The Chaos of Ukraine

delivered April 25, 2014

Tonight I want to share with you two main points:

One:  how to respond to something alarming in the Jewish world, using the recent propaganda from Ukraine as an example and

Two: how we can empower ourselves by not being unwitting purveyors of propaganda by repeating it, especially over the Internet.

It is no shock to anyone that when the Israeli press picked up on leaflets being passed outside a synagogue in Ukraine on the day of Passover services demanding that Jews register or face deportation and a fine would chill the spine of anyone who remembers how dangerous Ukraine was for Jews.

From the pogroms that swept through Ukraine in 1881 through World War Two, the ground that is today’s Ukraine, once the home to some three million Jews, has always fostered anti-Jewish sentiment--mostly out of nationalistic ignorance, but with deadly consequences for those who were Jewish.

It is in today’s Ukraine that anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head.  This is because the country is destabilized by the Russian takeover of the Crimean Peninsula and the chaos between pro-Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine and the pro-Ukraine government supporters who align more with Europe.  

It is a combustible situation on so many levels.

For Jewish people, Ukraine has a well-deserved reputation for being inhospitable.  

It is that sense of history, of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis, including the infamous Babi Yar massacre in 1941, that leaves Jews deeply suspicious about anti-Semitic motivations in current-day Ukraine.

The United States Holocaust Memorial notes that Ukraine was once home to the largest population of Jews in the Russian Empire, and on the eve of the Nazi invasion of the USSR in 1941 it was the largest Jewish community in Europe.

As such, Ukraine was one of the most important centers of Jewish life destroyed during the Holocaust. Between 1941 and 1944, some 1.4 million Jews were killed there.

Now comes word, widely disseminated on the Internet and social media that outside a synagogue in Donetsk, in coal country near the Russian border in eastern Ukraine, that Jewish worshippers on Passover were confronted by masked men on a sidewalk handing out leaflets demanding that Jews register and pay a fine or leave the area.

Addressed to the “Jews of Donetsk,” the fliers claimed to have come from the headquarters of the Donetsk Republic.  The leaflets ordered Jews to register at Room 514 in the building used as the headquarters to pay $50 each, or “the guilty ones would be deprived of their citizenship and deported outside the republic and their property confiscated.”  Scary.

For any of us with even a modicum of Holocaust history, this should send a shutter down our spines:  the Jews who were deported and killed during the Shoah were all meticulously tracked, counted, registered, recorded.  

It is beyond creepy to think that could or would ever be required again.

So the fliers that were passed around on this day were picked up by the Israeli press, and quickly spread throughout the greater Jewish world via the Internet.

This obviously terrified Jews around the world by rekindling the well-deserved anti-Jewish reputation of both Russia and the Ukraine.  

So where does one find truth? How can one figure out if we are being played by propaganda?  Especially when so many of us received this information, unverified, and forwarded on to others through the various channels of the Internet?

There are three approaches you can take.

First, you should feel free to contact me and let me do some in-depth research.  Even if your fingers itch to send it on to a list of friends who will then pass it on in exponential numbers, I urge you to exercise caution.  If it sounds outrageous, perhaps it is--and perhaps I will be able to give you better information.  

Second:  always, always, always check snopes.com.

Snopes was developed in response to the raft of rumors that permeate the Internet, vetting them to find the truth.  Some rumors turn out to be true.  In this case, Snopes confirms that a small group of sinister looking people with their faces covered in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk passed out leaflets on Passover to Jews leaving synagogue ordering local Jews to register with the government or face deportation.

Snopes also confirms that it is false that the government of Ukraine officially ordered Jews in the Ukraine to register. Period.

So who distributed these leaflets and what were their motives?  

Snopes writes that, “It appears that whoever distributed the leaflets simply fabricated the alarming documents for the purpose of yanking people's chains, generating negative publicity, and/or making some money, without having either the means or the intent of actually enforcing the provisions outlined therein.”

In other words, once again using anti-Jewish propaganda for personal and political gain.  A familiar rubric.

Whoever made these leaflets, it has backfired.  These ill-conceived Ukrainian pro-Russian separatists have managed to panic the entire Jewish world.   

The situation in Ukraine is enormously unstable, and we should gird ourselves for more reports of using the Jews as pawn in the battle of the borders, both by Ukraine and by Russia.  

Let us hope that the situation in the Ukraine reaches a calmer place, soon, and that people, including the Ukrainian and Russian governments, will not reach back to threaten Jews with type of rhetoric that destroyed Jewry from the 19th century through the mid 20th century.

And for us, even more importantly, let us agree that when we receive information that appears inflammatory via email or the Internet that we pause before reacting.  Please refrain from forwarding it.

That way we can all do our best at ensuring that each of us does not become complicit in spreading ill-conceived anti-Jewish, anti-Israel propaganda thereby helping our enemies.