Features
Decision to invite former member of Nazi-aligned Ukrainian military unit to House of Commons raises questions about why he was allowed into Canada in the first place
By BERNIE BELLAN (Originally published Sept. 25 in The Jewish Post & News)
The storm that erupted over the revelation that a former member of a Ukrainian unit that fought with the Nazis during the Second World War was invited to attend the appearance by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky when he spoke to the House of Commons on Friday, September 22, has led to a whole series of questions:
- Who is Yaroslav Hunka, the 98-year-old Ukrainian-Canadian who received a standing ovation from members of all four parties in the House of Commons on Friday, September 22, when he was introduced by House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota prior to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyâs speech in the House of Commons?
- What was the Wafen-SS Galicia Division (also known as the SS 14th Wafer Division)?
- How is it that many former members of the Wafen-SS Galicia Division were allowed entry into Canada following World War II?
- Why was there no vetting of Hunka by anyone prior to his having been invited to attend the House of Commons on September 22?
The fierce reaction from various Jewish Canadian groups, including the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies, Bânai Brith Canada, and the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, was unrelentingly critical of the decision to invite Hunka to attend Zelenskyâs appearance in the House of Commons.
Hunkaâs past participation in the Wafen-SS Galicia Division was well known. As an article that appeared on Wikipedia on September 24 noted: âYaroslav Hunka (Ukrainian: ĐŻŃĐŸŃлаĐČ ĐŃĐœŃĐșа; born c. 1925) is a veteran of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician), a Nazi Germany military formation. Hunka was born in Urman, then in Poland, and volunteered for SS Galizien in 1943. He emigrated to Canada after the conclusion of World War II. In 2023, Hunka made international headlines after he received a standing ovation from the House of Commons of Canada, and was recognized by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Later, it was revealed Hunka was affiliated with Nazis, and Canadian government officials apologized to the worldwide Jewish community. Hunka is retired and lives in North Bay, Ontario.
Biography
âYaroslav Hunka was born in
âYaroslav Hunka was born in Urman, Second Polish Republic (now Ukraine) c. 1925. In 1944, Hunka was deployed into combat against Red Army forces on the Eastern Front of World War II. Following the conclusion of World War II in Europe, Hunka immigrated to Canada and joined the Ukrainian-Canadian community.] As of 2022, Hunka lived in North Bay, Ontario, and travelled to Greater Sudbury to protest against that year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine.â
The question why so many former members of a Ukrainian military unit that fought for the Nazis were allowed into Canada following WWII is laced with controversy. A website that is very sympathetic to Russia lists a number of very serious allegations about Canadian complicity in allowing those individuals into the country:
âIn the immediate postwar period, Canadaâs then Liberal government, working in close cahoots with US and British intelligence, opened Canadaâs doors to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators. These included members of the infamous 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen SS, also known as the Galicia Division.
âThe scale of the influx of Nazi collaborators only became public knowledge in the 1980s. A comprehensive study carried out by Alti Rodal on behalf of the federal government-appointed DeschĂȘnes Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals in Canada uncovered records proving that US intelligence agents in Europe had funneled Nazi collaborators from Eastern Europe through the Canadian immigration system using false papers. Rodal revealed that large numbers of identically typed applications were received by Canadaâs immigration department from one address in West Germany. On closer inspection, this address turned out to be a US military base.
âThe Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney established the DeschĂȘnes Commission in 1985, in response to a mounting public outcry over exposures of Nazis and Nazi accomplices who had found a safe haven in Canada and tasked the inquiry with identifying Nazi war criminals residing in Canada.
âAround the same time, the Simon Wiesenthal Center estimated that upwards of 2,000 Nazis and Nazi collaborators emigrated to Canada in the years after the war. A quarter-century later, in 2011, it would give Canada an âF minusâ in its annual report ranking countries on their efforts to prosecute war criminals. This placed Canada on a par with Ukraine and the former Baltic republics, i.e. countries where the right-wing, nationalist regimes that have emerged since the Stalinist bureaucracyâs dissolution of the Soviet Union openly venerate the ultranationalists who aligned with the Nazis when they invaded the USSR.
âWar criminals in Canada
âA significant number of those who made their way to Canada were members of the Nazi SSâs Galicia Division, which was made up of Ukrainian nationalist volunteers who fought on the side of the Wehrmacht against the Red Army during the Nazisâ war of annihilation against the Soviet Union. This preplanned onslaughtâlaunched in June 1941 when a 3 million-strong force comprised of German troops, their Axis allies and fascist volunteers invaded the Soviet Unionâled to the deaths of 27 million Soviet citizens and the Holocaust.
âIn waging war, suppressing the population, and pursuing the annihilation of the Jews, across Eastern Europe and above all in the USSR, Hitlerâs Wehrmacht and SS shock troops relied on the loyal collaboration of ultraright-wing, anti-Semitic forces. Among the Ukrainian nationalists, in both occupied Poland and the USSR, the Nazis found eager collaborators. The Galicia Division was formed in 1943 out of a faction of the Stepan Bandera-led Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists Bandera (OUN-B) and fought with the Nazis against the Red Army throughout 1944.
âMassacres perpetrated by the division against Polish and Jewish civilians have been well documented, including at Huta Pieniacka, Podkamien, and Palikrowy. At Podkamien, 100 Polish civilians were massacred in a hilltop monastery, and at least a further 500 in surrounding villages as the Red Army approached the German-occupied area in March 1944.
âMembers of the Galicia Division were initially prohibited from entering Canada due to their membership in the SS. But in 1950, Britain made an appeal to the Commonwealth for volunteers to accept a total of 9,000 division members who were at that time residing in the UK after being disarmed by British troops at the warâs end.
âWhen Canadaâs External Affairs Department, prompted by complaints from the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), raised concerns about the divisionâs ties to the Nazis and role in Nazi atrocities, the British government insisted that it had carried out background checks. âWhile in Italy these men were screened by Soviet and British missions and neither then nor subsequently has any evidence been brought to light which would suggest that any of them fought against the Western Allies or engaged in crimes against humanity,â claimed the British Foreign Office. ââTheir behaviour since they came to this country, added London, âhas been good and they have never indicated in any way that they are infected with any trace of Nazi ideology.â
âWith this letter serving as political cover, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and his cabinet declared that Galicia Division members would be permitted to immigrate to Canada unless it could be proved that they had personally committed atrocities against civilian populations based on ârace, religion or national origins.â Simply having been a Galicia Division member would not be considered a valid reason to prevent entry, even though after the war all Waffen-SS members had been deemed complicit in war crimes.
âThe immigration of Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals continued for more than a decade after the war and was a significant factor in Canadaâs emergence during the Cold War as a political-ideological centre of far-right Ukrainian nationalism.
âSpeaking to a CBS â60 Minutesâ programme in 1997, Canadian historian Irving Abella, who is currently Professor for Canadian Jewish history at York University, bluntly summed up the political climate of the time. âOne way of getting into postwar Canada,â he said âwas by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.â
âOttawa carried out this policy in close collaboration with US authorities, who similarly permitted ex-Nazis to settle in the US and recruited hundreds to act as spies against the Soviet Union and the Soviet-allied regimes in Eastern Europe. According to investigative reporter Eric Lichtblau, up to 1,000 former Nazis were made use of by the CIA in Europe, within the US itself, the Middle East, and in Latin America.
Yet, other historians dispute the notion that Canada became a safe haven for Nazi and Nazi-allied war criminals. In a book titled , written by historian Howard Margolian, and reviewed by Urs Obrist in 2002, Obrist writes the following:
âEven though the debate on the admission of Nazi war criminals to Canada after World War II seemed to have reached its apex in the mid-1980s, with the investigation of the Jules DeschĂȘnes Commission and its inquiries on war criminals, the issue has continued to stir historical interest in the 1990s and beyond.[1] This recent publication by Howard Margolian, Unauthorized Entry, revises the widely held view that Canada has been a safe haven for Nazi war criminals. Margolian is a Canadian historian with a special interest in the history of World War II and Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. As the author of Conduct Unbecoming, he has already shed light on the story of the murder of Canadian POWs in Normandy and the trial and fate of the SS-General Kurt Meyer.[2] In Unauthorized Entry, Margolian challenges and refutes accusations stating that the King and St. Laurent governments had been negligent in the admission of Nazi war criminals and collaborators to Canada.
âHis study concludes that neither the immigration bureaucracy, nor the immigration lobby in Canada, nor the western intelligence community were as responsible for the influx of about 2000 war criminals and collaborators as has been generally assumed. Instead, he argues, the blame is to be put on the war criminals and collaborators who gained entry to Canada by forged identities or by giving false information about their wartime history. The great majority of Nazi war criminals and collaborators who settled in Canada after the Second World War were admitted not on purpose, but as a result of the absence of, or inaccessibility to, information about their wartime activities. Margolian summarizes that, in view of the benefit drawn from the immigration of the 1.5 million immigrants arriving in Canada between 1945 and 1955, it was worth taking the risk and admitting some 2000 war criminals to Canada.â
However, in his review of Margolinâs book Obrist notes that the Canadian government made exceptions for three categories of immigrants – who were not denied entry even if they might have had Nazi connections: âGerman scientists, Estonian refugees from Sweden and former members of the Ukrainian SS-Division âGaliciaâ.â
As for how the Speaker of the House of Commons could have completely overlooked Hunkaâs past membership in a Nazi-affiliated unit during WWII, Rota released a statement late Sunday afternoon saying he recognized an individual in the gallery on Friday, and that he has âsubsequently become aware of more information which causes me to regret my decision to do so.â
âI wish to make clear that no one, including fellow parliamentarians and the Ukraine delegation, was aware of my intention or of my remarks before I delivered them,â he wrote.
âI particularly want to extend my deepest apologies to Jewish communities in Canada and around the world.â
The statement does not make clear what Rota is apologizing for, and it does not name Hunka or give any details about what information Rota learned about him since Friday.
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Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyoneâs predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that partyâs primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSAâs platform states it plainly: It pledges âsupport for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.â
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed âthe Teamâ: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia VelĂĄzquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdezâsâs defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynosoâs 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSAâs help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said âFree Palestine.â She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israelâs war against Hamas as a âgenocideâ as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting âGlobalize the Intifadaâ and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. âNew Yorkers donât just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,â she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having âwiped my hand on the American flag.â
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillatâs campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillatâs 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the âDemocratic machine.â Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against âwhat we all know is a genocide in Palestine.â
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and âWestern civilizationâ as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: âWe are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,â it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. âI can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,â when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person âof clarity, of conscience and of conviction.â

The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Landerâs race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New Yorkâs Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the partyâs divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marekâs bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. âWe pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,â which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the nightâs biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldmanâs 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. âWe donât serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,â Poetica declared. âToo bad we didnât recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.â
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
âWere defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?â asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. âOf course not. They lost because they arenât anti-Israel enough. âFree Palestineâ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.â No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes youâve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities youâve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. âThereâs a cliff, and weâre heading towards it,â warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like âCapitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,â will the left now embrace him as a âpremature antizionistâ? Even satire canât match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the âomnicause.â Thatâs why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world arenât being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because itâs Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, âStand Up,â Tablet, July 6, 2026. âWhen anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.â
In âA Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,â New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, âthrough being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,â a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
âThis set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and âZionistâ has become an epithet, something itâs unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,â where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become Americaâs anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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