Jews mock anti-Semitism claim and stand their ground

Holocaust survivors and the newer generation are outraged the Kremlin is using allegations of neo-Nazism to justify the attack.

A protester in Zagreb throws the neo-Nazi slur back at Vladimir Putin. Picture: AFP

The Holocaust survivor poured himself a cup of Chivas Regal, toasted life, friendship and peace, then knocked it back in one.

“Its part of my recipe for longevity,” said Igor Davidovich, 90, with a smile. “Another one perhaps?” Then the air raid sirens began.

The last time Davidovich’s city was attacked was in 1941 when the Nazis bombed and captured ­Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. He was nine. Later, he and his mother and younger brother fled to the Urals aboard a train as the Einsatzgruppe D death squad reduced the population of Jews who had not escaped the city from 30,000 to 702 in a four-day murder spree. His father, a Polish Jew and communist, had been murdered in 1937 on trumped-up spying ­charges as part of Stalin’s purge.

“I last heard those sirens a long, long time ago,” Davidovich said. “I could never in my life have imagined that I would hear them again. It grieves me to hear that sound ­repeated in my ears now.”

This time, he is not for leaving. The war is quite different and Vladimir Putin is no anti-Semite. Yet carnage is visited across Ukraine and air raid sirens sound over European cities, forcing thousands of civilians to run for cover in underground shelters, Holocaust survivors and the newer generation of the country’s thriving Jewish population alike are outraged the Kremlin is using alle­gations of neo-Nazism to justify an attack on a country whose president is of Jewish origin.

“It feels so wrong for war to come again. Why should Putin do this to us? We are outraged,” Davidovich said. A widower whose physique is that of a far younger man, he still works as administrator of Dnipro’s Golden Rose synagogue. “There is no anti-Semitism or neo-Nazism here. It is just Putin’s point of view, something he claims, as there is no other justification he can come up with,” he said.

Jews have lived in Ukraine for more than 1000 years, and the country has a Jewish population of well over 400,000. They are no strangers to pogroms and persecution by Cossacks, Tartars, Russians and Ukrainians over the centuries. During the Holocaust, the Germans, with the help of Ukrainian collaborators, killed more than one million Jews.

Those who survived were heavily restricted from practising their faith after the war, until the Gorbachev era of the late 1980s, when synagogues began to reopen. Since then, the country’s Jewish community has experienced a strong revival. Ukraine does have a far-right movement, but it has never managed to gain the same political toehold or public support base as its counterparts in western Europe. The 2019 elections ended in humiliation for far-right parties, which attracted less than 2 per cent of the vote. The same year, epitomising Ukraine’s embrace of its Jews, Volodymyr Zelensky won the presidency with more than 70 per cent of the vote.

Not only is Zelensky Jewish but his grandfather fought against the Nazis as a Soviet soldier in World War II, and many of his family members died in the Holocaust. That did not stop Putin justifying his unprovoked attack upon Ukraine by announcing that he wished to achieve its “demilitarisation and denazification”.

The unprovoked invasion has spurred many of Dnipro’s younger generation to volunteer to join the Ukrainian Territorial Defence Force, taking up arms to defend their kin and nation against the Russian soldiers. They mock Putin’s claims to be targeting a fascist enemy.

THE TIMES