The world’s largest and most expensive Jewish Museum opened to great fanfare in Russia late last year. And although it has only been open for less than six months, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow has become a must-see for any visitors to the Russian capital.

A high profile project, its construction cost around $50 million, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin donated a month’s wages. Israeli President Shimon Peres, who was born in what is now Belarus, flew to Moscow for the museum’s opening in November 2012.

There the 89-year-old Israeli leader told reporters that, “My mother sang to me in Russian, and at the entrance to this museum, memories of my childhood flooded through my mind, and my mother’s voice played in my heart.”

The history of the Jews in Russia is as complex and emotional as any childhood memories.

This large and engaging museum—which was primarily funded by oligarchs with close ties to the Kremlin—is dedicated to the ambivalent history of Jews in Russia, land that has been the site of both immense Jewish achievement and suffering.

“We tried to make our museum not about how bad or how good it was to be a Jew in Russia, but simply about how it was,” said Borukh Gorin, the chairman of the museum, according to the Los Angeles Times.

To tell the tale, the museum has adopted a very modern approach. It employs interactive displays with personal testimony and archival footage in both Russian and English.

New York based designer Ralph Appelbaum, who designed the United States Holocaust Museum, created a museum that the Russian online television channel Dozhd described as a “Jewish Disneyland.”

As befits a major museum, it occupies a vast space—some 5,000 square feet. Across this floor space the museum offers visitors an array of interactive exhibits. Films in 3-D, interactive maps and touch screens all chronicle Jewish life in what was once the Russian Empire.

A visitor can touch a screen at one exhibit and appear in a mirror dressed in the garb of a 19th-century blacksmith, or a merchant, or a Russian-Jewish intellectual. If you touch a Torah in a virtual synagogue, the cantor’s voice fills the air.

The exhibitions are presented in chronological order. As visitors progress through the museum, they follow in the path of centuries of Russian Jewry, travelling across medieval Europe to the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and then onto Russian cities.

The Jewish presence in Russia grew as a result of Russia, Prussia and Austria’s division of Poland at the end of the 1700s. Along with the Polish territory it gained, the Russian Empire inherited approximately 1 million Jews. Most of the Jewish population was densely concentrated in rural areas in the north and west of the Russian Empire. Later Tsarist decrees forbade Jews from settling outside of a prescribed area, known as the Pale of Settlement.

Individual Jews had to apply for permission to live outside of the Pale (from where we get the expression, “beyond the pale”), applications which were almost always denied. As the Russian Empire expanded, especially south into the area known as New Russia (southern Ukraine), Jews were permitted to settle in this new terrain, which included the city of Odessa. The Ukrainian port soon became the center of flourishing Jewish life, one of the major Jewish centers of the world.

Visitors to the museum can sit down at a café in Odessa and interact with a virtual, dead Jewish writer, a representative member of the city’s intelligentsia.

In addition to conversation with long-dead authors, a visitor can partake in other interactive role-play at the Odessa café. By touching the table, the visitor is posed a question that was all-too pertinent for many Jewish residents of Odessa in the 19th and 20th centuries.

“If your store were destroyed by a pogrom, what would you do?”

The question is a good one, not merely hypothetical. Odessa was the site of pogroms in 1821, 1859, 1871, 1881, 1886 and 1905. Visitors can choose from one of four responses:

“A) Give up and emigrate to the West, B) Stay in my hometown and try to rebuild the store, C) Join a Jewish self-defense league and prepare for the next pogrom or, D) I am still in shock.”

As it happens, Vladimir Jabotinsky, a resident of the city on the Black Sea, chose option C. In the midst of the anti-Jewish violence, Jabotinsky created the Jewish Self-Defense Organization, a Jewish militant group whose purpose was to safeguard Jews from attack in Odessa and throughout the Russian Empire.

Jabotinsky became convinced that the only ways for Jews to be free from the threat of violence was to be armed— “better to have a gun and not need it than to need it and not have it!” he said—or, better yet, to live in their own country, the state of Israel.

Jabotinsky became a prominent Zionist, changed his name from Vladimir to Ze’ev, and founded the Revisionist Zionist movement. Jabotinksy died in New York in 1940, before his dream of a Jewish homeland was realized, but after the establishment of the Jewish State, his remains were transferred to Israel.

In addition to contributing to the development of Zionism, the bloody pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries resulted in the mass emigration of Russian Jews to the West—the United States, primarily, but also France, the United Kingdom and Germany—and to pre-State Palestine. Then in 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution granted equal rights to all minority groups in Russia, including Jews, while it also precipitated more anti-Jewish violence.

The museum outlines these periods, as well as the Holocaust. While the Shoah is by no means the primary focus of the museum, exhibitions detail some of the horrors in which over 2.5 million Russian Jews were murdered. Yet while many Russian Jews perished at the hands of Nazis and their collaborators, Russian Jews fighting in the Soviet Army also helped to liberate concentration camps. Once again, Jewish suffering and success are starkly juxtaposed.

The museum chronicles the Jewish contribution to Russia’s war effort during World War II. It houses a copy of a T-34 tank, which was made in a plant run by a Jewish man in the Urals town of Nizhny Tagil and served as the Russian army’s primary tank during the war. The museum also honors Russia’s only female Jewish air force pilot, who received the Hero of the Soviet Union award, with a reproduction of the plane she flew during the war.

Exhibitions also address the post-War period, exploring what it meant to be a Soviet Jew. This section of the museum might be of particular interest to the many Russian-speaking Jews who left the former Soviet Union. There are now hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of Russian-speaking Jews and their families who live in Israel, the United States, Germany and elsewhere outside of Russia.

While many Russian Jews desperately fought to leave the Soviet Union, hoping to immigrate to Israel for ideological reasons—part of the refusenik movement—or to the West, the museum also profiles the many and varied contributions of Russian Jews to the development of the Soviet Union in the fields of politics, literature, engineering, mathematics, literature and the arts.

At the start of the 20th century, Russia was home to the largest Jewish population in the world, perhaps as many as 5 million souls. But anti-Jewish violence and legislation led to mass emigration from Russia—to primarily to the United States, pre-State Israel and Western Europe. Then the Nazi genocide further decimated Jewish communities. After the defeat of the Nazis, Soviet authorities repressed Jewish religious and cultural life, as well as other religions. In the wake of the break down of the Soviet Union, yet more Russian Jews left the country for Israel and the West. These events radically cut the size of Russia’s Jewish population, which currently numbers approximately 200,000.

Although there may be fewer Jews in Russia than at any point in over 200 years, Moscow is now home to an impressive museum—earlier this month, the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center received the “Museum of the Year” award from the Russia edition of the prestigious The Art Newspaper, the Jewish Telegraph Agency reported.

So many of the world’s Jews, from Nobel laureate and Israeli President Shimon Peres down, can trace their families’ histories to Russia. It is fitting that this major museum honors the heritage of a huge proportion of the world’s Jews and the inextricably intertwined modern histories of Jewish people and Russian lands.

At the appointed moment, they remove their windbreakers to reveal white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the kikes.” Their jackets carry the name of Svoboda, the ultranationalist Ukrainian political party.

A small riot quickly ensues. Angry protestors rip at the T-shirts, but the Svoboda-labeled men give as good as they get. One of the men beats Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist, so savagely that he is rendered barely recognizable.

In the days after this April 6 melee, Svoboda denied that the provocateurs at the rally were their men. Yuriy Syrotiuk, a Svoboda parliamentarian, called the men criminals and complained that police were not responding to an act of incitement, Interfax reported. Some suggested the men were anti-Svoboda activists seeking to tarnish its image.

But denials notwithstanding, the incident has raised anxieties among Ukrainian Jews fearful of rising xenophobia and racially motivated violence they say is inspired by Svoboda, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a penchant for thuggery.

“Svoboda lifted the lid from the sewer of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and it’s spilling out,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament.

A U.S. State Department report this month singled out Ukraine, along with Hungary and Greece, as places of “concern” because of growing anti-Semitic parties. But open anti-Semitism is still rare in Ukraine. Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry documented just 15 cases of anti-Semitic violence in 2012. In France, the number was 200.

But the behavior of some Svoboda politicians risks changing that, some Ukrainian Jews worry.

Founded in 2004, Svoboda (“freedom” in Ukrainian) is the latest incarnation of the Social-National Party, a far-right movement ideologically aligned with Nazism. But while the Social-National Party never enjoyed any electoral success, Svoboda garnered more than 10 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections, becoming the country’s fourth-largest party.

“Svoboda is perhaps the biggest challenge facing Ukrainian Jewry today,” Ukrainian Jewish Committee President Oleksandr Feldman told JTA. “It has no structure and operates in a political vacuum and turmoil which allow it to run rampant.”

Svoboda’s unstructured nature also makes it difficult to pigeonhole. Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok has praised supporters for being the “worst fear of the Jewish-Russian mafia” and has called Jews “kikes.”

Yet the party also speaks admiringly of Israel, and Tyahnybok has made a point of advertising his meeting last December with Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine. Alexander Aronets, Svoboda’s press secretary, has praised Israel on his Facebook page as ”one of the most nationalistic countries in the world.”

Good relations with Israel may be desirable to Svoboda as a defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, a tactic employed by other European nationalist movements that have made overtures in Israel’s direction.

“They know anti-Semitism is preventing the good relations they seek,” said Moshe Azman, Ukraine’s Chabad-affiliated chief rabbi. “But Svoboda is not a uniform entity and I’m not sure the leaders control the rank and file.”

Feldman, an energetic businessman, lawmaker and founder of the Kyiv Interfaith Forum, says Svoboda has helped erode the shame associated with open expressions of anti-Semitism and other ethnic hatreds. His interfaith forum, which each year brings together hundreds of clerics from five faiths, was marred for the first time this year by a minor assault on a Muslim participant outside the conference.

“Svoboda is very frightening to Ukrainian Jews and other minorities because it is an ultra-Jobbik that evolved quickly,” Feldman said, referring to the anti-Semitic and Iran-friendly Hungarian party that also has enjoyed recent electoral success.

“We had hoped Svoboda would tone it down once it’s in parliament, but the opposite has happened,” said Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Ukrainian researcher with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. “The electoral gains have emboldened Svoboda lawmakers to incorporate thuggery as a modus operandi, a very dangerous development.”

One example came in February, when party member Igor Miroshnichenko shimmied up the towering statue of Vladimir Lenin in the town of Akhtyrka, threw a rope around the communist leader’s head, tied the other end to a truck and brought down the monument.

In December, the same man said Mila Kunis, a Ukrainian-American Jewish actress, was “no Ukrainian, but a kike.” Asked by a newspaper if Miroshnichenko could be prosecuted for making a racial insult, a Justice Ministry official said the word he used — “zhydovka,” a feminized version of kike — was permissible and part of the official vocabulary.

“This was another Svoboda success in poisoning the public sphere,” Likhachev says.

Svoboda officials declined several JTA requests for comment for this story.

In February, Likhachev signed a letter along with several other Jewish Ukrainians asking the Jewish Agency for Israel to cancel plans to hold its board of governors meeting in Kiev in June. The letter, which several Jewish leaders dismissed as overblown, said that poor democratic standards and Svoboda’s ascent made Kiev an ill-suited choice.

“Svoboda are riffraff — nothing comparable to Jobbik, which has its own militia and coherent policy,” said Yaakov Bleich, a Ukrainian chief rabbi.

“Svoboda is troubling as a symptom of the main challenges facing Ukrainian Jewry: the economic recession and political uncertainty,” Bleich said. Still, he added, “because Svoboda is a mob, it’s less predictable than Jobbik. Svoboda’s leaders may be unable to control anti-Semitic displays.”

Despite the disagreements, many Jewish leaders seem to agree that Svoboda’s success owes more to frustration with the establishment than to its anti-Semitic statements. Likhachev pointed specifically to the discontent that emerged in the wake of the Orange Revolution, the protests following the 2004 election that brought former president Viktor Yushchenko to power on a platform of greater government accountability.

Bickering and disunity cost Yushchenko the presidency in 2010. He was succeeded by Viktor Yanukovych, the man whom protestors accused five years earlier of election fraud. That development strengthened Svoboda in two ways, Likhachev says.

“First, it radicalized disgruntled voters,” Likhachev says. “Second, the opposition allies learned they needed to stay united to win. So they are willing to overlook Svoboda’s anti-Semitism — to the detriment of Ukrainian society and its Jewish population.”

The April 6 rally in Cherkasy, a city situated 100 miles southeast of Kiev, turned violent after six men took off their jackets to reveal T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “Beat the kikes” and “Svoboda,” the name of a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist movement and the word for “freedom” in Ukrainian.

Police arrested one of the men, who were also confronted by people attending the rally, a gathering of opposition parties.

Police questioned 36 people suspected of inciting ethnic hatred in connection with the incident, according to a report by the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism, a watchdog group.

One of the people injured at the rally, attended by a few hundred people, was Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist.

“I told the men in the T-shirts they were promoting hatred,” Smal told the news site newsru.co.il. “They beat me to the ground and kicked me until I lost consciousness.”

A swastika and neo-Nazi symbols was spray-painted last week on a monument in Mykolaiv, near Odessa, to the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

In Kiev, anti-Semitic flyers on Monday were placed on a synagogue and other Jewish heritage sites, including a monument to the Jewish author Sholom Aleichem and the former home of the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

According to Jewish News, a news website about Ukraine, the posters contained profanities and calls for violence against Jews, who were referred to as “trash.” The posters were signed by Svodoba, the name of a nationalist movement with prominent members who have been accused of anti-Semitism. Svoboda spokesman Ruslan Koshulinsky denied the party was behind the posters.

In Lviv, in western Ukraine, soccer fans last week handed out leaflets ahead of a match between their team, the Carpathians, and a team from Odessa, Chernomorets, whose players are often referred to as “Jews.” The posters were titled “Death to the Jews” and featured a picture of the main entrance to the Auschwitz death camp, according to the Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism.

In Poland, “Murder the Jews” was spray-painted on the walls of a newly dedicated Jewish cemetery in Myslenice near Krakow, along with a swastika and the symbol of the elite Nazi SS unit, the news website miasto-info.pl reported.

On March 16, anti-Semitic slogans were chanted at an anti-communist demonstration in Krakow, including “Down with Judaism” and “hit them once with a sickle and twice with the hammer.”

In Hungary, stickers reading “Jews, the university is ours, not yours” were placed on the doors of two University of Budapest lecturers, Gyorgy Peter and Gruberne Welker Agnes. Earlier this month, a young woman wearing a T-shirt with the logo “Auschwitz Holiday Camp” was filmed attending a nationalist demonstration in Budapest.

Firefighters in Perm, a municipality located on the banks of the Kama River near the Ural Mountains, put out a small fire inside the center on Saturday, the government-owned Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily reported.

The fire is believed to have been caused by two bottles filled with a flammable liquid that were thrown into the center from outside the building.

Police suspect the fire was a provocation ahead of an event that took place Sunday, when Orthodox Jews of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement introduced a Torah scroll to the synagogue operating in the center. Some 400 people attended the event, according to the Israel-based Russian-language news site Izrus.co.il.

WASHINGTON D.C. – Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett, Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), today testified before the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations on “Anti-Semitism: A Growing Threat to all Faiths.”

In her testimony, Dr. Lantos Swett notes that:

Clearly, anti-Semitism in contemporary Europe, while not nearly as virulent as in the past, has persisted, even in well-established democracies. It has led to religious freedom violations, ranging from governmental actions limiting religious practices to private actors perpetrating violent acts in Europe’s cities against Jewish individuals and property.

Denouncing such hate is crucially important to show that “never again” will the forces of democracy and freedom turn their back on Jewish communities when they face the scourge of anti-Semitism. The Executive and Legislative branches of our government, along with USCIRF, can play an important role pressing other countries to condemn hatred of the Jewish people.

Click here to view the full testimony.

by Nicky Larkin

There are not many borders in Europe where the cops sell ecstasy. There are also not many countries in Europe currently boasting one hundred per-cent employment. In Transnistria it seems they have it all sorted. The only problem is the country doesn’t officially exist. And they hate you Jews.

Also, you don’t get to keep the pills. It’s a clever recycling initiative. Anyone clueless enough to purchase drugs from the man with the gun in the uniform, will subsequently be greeted by another man with a gun in a uniform about ten miles down the road. The ecstasy is found, the bribe is paid, and the merchandise whisked back to the border for the next clown’s misfortune.

It’s highly symbolic as the outsiders entrance into this murky, but fascinating, little anti-Semitic corner of Europe.

A breakaway territory in the east of Moldova, Transnistria is a thin sliver of land bordering Ukraine, separated from the rest of Moldova by the Dniester river. Michael Palin went there and had a laugh, but he was from the BBC and had a big camera crew, so he only saw the marching bands and didn’t get offered any pills. He doesn’t look like the type anyway.

I didn’t have a big camera crew or the BBC. I had a Lada with a cracked window, a chain-smoking driver, and a very bad hangover. I also had Frank, and he needed to vomit. We were much more Monty Python than Michael Palin.

The Transnistrians have been quite open about their anti-Semitism. Home to a small Jewish community, the local Synagogue was targeted with a pipe-bomb attack in 2001. The reason – to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In 2004 a Russian Neo-Nazi group went at it again; this time trying to burn down the Synagogue with a Molotov Cocktail.

Most shockingly of all, 70 tombstones in the Jewish cemetery were vandalized with anti-Semetic graffiti. The Transnistrian authorities refused to clean it up. It was a very clear message – two fingers to you Jews – from the bitter little country that doesn’t even exist.

So as that Lada rattled towards the made-up border, I had all sorts of pre-conceived ideas as to what it would be like inside this murky micro-nation. The EU has called Transnistria “a black hole in which illegal trade in arms, the trafficking in human beings and the laundering of criminal finance was carried on.” The locals are even subject to a night-time curfew. Would we even get in?

To have any chance of crossing the border you need a Russian speaker. Without this essential element you won’t even get offered the chance to buy ecstasy in the first place. You’ll be shaken down, turned around, and sent back to wherever you came from. But we were sorted – our Lada-driving chain-smoker spoke both Moldovan and Russian.

As we approached the border our driver stopped. He turned around, cigarette dangling from his mouth, and demanded we hand him over our passports and stay in the car. The Department of Foreign Affairs would definitely frown upon sitting in a Lada with no passport, on the border of a country that doesn’t exist. With a cracked window….

But not for the first time, the Paddy passport worked its charm. Even the border guards in this shady non-existent country thought being Irish was hilarious, and they didn’t even know about that whole IMF money disaster thing and that we were all paupers again. Or maybe they just knew us Irish aren’t too keen on you big nasty Israelis either. They must read The Guardian too. Either way, a Spud-Head victory. We were in.

Despite being repeatedly urged by NATO to withdraw from Transnistria, our chain-smoking driver laughed as he pointed at the imposing Russian army base visible from the road into Tiraspol, the capital city. The Russians have permanently positioned an old Soviet tank – complete with hammer and sickle – facing across the Dniester, a symbolic message in case those bloody Moldovans get notions of reclaiming land still internationally recognized as theirs.

I spent the previous few nights in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova, and experienced the sparse aesthetic of Europe’s poorest per-capita country. So on my way into Tiraspol I expected more babushkas at bus stops. Instead I got teenage skaters in baggy jeans and baseball caps, doing tricks in front of that Soviet tank.

But perhaps the most striking thing about Tiraspol is the huge billboards positioned all over the city, displaying the stern image of Putin’s watchful face – making sure the locals don’t get notions. Putin’s pissed on every lamppost in the city; firmly marked his territory in his strategic little enclave.

But despite the billboards, Transnistria is officially self-governed, with their own parliament, police and postal system.

They even designed their own flag and currency, and came up with a new national anthem. One can only imagine that particular meeting…

Fresh from months of war; bent, bandaged and bedraggled in a bullet-riddled building, armed to the teeth with crayons and sketchpads. Pure Monty Python territory – a poster competition for militant separatists. Accompanied on piano by a liquored-up land-mine victim, bashing out the chords, trying to come up with a national anthem with his good arm.  And if that went well, he’d have a go at the Eurovision too.

But sadly for these piano-playing separatists, despite geographically being in Europe, Transnistria doesn’t qualify for the Eurovision. These anti-Semites don’t really qualify for anything. Transnistria’s political status remains up in the air. It’s unrecognized internationally, yet in effect an independent state. This sketchy political status has its definite benefits.

It is widely alleged that the Russians now run all their dirty work through Transnistria. People trafficking, weapons and drugs, along with the disposal of nuclear waste. And why not; the place doesn’t even exist after all. It’s the perfect little set-up for keeping your hands clean. As long as you piss on all the lampposts.

Transnistria posed me many difficult questions. Who is responsible for this anti-Semetic encouragement – the refusal to clean up the 70 vandalized Jewish tombstones? Is it Russia, running their little proxy-state, or is it the actual Transnistrian separatists themselves?  And if so, why, in this obscure part of the world, is it bizarrely anti-Semitic in the first place?

Also, despite the dark allegations, the murky political set-up, and the very fact the state doesn’t officially exist, the quality of life for those baggy-jeaned skaters in front of that big Soviet tank seemed so much higher than on the other side of the Dniestr river, on the grim streets of Chisinau. The conclusions drawn from this alone are confusing. How can the standard of living be higher in this shady anti-Semetic banana republic, than in either of the two real authentic countries that surround it?

Or maybe it’s all much simpler. Maybe that chain-smoking Lada-driver pulled a pure Palin on me too.

By Nissan Tzur

Ask Yuri Syrotyuk, a senior member of Ukrainian far-right party Svoboda, about widespread allegations of antisemitism in his own party and among the country’s political classes, and he constructs an unfortunate defence.

“It is absolutely not true… Many representatives of your people [Jews] are in the Ukrainian parliament and among the richest citizens of Ukraine. Could that happen in a country where antisemitism is widespread?”

Svoboda — which holds 38 seats in parliament — has a troubling record when it comes to Jews, who number 71,000 in the Ukraine.

Svoboda MP Igor Miroshnichenko provoked a scandal in December when he called Ukraine-born, American-Jewish actress Mila Kunis a “Zhid”, an offensive word used to insult Jews and employed by the Nazis during the Holocaust in the Ukraine.

At the time, Svoboda leader Oleg Tyagnibok defended the statement, and Mr Syrotyuk concurred that there was nothing offensive about the term. “The word ‘Zhid’ is a common Slavic definition for Jews in most European countries. Another definition simply does not exist in Slovak, Czech or Polish language. This word has never had a negative or offensive connotation in any Slavic language,” he said.

The Jewish community of the Ukraine disagrees. Following the statement by Mr Miroshnichenko, it launched an international campaign to publicise the growth of antisemitism in Ukraine.

Since it was established in 1991, Svoboda has appealed to Ukrainian nationalists and often described Jews and the Russians as the enemies of the state and the people.

Mr Tyagnibok has recently made efforts to clean up Svoboda’s racist image, and Mr Syrotyuk claimed that Jews, as minorities, are safe living in the Ukraine. “Svoboda supports the right of all ethnic minorities to participate in government, education, language and more… Our common objective is to eliminate anti-Ukrainian, undemocratic regimes,” he said.

In May last year, Mr Syrotyuk commented that the country’s half-Congolese entrant to the Eurovision Song Contest meant that “millions will see that Ukraine is represented by a person who does not belong to our race”.

The Kyiv Post weekly on Jan. 21 quoted a statement by the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress – an organization headed by Rabinovich – as reading, “A senior official from the current government visited Rabinovich on Jan. 17 and, threatening harassment, including physical violence, demanded that the JN1 television channel be transferred to them within a week.”

No official was named in the report. Rabinovich reportedly made a complaint to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine.

Alexander Zanzer, JN1’s Brussels bureau chief, told JTA that Ukrainian police recently inspected JN1′s offices in Kiev, “but it is not sure who is ultimately behind this newfound interest in us.” He added, “It would seem like someone decided they could use JN1 to exert control. I am not sure who it is, but we are speaking out against it before it becomes more serious.”

Co-owned by Rabinovich and fellow Ukrainian Jewish philanthropist and businessman Igor Kolomoisky, JN1, or Jewish News One, began broadcasting in 2011. Along with Kiev, it has offices in Brussels and Paris.

By Adam Soclof

In 1948, prominent Yiddish theater actor and director Solomon Mikhoels died in what was later revealed to have been a political assassination ordered by Joseph Stalin’s security police chief Lavrenti Beria. (The death murder was believed by many, including his daughters, to have been carried out in the form of a staged car accident). A similar account was conveyed by a JTA writer in 1987:

He was sent to Minsk by the Cultural Affairs Ministry as a member of the Stalin Prize Committee, purportedly to inspect theaters. Late at night, on Jan. 13, 1948, he was called from his hotel by an official. He was mowed down by a truck, and although his death was reported an accident, it is generally believed that the KGB killed him. The Soviet government made an extraordinary funeral for Mikhoels, attended by tens of thousands of Jews.

As noted by JTA 50 years later, Mikhoels’ death marked the beginning of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Soviet Union that eased only after Stalin’s death in 1953.

In 1953, exactly five years after Mikhoels’ death, the Soviet newspaper Pravda published “The Doctors’ Plot,” an article that alleged a conspiracy by 9 doctors, 6 of them Jewish, to kill Soviet leaders with aid of American intelligence and the American Joint Distribution Committee.

Mikhoels was among the names identified in the plot, which Nikita S. Khrushchev later claimed was promulgated by Stalin. In 1957, Miron S. Vovsi, Mikhoels’ cousin and one of the doctors named in the plot, was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Read the CIA’s 1953 report detailing the Doctors’ Plot here.

PHOTO: Memorial tablet on the house in Daugavpils where Soviet Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels was born on Mar. 16, 1890. (Alma Pater, CC BY 3.0)

(h/t David B. Green of Haaretz)