18 October 2007
The president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC), Moshe Kantor, has canceled a trip to Kiev in protest at the Ukrainian government's silence on rising anti-Semitism. Kantor was set to visit Ukraine on Wednesday for a government ceremony honoring the late major Anatoly Shapiro, a Red Army commander during World War II who liberated the Auschwitz death camp. However, in a letter to the 41 EJC communities, Kantor wrote that “to my deepest disappointment, in the last few days things have deteriorated extremely in Ukraine with regard to anti-Semitism. After four major physical attacks against rabbis in Ukraine within the last month, we have not seen nor heard any statement from the government condemning this dangerous tendency.” Rabbis were attacked in Zhitomir, Cherkassy and Sevastopol in late September. The home of the rabbi of Uzhgorod was set ablaze two weeks ago. Kantor also noted that a recent neo-Nazi parade in Kiev was unopposed by local authorities and that the government had honored a Nazi collaborator.
