Cossack leaders in Belarus accused of anti-Semitism ("The yoke of the Yids")

AP/The Jerusalem Post ^ | 3 November 2003 | ASSOCIATED PRESS

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Nov. 3, 2003
Cossack leaders in Belarus accused of anti-Semitism
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
MINSK, Belarus

A U.S.-based Jewish organization on Monday accused Cossacks and Russian Orthodox Church leaders in Belarus of inciting anti-Semitism, and asked the chief prosecutor in the former Soviet republic to open a criminal investigation based on the allegations.

Anti-Semitic literature was distributed at a meeting of Cossacks in the capital, Minsk, late last month, said Yakov Basin, the director of the Belarusian office of the Union of Councils for Soviet Jews.

Basin said the Russian Orthodox Church leader in Belarus, Metropolitan Filaret, had given his blessing to the meeting. He said the literature was provided by a Minsk religious bookstore called the Orthodox Book.

The literature handed out at the meeting included the text of a hymn "on the saving of our Orthodox, Russian Fatherland and our people from the ... yoke of the Yids" as well as copies of a newspaper containing various anti-Semitic statements, Basin said.

Basin asked Belarusian Prosecutor General Viktor Sheiman to open a criminal investigation into the meeting and the distribution of the literature, saying they incited anti-Semitism. "The authorities must stop closing their eyes to glaring instances of anti-Semitism," he said.

A spokesman for Filaret, Andrei Petrashkevich, said the church had no connection with the Cossack meeting or the bookstore and denied that Filaret had given the meeting his blessing. The bookstore and the Cossack group declined to comment.

Belarus has witnessed a steady series of what Jewish organizations say are anti-Semitic actions. Many Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized in recent years, and in May vandals scrawled swastikas on a memorial complex to the victims of the Yama ghetto in Minsk.

About 28,000 Jews now live in Belarus, a mostly Slavic nation of 10 million that was home to a substantial Jewish minority before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Some 800,000 Jews were killed in Belarus by the Nazis, and many have fled the country since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

[Sender]

It's not just Jews that are being maligned, it's also Christianity outside the Orthodox church. Lukashenko probably overlooks some of the hateful ideas as long as that hatred brings people together under his power.

But don't write off Belarus as anti-Semitic or anti-anything, because in general those are not the sentiments of the people. I have met quite a few Belarusians of different faiths and they were wonderful people.

Possibly there are a handful of leftover collaborators or their descendants from WW2 who still harbor mistrust of the Jews. Quite a few Belarusians willingly became Nazi collaborators in rounding up the Jews, mainly to save their own necks from certain death, but it is still a dark and largely unspoken secret from the past which most Belarusians would rather forget.