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MOSCOW —Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month let loose a fresh tirade against Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish and who had many ancestors that were killed by the Nazis.
“The Western masters,” Putin told Russian television, growing visibly angry, “put a person at the head of modern Ukraine an ethnic Jew, with Jewish roots, with Jewish origins” to cover up “the anti-human essence that is the foundation … of the modern Ukrainian state” and “the glorification of Nazism.”
Ukraine quickly condemned Putin’s words as antisemitic. A spokesman for the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry called it “another manifestation of deep-rooted antisemitism of the Russian elites,” and accused Putin of having a “chronic fixation” with Zelensky’s ethnic background.
It was not the first time since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine that the Russian leader attacked Zelensky’s Jewish heritage. In June, he told an economic forum in St. Petersburg: “I have a lot of Jewish friends. They say Zelensky is not a Jew, he is a disgrace to the Jewish people.”
Putin’s comments, which some analysts view as an effort to justify claims that Russia’s war is intended to “de-Nazify” Ukraine, are part of a wider pattern of antisemitic rhetoric by the Kremlin and its propagandists that have drawn criticism from Israel and the West.
After Putin’s comments at the St. Petersburg economic forum in June, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum accused the Russian leader of employing “antisemitic lies” and “distorting the Holocaust to justify his brutal invasion of Ukraine.”
Fears of a return of virulent state-sponsored antisemitism in Russia prompted one of Moscow’s chief rabbis, Pinchas Goldschmidt, to flee the country last year and relocate to Israel.
“My fear then, as well as my fear now, is that there is going to be more antisemitism under this new political system which has been established since the war began,” Goldshmidt said in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. “And it will be much more difficult for Jews and the Jewish community to live and thrive.”
Speaking of Russia’s “very long and difficult history of antisemitism” at various stages during the Soviet era, Goldschmidt said he worries that the country is “going back to the past.”
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Goldschmidt has publicly warned other Jews living in Russia to leave.
“It was the only choice,” Goldschmidt said in the interview, describing his decision to flee after the invasion. “I woke up in a different country and with a changed political system that was totally isolated from the rest of the Western world. Under this change of circumstances, I highly doubted that there is a future for Jews in Russia.” Since his departure, Goldschmidt, has been listed as a foreign agent by Russian authorities.
In May 2022, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov drew the ire of Israel and prominent Holocaust remembrance groups when he claimed that Zelensky’s ethnic background meant nothing and asserted that Hitler, too, had Jewish roots — a claim for which there is no evidence.
“For a long time now we’ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest antisemites are the Jews themselves,” Lavrov said in an interview with Italian media.
Israel’s foreign minister described Lavrov’s remarks as “unforgivable” and the foreign ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to explain. The office of then Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said that Putin apologized for Lavrov’s remarks during a phone call a few days later, but the Kremlin readout of the call made no mention of an apology.
Zelensky has called Putin “the second king of antisemitism after Hitler.”
The claims by Putin, Lavrov and other senior Russian officials that Ukraine is a neo-Nazi state have become increasingly difficult to support. Ukraine’s new defense minister, Rustem Umerov, is a Muslim with Crimean Tatar roots. Volodymyr Groysman, Ukraine’s prime minister from 2016 to 2019, was also Jewish.
But since the invasion, the Jewish community has repeatedly been instrumentalized in Kremlin propaganda. Vladimir Solovyov, one of the loudest propagandists on Russian state television, has frequently cast doubt on the authenticity of Zelensky’s Jewish heritage during his talk shows.
And in the recently released film “Svidetel,” or ‘The Witness” — a state-supported Russian propaganda film about the war in Ukraine — Ukrainians are portrayed as violent, sadistic Nazis who frequently use antisemitic slurs. When the film’s Jewish protagonist, a Belgian violin player, tries to play Klezmer music, he is ordered by Ukrainian commanders to stop playing that “ugly music” and ridiculed for his Jewish identity and appearance.
In a memo last year, the U.S. State Department wrote that Putin and the Russian propaganda apparatus was exploiting the historical memory of the Soviet fight against Nazi Germany to fabricate a pretext for the invasion of Ukraine.
“To serve its predatory ends, the Kremlin is exploiting the suffering and sacrifice of all those who lived through World War II and survived the Holocaust,” the memo stated. “In the process, the Kremlin is detracting from critically important global efforts to combat antisemitism and is instead propagating one of antisemitism’s most insidious forms, Holocaust distortion.”
The memo added, “With antisemitism on the rise around the world, it is imperative for all to call out this particularly pernicious kind of Russian disinformation.”
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After the invasion, tens of thousands of Russian Jews emigrated to Israel as part of the historic wave of Russians leaving the country to escape the economic and political consequences of the war. It was the largest wave of departures to Israel in decades.
But within Russia’s remaining Jewish community, almost no one says that antisemitism is on the rise — at least not publicly.
Leonid Bimbat, the rabbi at Moscow’s Center for Progressive Judaism said that following the invasion of Ukraine, he decided that the synagogue would refrain from commenting on politics or the war, to both protect the congregation and maintain dialogue with other progressive congregations around the world.
“We need to be present here, in Russia,” Bimbat said. “We cannot talk about sensitive topics and we do not talk about politics. We need to be here with people and this role is more important than ever. People here need stability.”
At a sabbath service on Friday, ahead of Monday’s Yom Kippur holiday, worshipers kept to that pledge.
A mixed congregation of around 20 people, mostly young people in their 30s, sang alongside the cantor leading prayers with a guitar in a mixture of Russian and Hebrew. A ring light and camera lit up the scene, streaming the service to a wider congregation online, a feature that was first introduced during the covid pandemic and became so popular that it stuck. No one wished to talk about the war.
Leo, 40, who spoke on the condition that only his first name be published for security reasons, said that he was not sure if antisemitism in Russia was on the rise but that he had not noticed anything unusual recently. His wife, Valeria, said that the situation was “the best it’s been in a while.” The couple declined to comment on Putin’s or Lavrov’s statements.
Bimbat insisted that there is “no antisemitism in the Russian state” and “no immediate threat to the Jewish community in Moscow.”
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After the invasion, the Russian Jewish community — like many other parts of wartime Russian society — was quickly divided between those who publicly condemned the war, those who continued to support the Kremlin and those who remained silent.
Following Goldshmidt’s departure, he was criticized for “engaging in political activities” and has been accused of misrepresenting the broader views of Russa’s Jewish community.
“There are some people in the community who have supported the war and supported the narrative of the fight of Russia against neo-Nazis, unfortunately,” Goldshmidt said in response to the accusations. “And there are those people in the community who believe that they have to support the government in any circumstances.”
In a recent interview, the former Soviet dissident and Israeli politician, Natan Sharansky, refuted the idea that Putin was antisemitic. “Putin is not antisemitic, isn’t an antisemite, on the contrary, he sympathizes with Jews for many reasons but he is now building a new dictatorship,” Sharansky said in the interview with Israeli media.
“He has decided to renew the Russian empire and wants to restore its national dignity,” Sharansky said. “He wants to take over Ukraine and for that, he needs to mobilize his people, because no one is interested in war except him.”
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