Uncategorized
Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague
PRAGUE (JTA) — Not long after she puts away her silver Shabbat candlesticks and home-baked challah, Yael Schoultz walks through a cavernous hallway, and up a set of gray concrete stairs. Past a door, she finds a group of heavily made-up women in red and black G-strings and spike heels, listlessly beckoning men for sex in return for cash.
Schoultz, 43, spotted about 30 women at the Prague brothel floating from room to room in various states of undress — negligees, see-through bras — with accents as varied as their lipstick shades. Some are smiling, some appear bored as they play games on their phones, others are trying to woo potential clients with a simple, “Come have a good time, come to my room.”
It’s a typical Saturday night post-Shabbat routine for Schoultz, an Orthodox Jewish South African who recently launched L’Chaim, an organization dedicated to helping sex workers in the Czech Republic.
Schoultz and her colleagues engage the women with friendly banter about health and the weather, careful not to interrupt those with customers. The L’Chaim volunteers collectively carry a few hundred free condoms along with high-end soaps and hand-crafted bracelets.
“The girls always ask for extras for their friends,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz, who has been visiting Czech brothels since she moved to Prague in 2011, is not a mere purveyor of gifts. Her goal is to establish a rapport with the women she meets so that they can leave the business of sex work if they so wish. And her Jewish faith is a core driver of Schoultz’s quest to provide a better life for the sex workers.
“Some of the women have been trafficked,” she explained, referring to the term governments and human rights advocates use to describe a contemporary form of slavery. “There are girls who were tied up for days and raped, even by the police. Some might seem to be in the brothel voluntarily, but not really, because they owe a lot of money on a debt and feel sex work is only way they can pay it back.”
Dressed in black from head to toe, in what a fashion magazine might describe as modest goth, Schoultz is a veteran of global anti-trafficking efforts. A few decades ago, while teaching English in South Korea, Schoultz volunteered for an organization that was trying to stop the trafficking of North Korean women to China. At the same time, she was getting a master’s in theology and wanted to move to Europe to get her doctorate, which was possible at Prague’s Charles University.
“When I got to the Czech Republic, I started looking for people who were working on the trafficking issue and found three women: a Catholic nun and two Protestant missionaries. All of them were in their 60s,” Schoultz said.
Schoultz asked if she could join them in their visits to brothels.
“I just went in and started talking to women, about really anything. Language wasn’t a barrier because most sex workers speak English,” she recalled. “But it was a bit weird walking into these places with a nun in full habit.”
After a few months Schoultz began to feel uncomfortable — not with the sex workers, but with her philanthropic colleagues’ proselytizing and “religious agenda.”
“I wasn’t interested in giving out Virgin Mary medallions,” she said.
Schoultz, who teaches English at an international school in Prague, started her own informal volunteer group to help sex workers in 2012, while also embarking on a deeply personal Jewish journey.
Although she believes her father has “Jewish ancestry,” Schoultz was brought up in a Protestant home. Still, she long maintained a deep interest and connection to Judaism which intensified when she pursued her studies in theology. For several years, she regularly attended Orthodox services at 13th-century Old New Synagogue and volunteered for the Prague Jewish Community’s social services department before completing an Orthodox conversion in 2020 with Israeli rabbi David Bohbot. She has now begun her master’s degree in Jewish Studies at the Ashkenazium in Budapest, a division of the secular Milton Friedman University operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement.
“From the beginning when I knew I wanted to make the conversion, Orthodox Judaism was something I agreed with theologically, it is where I felt most comfortable,” said Shoultz, who describes herself as Modern Orthodox.
Rabbi Dohbot praised Schoultz’s dedication. “This work she does is noble, and isn’t that what most big religions are based on? Showing love and respect for others?” he said.
Schoultz completed an Orthodox conversion to Judaism in 2020. (Courtesy of Schoultz)
Last year, Schoultz achieved another transitional milestone: obtaining Czech government recognition of L’Chaim as a registered nonprofit.
Although L’Chaim is a secular organization, Schoultz sees her work through the lens of tikkun olam, the rabbinical command to repair the world.
“I feel like as a Jewish person, you’re supposed to bring light to the world,” said Schoultz. “And the sex industry is very dark, because even if you choose to be a sex worker, it’s not a job that anybody really enjoys as the customers are often drunk or abusive.”
“It might sound strange, but I feel very connected to Hashem when I am in the brothel, because he is there for me, and for these women too,” she added, using the preferred Orthodox Hebrew term for god.
Schoultz’s co-volunteers, who are mostly not Jewish, are aware of her commitment to the faith.
“After Yael started getting serious about Judaism, she found her path, she was more complete and found her purpose,” said Natalia Synelnykova, who worked with Schoultz to launch L’Chaim. “Everyone would say that their friends are unique, but I have rarely met someone who is so human-centered as Yael, and that is definitely linked to how she sees Judaism.”
Schoultz named her new organization L’Chaim — to life, in Hebrew — as a message to those she seeks to help.
“We want the women in the brothels to have a life because a lot of them feel like they don’t have any life, like they’re barely making it,” she said.
There are about 100 brothels in Prague, according to media reports, and roughly 13,0000 sex workers in the Czech Republic, of which about half are thought to be single mothers. Although sex work is legal, pimping is not, so the brothels operate in a murky legal area that legislators have been trying to address for decades.
Once a hotspot for human trafficking, today the Czech Republic has a relatively low rate of human sex slavery according to government statistics. But Schoultz said the numbers are misleading.
“No one really knows how many trafficked women there are in the country,” she said.
A U.S. State Department report praised the Czech Republic’s efforts to limit trafficking but also noted that the country is more focused on prosecutions of criminals rather than on helping victims. Their stories stay with Schoultz.
“I meet many Nigerian women who may not be locked up in a room, but they are locked up by Juju,” she said, referring to a form of “black magic” that some Nigerian traffickers reportedly use to scare women into prostitution.
She also counsels “Romanian girls who are initially romanced by men that turn out to be traffickers.” A man will have many women he calls “wives,” and each one has a baby with him, “The women give him all their money to support the baby who he keeps as a form of collateral in Romania,” Schoultz said.
(Shoultz turned down JTA’s request for contacts of sex workers she has helped, noting that this would violate L’Chaim’s promise of confidentiality).
The Czech Republic’s leading anti-trafficking organization, La Strada, takes a different orientation towards sex work than L’Chaim, focusing on it more as a legitimate profession that should be organized and regulated.
“We believe women are fully able to decide for themselves if they want to be sex workers and our goal is to provide safety for those who do so, to help them organize, fight stigma and have the rights of all other workers,” said Marketa Hronkova, La Strada’s director. La Strada defines trafficking strictly as those who are physically coerced or blackmailed into providing labor.
Hronkova said there are many sex workers who choose their profession willingly and that it is patronizing and often damaging when those who say they want to help focus exclusively on “pushing women to exit a path they have chosen, as if they have no minds of their own.”
The alternative to sex work, for a single mother, can often put her in an even worse financial situation, she noted. “Our goal is to make sex work safe, not to get women to stop doing it,” said Hromkova.
Concerning L’Chaim, she said as long as its aim was listening to women, and not making them feel ashamed, it could be helpful. La Strada already cooperates with another Czech organization, Pleasure Without Risk, which maintains a neutral stance towards sex work and provides women with access to testing for sexually transmitted diseases as well as counseling.
L’Chaim’s goal, Schoultz explained, is to identify who might be trafficked and provide them with the confidence and practical resources to rebuild their lives. But since getting access to the women requires earning the trust of brothel owners and managers, L’Chaim doesn’t advertise itself as an anti-trafficking group.
“We show up as providing support to women in prostitution, that gets us in the door,” she reflected. L’Chaim has about a dozen volunteers.
It can take Schoultz six months of relationship building before she finds out what brought the client into sex work.
“We start by talking about her kids, talking about her dogs,” said Schoultz “and eventually their stories come out, many involving abuse, trauma and mental health problems.”
She estimated that at the 13 or so brothels she regularly visits in Prague and Brno, at least half the sex workers were not there on a fully voluntary basis.
In the future, Schoultz hopes to create trafficking awareness campaigns and help the customers of sex workers recognize the signs that a woman is working against her will.
The brothel owners are not always pleasant to deal with, Scholtz acknowledged.
“At one place an owner came behind me and kissed my neck on the back of my neck. It was really creepy,” she said.
And despite her modest dress, or tznius, in keeping with her Orthodox values, she said she was pursued by a brothel customer to participate in “group sex.” She fended him off calmly by explaining that she “offered services, but not those kinds of services.”
—
The post Condoms and tikkun olam: An Orthodox woman strives to aid sex workers in Prague appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested
Dozens of Israeli and international activists, including U.S. congressional candidate Brad Lander, were detained by Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Wednesday morning while accompanying Palestinian farmers harvesting olives. After Landers was released, the Israeli activists were later placed under arrest, and the foreign citizens were reported to be awaiting interrogation.
The delegation was hours into their work when they were told they were unlawfully inside a closed military zone, according to Anton Goodman, acting CEO of Rabbis for Human Rights. Authorities detained the group even after he agreed they would leave immediately, he said.
Goodman told the Forward that 42 Israeli members of his delegation and another 28 foreign citizens were being held at the police station in nearby Beitar Illit.
“Those of us with Israeli citizenship are being detained outside of the police station,” Goodman said by phone while he was detained. “The foreign passport holders have been separated from us, and I have been told by a senior security officer that they will be interrogated by Army personnel.”
Shorty after speaking to Goodman, Tamar Glezerman, an activist from New York who holds Israeli citizenship, informed the Forward that the detainment had been converted to arrests “because you cannot detain people for more than three hours.” Glezerman also said the foreign citizens had been taken to a military base for interrogation.
According to Goodman, the delegation was helping Palestinians who have faced severe restrictions on access to their land since Oct. 7, 2023, when authorities informed the group that the area had been declared a closed military zone.
“There is no possible way we could have known that this morning,” Goodman said. “And even so, I told them we would respect the decision and leave immediately.
“But that was not good enough for them,” he continued. “I was informed that the entire group was being detained for ‘identification purposes.’”
At the time of the interview, Goodman said, only Lander had been released. The others remained detained, including a Palestinian woman whose family owned the olive grove where the harvest took place. Lander, a progressive Democrat running for Congress this year, has been vocal in his criticism of both settler violence and Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Rabbi Jill Jacobs, CEO of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, also confirmed that she and dozens of other Americans, along with Canadian and British citizens, had been detained, their passports confiscated. They were being taken by bus to the same police station, she said at the time.
“There is a Jewish principle of accompaniment of those in danger,” Jacobs told the Forward. “We were living that out, in contrast to the settlers who justify stealing olives and carrying out violent acts contrary to Jewish law.”
Despite the uncertainty over what would happen to her delegation, Jacobs said they remained in good spirits.
“We are currently on the bus saying divrei Torah and singing niggunim and religious songs,” she said, referring to Torah teachings and wordless melodies.
“It is a sad comment on the current state of Jewish affairs that they are arresting rabbis picking olives, and not the settlers who steal them, poison trees, and violently attack human beings,” Jacobs added.
The detentions follow an especially brutal week in an already escalating wave of settler violence in the West Bank. On Friday, settlers severely beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine while she covered the olive harvest in Abu Falah, leaving her with fractured vertebrae and a broken rib. The following day, settlers attacked a delegation of European diplomats and other visitors near Taybeh. Palestinian residents have also faced repeated assaults, with dozens reported injured, several seriously.
Goodman called the mass detention “insane,” criticizing both its scale and the deployment of security forces against volunteers.
“This is the largest mass detainment we have ever seen,” he said. “But it’s not just that. All across the West Bank we have seen a complete deterioration of the rule of law as settler terrorists rampage through Palestinian villages with little consequence or deterrent. Now you have a completely peaceful delegation who are only here to help with the olive harvest and 100 security personnel are dispatched to detain them?
“What a complete and utter waste of public resources.”
The post Brad Lander detained by Israeli police in the West Bank while helping Palestinians harvest; dozens of rabbis and activists arrested appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel
(JTA) — Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international anchor, is leaving the network after 43 years, closing a chapter in a career that made her one of television journalism’s most celebrated war correspondents — and one of its most controversial figures among Jewish and pro-Israel viewers.
For many viewers, Amanpour’s legacy is that of a fearless correspondent who brought the human costs of war into American living rooms, from the first Gulf War to Bosnia, Rwanda and Ukraine.
But her coverage of Israel and the Palestinians has long drawn sharp criticism from some Jewish viewers, who accused her of giving insufficient weight to Israeli security concerns, mischaracterizing events and disproportionately presenting Israeli religious nationalism in an especially unflattering light.
Amanpour, 68, announced Monday that she will wind down her daily CNN International program early next year, conclude its weekly successor in May and leave the network in June 2027. Her PBS program, “Amanpour & Company,” will end at the close of this year. However, she will continue her podcast, “The Ex Files,” with her ex-husband, Jamie Rubin, a former State Department official.
Amanpour did not give a specific reason for her departure, which comes as CNN enters a new era under Paramount Skydance ownership.
“Always be truthful, not neutral,” Amanpour wrote in her farewell message, summing up a philosophy that has animated her reporting — and helped make her a polarizing figure.
Amanpour’s admirers would argue that the same qualities that make her coverage uncomfortable for some Jewish viewers — skepticism toward official accounts, attention to civilian suffering and willingness to challenge powerful governments — are essential to journalism.
When the National Press Foundation honored her in 2025 with its Sol Taishoff Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, its judges called her “a gold standard for international broadcast journalism” and praised her tough questioning of world leaders. The Committee to Protect Journalists, which honored her in 2016, likewise celebrated her commitment to press freedom.
Amanpour, who was raised in Iran and England by her Iranian Muslim father and British Roman Catholic mother, joined CNN in 1983 as a desk assistant and rose through the ranks to become one of its most prominent correspondents. Her reporting from the Bosnian war in the 1990s helped establish her reputation for confronting officials and challenging the language governments use to justify military action.
Some of the sharpest criticism of her work came in 2007, when Amanpour hosted “God’s Jewish Warriors,” the opening installment of a three-part CNN documentary series examining the role of religion in politics and conflict.
Andrea Levin, president of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, or CAMERA, condemned the program as a biased portrayal of Jewish religious life and Israeli settlers. A 2010 Jewish Telegraphic Agency commentary revisited the controversy, with Ron Kampeas noting that “the only explicitly religious people she interviewed were ultranationalist settlers,” and that Amanpour ignored religious Jews who opposed the settlements.
Kampeas also said the program’s treatment of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington exaggerated the power of groups like AIPAC and downplayed the shared strategic and moral imperatives that drove the U.S.-Israel alliance.
“God’s Jewish Warriors” became Exhibit A in the case against Amanpour’s work. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy, her detractors asserted, was framed in a way that left Jewish viewers feeling that Jewish religious identity, political advocacy or national aspirations were inherently suspect.
Reporting from Lebanon during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Amanpour was part of a CNN team whose work rekindled a longstanding debate over how journalists should cover conflicts in which a state military fights an armed group embedded in civilian areas.
Even as Amanpour at times acknowledged the difficulty of covering such “asymmetrical warfare,” Israeli officials and supporters argued at the time that images of destruction and civilian suffering in Lebanon obscured Hezbollah’s role in initiating and sustaining the conflict. Those objections anticipated similar complaints, aimed at CNN and other outlets, over coverage of Israel’s devastating war in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.
Critics have continued to document what they see as a pattern. CAMERA has maintained a collection of complaints about Amanpour’s reporting, while HonestReporting, another pro-Israel media-monitoring organization, has accused her of repeated anti-Israel distortions.
Although both organizations have a clear advocacy perspective, they often provide specific examples of errors, and often extract corrections.
One example came in April 2023, when Amanpour described the killing of Israeli Lucy Dee and her daughters Maia and Rina in a Hamas-linked West Bank terrorist attack as a “shootout.” The women were driving on a highway when Palestinian gunmen opened fire on their vehicle. Amanpour subsequently apologized on air for her inaccurate characterization.
In 2024, Amanpour also drew criticism for a social media post about Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned Palestinian political leader convicted by an Israeli court of involvement in deadly attacks. “To many Israelis, he’s a terrorist. To many Palestinians, he’s their Mandela,” she wrote.
The comparison accurately captured Barghouti’s sharply different reputations among Israelis and Palestinians, but critics argued that it risked reducing the gravity of the attacks for which he was convicted.
Complaints about CNN’s Gaza coverage gained a striking new dimension in February 2024, when Amanpour reportedly joined CNN colleagues in accusing the network of a pro-Israel bias in its coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
According to reporting by The Intercept and The Guardian, journalists at an internal CNN meeting raised concerns that the network’s editorial procedures were favoring official Israeli narratives and making it harder to convey Palestinian perspectives. CNN’s process required coverage of the conflict to pass through its Jerusalem bureau; Amanpour was heard on tape saying that the process led to “changing copy, double standards, and all the rest.”
At the same time, some pro-Israel viewers saw CNN and Amanpour as too willing to accept Palestinian claims and too quick to foreground Gaza’s devastation.
In response to the reports, CNN defended its coverage of the conflict. “We remain absolutely committed to reporting all sides of this immensely challenging, complex and emotive story,” it said in a statement. “We absolutely reject the notion that any of our journalists treat Israeli officials differently to other officials.”
Amanpour again apologized on air in October 2025 for having said that surviving Israeli hostages released from Hamas captivity were “probably being treated better than the average Gazan, because they are the pawns and the chips that Hamas had.” Following backlash from political figures and organizations, Amanpour retracted the statement, calling her remarks “insensitive and wrong.”
Last month, in a rare long-form interview about her career with the podcaster Sam Fragoso, Amanpour discussed CNN’s coverage of the Gaza war. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, she said, the network was “practically wall to wall with horrendous stories from the victims in Israel. I mean, just horrendous.”
But as Israel’s military response ground on, “the story flipped,” she said. “As the destruction of Gaza took place and the bodies piled up, most particularly the women and the children, the tone of the coverage reflected the reality.” At the February 2024 meeting with CNN executives, she said, her colleagues expressed frustration that the network took too long to cover the Palestinian side.
In the same interview, Amanpour also walked back an apology she made in 2020 — not about CNN’s Mideast coverage, but for a commentary on the 82nd anniversary of the Kristallnacht attacks. In that segment, she juxtaposed the Nazis’ anti-Jewish pogrom with what she called President Donald Trump’s “attacks on history, facts, knowledge and truth.” After Jewish groups, including the American Jewish Committee, complained that she had “instrumentalized” the Holocaust with a faulty comparison, Amanpour said on air that she regretted any pain her statement may have caused.
Speaking last month with Fragoso, Amanpour said that she stands by her assertion that Kristallnacht demonstrated how quickly “democratic values can slowly slip away.” She also suggested that her employers had bowed to outside pressure and instructed her to apologize.
“There were people, you know, in various communities in regard of this,” she said, referring to her critics, “who decided that I need to be slapped around and pull[ed] down a peg. But I think that’s just because some people are afraid of the truth.”
Amanpour’s departure comes at a moment of uncertainty about CNN’s future under its new corporate owner. Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN’s parent company, has raised concerns among journalists about political influence and editorial independence, particularly given new owner David Ellison’s ties to Trump and the changes he has overseen at CBS News.
Amanpour herself expressed concern in May about what she called an “ideological realignment” at CBS News under its new leadership. “So clearly, obviously, I’m concerned,” she said, speaking at an investigative journalism conference in London. “I would like to think that we would have the very basic, which is editorial independence. I’m hoping for that. I know many of us at CNN are incredibly — including leadership — are very, very committed to that, clearly.”
For some Jewish and pro-Israel observers, however, the same changes have raised hopes that CNN’s coverage of Israel might become more favorable. Bari Weiss, who became CBS News editor in chief after Paramount acquired her strongly pro-Israel publication, The Free Press, has long argued that mainstream news organizations have mishandled Israel and antisemitism.
Amanpour didn’t mention the merger in her announcement. But she noted how her background shaped her perspective.
“Because of my upbringing — I’m half-Iranian and half-British — I’ve had the great privilege of being able to see the world from two very distinct perspectives,” she said. “I’ve always spoken out about the need to bridge gaps. I know we can live in a world that’s not 100% tribalized.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Christiane Amanpour exits CNN with a legacy shaped by the debate over Israel appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators
(JTA) —
EDMONTON, Canada – Duncan Kinney, a former journalist with the left-wing website Progress Report, pleaded guilty to criminal mischief on Monday, four years after he was arrested for vandalizing monuments to Ukrainian Nazi collaborators in Edmonton, Alberta.
Monday’s guilty plea was an anticlimactic not-quite-end to a case that appeared to be run-of-the-mill vandalism but was so culturally charged that it drew the attention of everyone from the Premier of Alberta to Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto.
In 2021, Kinney broke the news story that someone had spray-painted “Actual Nazi” on a bust erected to honor WWII military commander and Nazi collaborator Roman Shukhevych and then painted “Nazi Monument” and “14th Waffen SS” on a memorial to the SS Galizien, a Ukrainian military unit that was part of the Nazi Party’s military wing.
According to court documents, Kinney was caught on a security camera spray-painting the Shukhevych monument shortly after midnight on Aug. 10, 2021, and caught again eight hours later photographing his handiwork. He then sent an email to the staff of the Ukrainian Youth Unity Complex, where the monument was located, explaining that Progress Report had received photos of the defaced monument. The brief email concluded with “Do you have any statement or information on this matter? Was Roman Shukhevych a Nazi or Nazi collaborator? Our deadline is 3:15 pm. Thank you.”
Kinney initially pleaded not guilty to one count each of criminal mischief and mischief relating to a war memorial. He suggested he’d been targeted because he was critical of the Edmonton Police Service and alleged that they were trying to silence him.
He is due to be sentenced Jan. 25, 2027, at which time the crown prosecutor is expected to drop the more serious charge of defacing a war memorial, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
Neither Kinney nor his defense attorney, Tom Engel, would comment after the court appearance. However, the board of Progress Report issued a statement decrying its former employee’s actions, calling committing a crime and reporting that somebody else did it “a cardinal breach of journalistic ethics and not acceptable behavior within any media organization. Mr. Kinney has always maintained his innocence in this matter and we trusted him; today’s news was an unpleasant surprise for us.”
Ultimately, the case exposed deep divisions in the Ukrainian diaspora about the role that Ukraine played in the Holocaust.
Shukhevych was a leader in both the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). He was also an officer in a Third Reich auxiliary battalion. During World War II, he commanded troops that murdered Jews, Polish civilians, other national minorities, communists and his countrymen from Ukraine. And he helped marshal the fight for Ukrainian independence from the Soviets.
The monument to the SS Galizien is located at St. Michael’s Cemetery, less than two miles from the complex housing the Shukhevych bust. Among the unit’s members was Yaroslav Hunka, who, at age 98, received two standing ovations for his service in WWII and fighting for Ukrainian independence when he appeared in the House of Commons alongside visiting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in September 2023.
Nobody in Parliament, it seemed, was aware of Hunka’s Nazi past. When the news became public, the incident became a national embarrassment. At least temporarily, the country was forced to examine how it dealt with WWII war criminals.
In Edmonton, however, the blunder appeared to have no impact on Kinney’s case. For his alleged vandalism to the SS Galizien monument, he had been charged not with simple mischief, but with vandalizing a war monument.
“We do not consider a statue honoring a Nazi to be a war monument,” says Jaime Kirzner-Roberts, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center in Toronto. “When we talk about veterans’ monuments, we are talking about Canada’s veterans. We are not talking about Nazi veterans.”
Kirzner-Roberts’ organization, B’nai Brith Canada and the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, as well as local politicians and academics, have been asking for years for the monuments to be removed.
“I think that in the case of the Shukhevych monument, you shouldn’t put up monuments to people responsible for mass murder,” says John-Paul Himka, a University of Alberta professor emeritus of history, whose 2021 book “Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust” examines the role that the OUN and UPA had in destroying Ukraine’s Jewish population during WWII.
“As for the Waffen-SS memorial, Austria has also been trying to get rid of their Waffen-SS memorials and it’s an issue around the world, really, how much you want to put up memorials to SS men or to people who collaborated with the Nazi state.”
Less than six months after the Hunka debacle in Parliament, the monument to the SS Galizien at the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery in Oakville, Ontario, was permanently removed. Himka doesn’t see anything like that happening in Edmonton, a city with the largest population of people with Ukrainian descent in a country with one of the largest populations of people with Ukrainian descent outside of Ukraine.
“The diaspora community doesn’t want to hear about this,” he says. “They don’t want to confront the history, and nobody is telling them otherwise really.”
The courtroom, though, did host one such confrontation. At the conclusion of Kinney’s appearance, two women who appeared to be in their 40s and who had spent the half-hour proceedings knitting, engaged in a conversation with two men who appeared to be at least twice their age and were sitting across the aisle.
The discussion started innocently enough, with inquiries as to what brought each of them to the courtroom. When the women said that Shukhevych was a Nazi who had killed thousands of innocent people, the temperature heated up.
When the women insisted, the men all but rolled their eyes. “That’s Russian propaganda,” they scoffed, then got up and marched together out of the courtroom.
The post Former Edmonton journalist admits to vandalizing monuments of Ukrainian Nazi collaborators appeared first on The Forward.
