-Semitism in Russia compared to what many, given the country’s history, might expect.

The main reasons for that, Levinson suggests, are that active anti-Semitism, support for actions intended to exclude or destroy the Jewish ethos, “has achieved these goals” – there are few Jews left and most are assimilated -- and state anti-Semitism “as a policy of excluding Jewry not as an ethnic but as a social category has also achieved its goals.”

At the same time, however, there exists and is reproduced a residual but passive anti-Semitism, a set of attitudes that is not directed against the existing Jewish population” and won’t be until and unless some senior government official mobilizes people on that basis at some point in the future.

Many people in Russia and abroad are surprised by the findings of sociologists like himself, Levinson says, and in some cases actively dispute them. And consequently, he says, he wants to “make one more attempt to offer an explanation” of the findings and of why they are in fact accurate.

To do so, he says, it is necessary to discuss the history of the question. “Jews in the Russian Empire were one of the peoples/ethnoses which had the majority of the attributes of such – their own language and alphabet, faith, way of life and compact settlement and a specific niche in the economy.

They had various kinds of relations with other ethoses ranging “from friendship and cooperation to hostility and striving to their exclusion of elimination as an ethnos and from that social space which other ethnoses supposed were theirs, the sociologist continues.

“The pogroms of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries led to the mass emigration of Jews from the Russian empire; pogroms during the civil war led to their mass physical extermination … [and] the Nazi ‘final solution of “the Jewish question” on the occupied territories of the USSR completed this solution.” The Jews left were no longer an ethnos.

“In addition to these factors, there were others which stimulated the rapid assimilation of part of the Jews to the dominant Russian culture with a corresponding rejection of Jewish culture. By the end of the 1940s, it was possible to speak about the specific non-ethnic but social category who were called and often called themselves or considered themselves Jews, but there was no basis, in my opinion,” Levinson says, to speak about the existence of a Jewish ethnos on the territory of the USSR.”

There is also a history of state anti-Semitism. The Russian Empire excluded Jews from most walks of life and actively persecuted them, supporting the pogroms. “In the Soviet Union at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, this line was continued but in the lightly masked forms of the struggle with ‘rootless cosmopolitanism.’”

Until the end of the USSR, Levinson says, there were unpublished but very real limitations on the admission of Jews to higher educational institutions, their ability to work in state institutions and the ruling party and even their participation in public life. That led to further emigration when that became possible.

But “with the formation of Russia as a new state,” he says, “these practices as government policies ceased to exist: they could be initiated by one or another set of officials in the spheres of their authority but they remained in this sense private manifestations” rather than government policy.

As a result of all this, “the number of those who consider themselves Jews and register as such in censuses and polls has been reduced to 150,000 … Assimilationist processes continue; however along with them in the Jewish milieu have appeared successful tendencies of restoring communal and religious ‘Jewish life.’”

Research shows, he continues, “that under Russian conditions, the positions of any boss and above all the highest, on ‘the Jewish question’ have decisive importance for anti-Semitic manifestations in the masses.” If the higher ups give the signal, then passive anti-Semitism will become active in the form of “’administrative’ anti-Semitism.”

“That anti-Semitism as in the past has as its goal the driving our and exclusion of Jews from this or that social space (from ‘our’ house, enterprise, city or state),” Levinson says. The existence of that possibility is one of the reasons many resist accepting poll findings showing that anti-Semitism as a body of attitudes is relatively passive in Russia today.

Those attitudes, he continues, include “negative and long established ethnic stereotypes” and beliefs in “’a world Jewish government” and a conspiracy of Jews behind the highest offices in Russia and other countries. But such ideas, while “very important, lack at present an aggressive potential.”

At the same time, Levinson says, studies show that Russians view Jews as having qualities that they themselves lack and that they believe “Jews live ‘here’ only because things are good for them. If they become bad, then they will leave,” a notion that reflects the idea that Jews are not that patriotic. And of course, there are the ubiquitous Jewish jokes.

Many observers suggest that there are too few Jews in Russia now to spark anti-Semitism, Levinson says, but that argument isn’t convincing. There are many countries which display “anti-Semitism without Jews.” And in Russia, most people say that they know at least some Jews.

And it is no explanation for the low level of active anti-Semitism to say that anti-North Caucasus attitudes have displaced the space anti-Semitism occupies traditionally, Levinson continues. But hatred of the North Caucasians and Central Asians “cannot explain he lack of anti-Semitic manifestations” in Russia.”

According to the sociologist, there are two reasons for the low levels of active anti-Semitism in Russia. On the one hand, most Jews have so completely assimilated to Russian culture that many Russians have trouble seeing them as distinct as anti-Semitic attitudes typically require.

And on the other, Levinson argues, “at present, not one of the influential elite groups is making use of anti- Semitism as a political resource. The only ones using it now,” he continues, are “marginal and local groups” who do not set the weather for the country as a whole.

World’s northernmost JCC opens in Russian Arctic city By Cnaan Liphshiz JTA, June 26, 2018 https://www.jta.org/2018/06/26/news-opinion/worlds-northernmost-jcc-opens-russian-arctic-city

The Russian city of Arkhangelsk saw the opening of a synagogue inside what may be the world’s northernmost Jewish community center.

The three-story building that was opened Monday took four years to construct and cost nearly $3 million raised from private donors, Anatoly Obermeister, the chairman of the local Jewish community, told the Regnum news agency. Arkhangelsk, where currently the sun shines 21 hours a day, is located approximately 750 miles north of Moscow at a latitude that is more than three degrees to the north of Anchorage, Alaska.

Separately, construction of what will be Russia’s westernmost synagogue continues in Kaliningrad, an enclave sandwiched between Lithuania and Poland. It is a replica of the Konigsberg Synagogue, a domed mammoth building that was one of Europe’s most impressive Jewish monuments before it was destroyed in the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. It will reopen on the pogrom’s 80th anniversary in November.

In February, a 23-ton dome was installed on the Konigsberg Synagogue. The following month, workers installed the first of eight stained-glass windows at the synagogue. They are themed after the work of the late Cubist artist Marc Chagall, a Jew who grew up in what is now Belarus. The Konigsberg Synagogue cost several million dollars to build. The philanthropist Vladimir Katsman alone donated $4 million for the project. Both projects are headed by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, the local branch of the Chabad- Lubavitch movement. Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar attended the cornerstone laying ceremony of both.

In Arkhangelsk, the new synagogue is part of the North Star Jewish Cultural Center. The modernist glass and metal building has a main entrance that features a giant Star of David. The building has a concert hall that seats 500. The local Jewish community is made up of about 200 members, according to Regnum. The report said that North Star may be the world’s northernmost JCC — a title that previously was believed to belong to the Jewish museum and community facilities of Trondheim in Norway, located a full degree south of Arkhangelsk’s latitude.

Arkhangelsk, which is a major fishing and logging center, was home to two synagogues before the Communist revolution, but they closed down in the 1920s. The first known Jewish community there was set up by former cantonists — victims of a policy enforced from 1827 to 1856 that forced Jewish communities to give up 10 children older than 12 for every 1,000 Jews.

Last year, authorities in the Siberian city of Tomsk handed over to the local Jewish community a unique wooden synagogue built by former cantonists. The community, led by a Chabad rabbi, is currently preparing to open a large community center next to its main synagogue.

Jewish Ukraine after Maidan By Josh Tapper eJewish Philanthropy, June 27, 2018 https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/jewish-ukraine-after-maidan/

Aaron Kaganovskiy had lived in the coastal city of Mariupol in southeastern Ukraine for nearly six peaceful years before the fighting began. One day in the early months of 2014, he noticed that the Ukrainian flags once flying above the city had been burned, replaced by those of Russia. Constant mortar shelling clapping in the distance soon provided an unsettling soundtrack to his life as a Chabad emissary and teacher in the local Jewish school; once, during a Rosh Hashanah service in 2014, he counted 56 rockets fired on the city.

Sparked by a surge of pro-Western protests on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti in late 2013, violence quickly migrated eastward by the following spring, engulfing Ukraine’s eastern regions in a deadly slow-burning conflict between Ukrainian and pro-Russian separatists that simmers to this day. When armed separatists entered Mariupol’s synagogue after a prayer service and asked if the community needed security, Kaganovskiy and his fellow worshippers politely declined, explaining to the men with guns that they could take care of themselves.

“When the situation started, we didn’t want to leave,” Kaganovskiy, 32, said of his wife, Chaya, and three children, all under ten years old. His confidence dissipated, however, even as the Ukrainian army fought back separatist forces and seized control of Mariupol in June 2014. Kaganovskiy recalled the day the Ukrainian army decisively pushed the separatists out of the city. As a group of rebel fighters retreated in the direction of his house, bullets flew underneath one of his windows. Kaganovskiy’s children hid inside. When they asked “Daddy, are we going to die today?” he knew it was time to leave.

I met Kaganovskiy on a cold and wet afternoon last November, at a housing settlement for Jewish refugees from eastern Ukraine on the outskirts of Kiev. The previous night, he told me, his car had flipped in a near- collision with an oncoming vehicle and he was suffering the numbing effects of a likely concussion. Some 150 people live in the fledgling settlement, which was founded two years ago by Moshe Reuven Azman, the Chabad rabbi of Kiev’s Brodsky synagogue, to absorb the stream of Jewish refugees fleeing from Ukraine’s east. The settlement was named Anatevka, a nod to both the fictional village of Sholom Aleichem’s stories and the actual village, Hnatevka, in which it is located.

Though the Ukrainian army has secured Mariupol, implementing relative stability in the city, Kaganovskiy insists that he “never wants to go back.” At Anatevka, Azman has raised enough money to build a wooden synagogue, an elementary school, a turf soccer pitch and a cluster of concrete apartment blocks amid swaths of golden cabbage fields. Kaganovskiy intends to keep his family there, where life, he said, is finally calm.

Kaganovskiy is among the 1.8 million people displaced by the conflict, according to United Nations figures. To say that the Maidan protests, the ensuing revolution, and the now-frozen conflict in the Donbass have upended Jewish communal life in the country is to state the obvious. Beyond internal migration, which has seen thousands of Jews resettle from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in cities like Kiev, Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk), Kharkov, and Odessa, thousands of others have left the country altogether. Nearly 7,500 Ukrainians made in 2015, according to the Jewish Agency, a 230 percent jump from 2013. While the number dropped to around 5,500 in 2016, representatives from the Jewish Agency told The Jerusalem Post last year that they anticipate the annual total to increase once again, fueled in part by a country-wide economic crisis that includes rising inflation and meager pensions. The total number of Jews in Ukraine is difficult to assess; the estimates roughly 360,00

Compounding the problems of a sputtering economy and demographic precariousness is what Eduard Dolinsky, Executive Director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee (UJC), a Kiev-based lobby group, calls a “worsening moral condition.” In the wake of the Maidan protests, which took off five years ago in response to the pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych’s reluctance to re-orient Ukraine westward, both politically and economically, the country has witnessed a program of state-led de-communization, as well as an upsurge in Ukrainian nationalism. These forces have fostered a discourse within some segments of Ukrainian society that promotes anti-Semitism and, most alarmingly to Jewish activists like Dolinsky, the historical whitewashing of Ukrainian complicity during the Holocaust.

Through the government-funded Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, the country has attempted to revise the anti-Semitic image of the World War II-era Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military faction, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). In 2015, during the height of fighting against Russian-backed separatists, Ukraine passed a law, widely condemned among western scholars, outlawing public disrespect toward the OUN and UPA, both of which the Institute of National Memory trumpeted as supporters of Ukrainian nationalism nonpareil.

In this climate of historical revisionism, incidents of anti-Semitism have taken on an even darker hue, Dolinsky told me when we met recently in a Kiev café. He pointed to a series of vandalizations in 2015 and 2016 at the Holocaust memorial at Kiev’s Babi Yar ravine, where more than 30,000 Jews were murdered by Nazis in 1941, and, this past October, to a riff over the unveiling of a statue depicting Symon Petliura – a nationalist leader blamed for inciting pogroms in the 1920s that killed some 50,000 Jews – in the western city of Vinnytsia. Opposition to the statue, which was erected a few meters from a synagogue, prompted the head of the local branch of the nationalist Svoboda party, Volodymyr Bazelyuk, to threaten on Facebook that Jews should “get accustomed to our rules,” leave the country, or be punished.

Dolinsky was born in Lutsk, in northwestern Ukraine, and founded the UJC ten years ago with the Ukrainian- Jewish businessman Oleksandr Feldman, who is now a member of Parliament. Since Maidan, Dolinsky has taken a rather pessimistic tone in the international press on the future of Ukrainian Jewry. What disturbs him most about high-profile anti-Semitic incidents, such as the defacements at Babi Yar, is apathy at the state and local levels. “Civil society doesn’t react at all,” he told me. “But most troubling is that law enforcement and general prosecutors do not reply and do not react to anti-Semitic acts.”

For some, the government’s laissez-faire approach to Ukrainian nationalism and its attendant anti-Semitism reinforces the notion that the problem is not, in reality, a serious one. Considering the economic challenges plaguing Ukraine since the conflict began – GDP has fallen from $180 billion to $100 billion since 2014, making the country one of the poorest in the former Soviet Union – Jews have largely dodged anti-Semitism or scapegoating on a mass scale.

“It’s very curious that there’s a lot of discontent with the pace of reforms, with the success of dealing with [economic] problems, with corruption, but happily the discourse has not devolved into ethnic slurs or stereotypes, or a heightened anti-Semitism,” said Adrian Karatnycky, co-director of the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, a Canadian nonprofit that promotes Ukrainian-Jewish cooperation. “Between the influence of the occupation of eastern Ukraine, the taking of Crimea by Russia, and the 10,000 dead as a result of Russia’s invasion, Ukraine has not seen a big rise of xenophobic sentiment. Yes, there are occasional outbursts of anti- Semitism by thuggish, not particularly astute parliamentarians or demagogues, but they’re few and far between.”

Nearly everyone I spoke to over a three-day period in Ukraine – Dolinsky included – emphasized strong relations between Ukrainians and Jews. After all, as locals often point out, Volodymyr Groysman, a Jewish politician from Vinnytsia, was appointed prime minister in 2016. As the general population deals with substantial economic problems, the intrusion of anti-Semitism into everyday discourse has taken a backseat to other concerns caused by the conflict. (The Israeli government disagreed in its annual report on global anti- Semitism, which found more attacks on Jews in Ukraine last year than all other post-Soviet states combined.)

When I met Svetlana Bukova, a 36-year-old single mother who moved from Luhansk to Kiev in June 2014, she was picking up her two-year-old daughter, Diana, from a subsidized daycare program at Halom, the capital’s new Jewish community center. Though Bukova’s father, who was also forced from Luhansk, sometimes grumbles about the prominence of far-right parties that entered Ukrainian politics in the wake of the Maidan protests, she said the issue of nationalism barely registers for her. Bukova knows it’s in the air, but “I don’t feel anti-Semitism at all, and I’m not afraid at all,” she said. Instead, she focuses her attention on more mundane concerns, like feeding and buying diapers for her daughter and finding a solution to the apartment she abandoned in Luhansk but won’t visit as long as fighting persists in the east.

Of course, Jews, like most Ukrainians, have been ravaged by the economy, which faces a $5 billion pension deficit and an average monthly salary that hovers around $250. Refugees, especially, have struggled to find new work and housing in central and western Ukraine amid widespread mistrust and suspicion of IDPs from the largely Russian-speaking eastern regions. Another factor, said Valeriya Kvasha, a 42-year-old mother of two teenagers, who left Luhansk for Kiev in the summer of 2015 after a bomb hit her apartment building, is the sense of uncertainty and dislocation. “The problem in your mind is that you still expect that you will return,” Kvasha said of Luhansk. “Your apartment and other real estate is still there, so are friends, work and other such things.”

At the same time, Kvasha, the head of Jewish Family Services in Kiev, now feels at home in the capital. In the years since leaving Luhansk and Mariupol, Kvasha and Kaganovskiy, respectively, no longer consider themselves refugees, a positive step toward rebuilding. In a way, they represent the sense of stability, even normalcy, Jewish life has attained five years after the start of the Maidan protests upended Ukrainian society. Halom, the shining 17,000-square-foot community center that opened in 2016 with funding from the Joint Distribution Committee, also points to this parallel narrative. It’s a narrative publicized less frequently in the West – which has grown accustomed to a doom-and-gloom portrait featuring trenchant anti-Semitism and the refugee situation – but it is perhaps more indicative of the present condition of Ukrainian Jewry.

In Kiev, there is a vigorous synagogue culture, across denominations; and in Dnipro, there is the 50,000- square-foot Menorah Center, purportedly the largest in Europe and funded by the Jewish billionaire and former governor of Dnipropetrovsk oblast, Ihor Kolomoyskyi. This past October, around 1,000 people gathered in Odessa for the annual Limmud FSU conference.

Dani Gershkovich, the JDC director in Kiev, arrived in late 2014 from Yekaterinburg, Russia, just as the conflict was reaching its peak. He said the crisis has sparked a communal awakening of sorts, most clearly in the groundswell of Jewish aid activity and voluntarism, even among IDPs like Kvasha, who were absorbed by Jewish communities elsewhere in Ukraine and now feel a sense of duty to give back. Since then, the Israeli- born Gershkovich has observed a level of intra-communal support that has kept morale among Ukrainian Jews afloat. He cited Moshe Azman’s refugee settlement, Anatevka, where residents live for free, as one prominent example. “If we are comparing the Jewish population and the general population, the situation of the Jewish population right now is much stronger,” he told me. “If you are Jewish in Ukraine, you are lucky. There is no other way to see it.”

Gershkovich also stressed that the material benefits available for needy Jews surpasses those of non-Jews, especially among the elderly. One woman I met inside Halom, Lidiya Gorelik, a 71-year-old from Kharkov, explained that without financial support from the JDC, her $40 monthly pension would not have been able to cover the new windows fitted to her apartment, as well as daily necessities, like medicine and laundry bills. In return, she founded a casual social program for others her age. “I cannot give to my children,” who live in Israel, “so I give to other people,” she said.

While older Jews rely willingly, and heavily, on patronage from communal organizations like the JDC, Gershkovich worries about a younger generation of Ukrainian Jews trying to start careers and make a living in their country’s depressed economic state. “For now, the situation is stable, but I feel that the young people, 40 and younger, really don’t like it,” he said. “Frustrations will come more from the younger generation.”

Still, some from that younger generation, like Anna Bondar, Halom’s director, remain committed to building Jewish life from within. Bondar, 30, understands that programs at the Jewish community center can seem unappealing to younger Jews, but she is determined to raise the profile of the Jewish community – through outreach and youth activities – in order to stave off emigration. Thoughts of leaving have crossed her mind, but for now, Bondar said, she works for Ukraine. “I consider Ukraine my native country, my homeland,” she said. “What’s important for me is to be helpful for the Jewish community here and that I’m part of the process of creating hope.”

The future remains uncertain, no doubt, but hardly hopeless. Despite the Jewish Agency’s prediction, Aliyah is on the decline, and an active network of Jewish institutions – from synagogues to social-service organizations to university-level Jewish Studies programs – are supporting a community that feels it can continue to exist in spite of the low-grade conflict in the Donbass. Amid the ceaseless battles over historical memory, there is also a greater reckoning with Ukraine’s dark Jewish past; in 2016, the country commemorated the 75th anniversary of Babi Yar with a series of events organized by the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. Even Dolinsky softened his tone when pressed about the future. “We have a small community now that is strong,” he said. “I sincerely believe that there is a future for Jews here and the community will revive and survive for many years. We’re going to live in Ukraine.”

Josh Tapper is a journalist and doctoral student in Jewish history at Stanford University. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Tablet, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, among other publications. This essay is from Contact, a publication of The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life.