Statue of Bogdan Chmielnicki in Ukraine |
Hundreds of Jewish families in Ukraine were forced to flee their homes not due to the Russian invasion, but because of Ukrainians looting their properties and physically attacking them, Hebrew-language news site 0404 reported Sunday.
The Lev Layeled NGO told 0404 that Jews in the town of Zhytomyr were threatened, harassed, and physically beaten by locals looking to take advantage of the chaos caused by the fighting between Ukraine and Russia.
The Jewish outreach organization Chabad and Lev Layeled manage an orphanage and children’s homes in Zhytomyr and its outskirts.
“On Thursday, the Ukrainians who worked at the orphanage began looting and beating the local Jews,” Lev Layeled said in a statement.
“The Ukrainian authorities called Chabad and told them they needed to [flee] urgently in order to save their lives.”
The organizations scrambled to organize evacuation buses for the children in their care. They were successfully taken to Romania, and then flown to Israel.
But due to the presence of the Chabad institutions in the town, Jews from surrounding communities continued to pour into Zhytomyr seeking refuge.
“The situation deteriorated even further, as hundreds of Jewish families found themselves harassed and beaten by Ukrainians there,” the organization said.
“We got a call at 6 a.m. this morning, asking again for help as more and more families are coming forward to leave everything behind and save their lives — not only because of the bombing, but because of the locals turning against them.”
While Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky has repeatedly invoked the Holocaust in order to urge Israel and Western countries to support Ukraine’s military resistance, the Eastern European nation has a long history of antisemitic violence.
During World War II, local Ukrainians aided the Nazis in slaughtering hundreds of thousands of their Jewish neighbors, and perpetrated multiple pogroms against Jewish communities.
2 comments:
I would respect the Lubavitchers if they had a two pronged approach - welcome and support the Jews there while strongly encouraging them to make aliyah and helping them out with that. But they don't. They want to keep golus going no matter how much Jewish misery it causes.
Hard for me to connect chabad with wanting to continue the gauls
We want mosiach now is their life
Maybe eretz yisroel is also galus to them
Only mosiach will end the galus not bennet
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