Uncategorized
In a Ukrainian city liberated from Russia, local Jewish leaders are being accused of collaboration
(JTA) — When Russian troops poured across the Ukrainian border in March, thousands fled from the cities that would be first in their path. But in Kherson, the southern port city with strategic value to the Russians, Rabbi Yosef Itzhak Wolff decided to stay put.
His decision to remain put him in line with the philosophy of his Jewish movement, Chabad, whose rabbis typically commit to the cities where they are stationed and stay there through thick and thin.
But his decision could also cost him the ability to serve Kherson’s Jews. According to a report this week in the New York Times, Wolff is now in Germany, concerned because some in Kherson accuse him of collaborating with the Russian forces.
Meanwhile, a member of his Jewish community is facing life in prison over his actions during the chaotic early days of the war, according to the New York Times report.
Russia captured Kherson on March 2, 2022, and for months, the city suffered a brutal occupation that resulted in hundreds dead and scores more “disappeared” or tortured, according to Human Rights Watch.
Among those living in the occupied city was Wolff, an Israel-born rabbi who arrived in Ukraine nearly 30 years ago, just after the fall of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s independence. For the past 13 years, he had presided over a Jewish community in Kherson estimated before the war at 8,000 people.
In the early days of the war, Wolff’s work to supply food, medicine and at least some semblance of a joyous Purim to his community was highly publicized.
During one trip, the Times of Israel reported, he dodged bullets shuttling food back to the city from the border with Crimea, where his brother is also a rabbi. In another, according to Chabad.org, he went out to deliver food even as Russian tanks rolled through the town.
“Despite heavy fighting in the streets of Kherson, Rabbi Yosef Wolff did not abandon his community for a moment, remaining in the war-torn city through it all and serving the local population,” Rabbi Motti Seligson, a spokesperson for the Chabad movement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He called Wolff a “true hero of the Jewish people and for people of good conscience everywhere.”
Before the Holocaust, Kherson was a major center of Jewish life, with some 26 synagogues, but now, there is only Wolff’s. And before the war, it was like Chabad centers around the world: serving a local community, but also famously welcoming to unfamiliar faces, including foreign visitors.
Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Wolff and mayor of Kherson Volodymyr Mykolaienko light Hanukkah candles, Dec. 19, 2017, in Kherson, Ukraine. (PLes Kasyanov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
Opening the doors to newcomers took on added gravity after the war began and Russians streamed into Kherson. For much of the year, it was unclear whether Ukraine would regain control of the city, or whether it would become like Crimea and remain under Russian occupation. But last month, Ukraine liberated Kherson, generating scenes of jubilation — and putting anyone perceived as collaborating with the Russian army under suspicion.
Some of that suspicion landed on Wolff, who had allowed Russian soldiers to pray in his synagogue. The soldiers were Jewish officers who had arrived with armed guards, he told the New York Times.
In the days after liberation, he left Kherson, and Ukraine, for Germany. Now, with efforts to penalize collaborators underway, he told the newspaper that he is not sure when or if he will return.
Among those who remained in Kherson was a prominent member of the Jewish community who is now being prosecuted for his choices amid the messy reality of occupation.
Illia Karamalikov, a nightclub owner and member of Kherson’s city council, was close to Wolff, frequently allowing Chabad to use his nightclub’s space for events, the rabbi told the New York Times.
In the early days of the occupation, Kherson descended into a state of lawlessness. The Ukrainian civil administration fled ahead of the Russian forces and, after conquering the city without much resistance, Russia took little responsibility for its administration, instead sending soldiers on to other targets such as neighboring regions of Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kryvyi Rih — Ukrainian president Voldymyr Zelensky’s hometown — and ultimately, Kyiv.
Looting was rampant, and cut off from power and supply lines, the thousands of people who remained in the city faced a real risk of starvation.
It was locals who managed to bring back some semblance of order. Karamalikov helped organize a 1,200-strong community patrol to enforce curfews and watch for looters.
A boy stands with Ukrainian flag in the central square of Kherson after the city was liberated from Russian occupation, Nov. 19, 2022. (Oleksii Samsonov/Global Images Ukraine via Getty Images)
It was in that role, according to the New York Times report, that he found himself face to face with a lost and confused Russian pilot, whom his men had taken into captivity. Karamalikov held the prisoner in a utility closet in his home for a night, before ultimately making the decision to return him to the Russian forces unharmed.
That earned him a 12-page indictment from Ukraine, as he ran afoul of new laws enacted at the outbreak of the war that stipulate that “cooperation with the aggressor state, its armed formations, or its occupation administration;” are punishable as acts of collaboration under Ukraine’s criminal code.
Many of those who spoke to the New York Times said the laws don’t account for the reality of living under occupation.
“All these people who ran away are judging us,” Wolff told the newspaper. “These are cruel times.”
Through returning the soldier, Karamalikov allegedly “organized the further participation of a Russian serviceman in aggression against Ukraine,” according to his indictment.
But many in Kherson are not sure what other option they had. Karamalikov’s community watch organization was a volunteer and non-military force whose limited power involved pressing looters into doing community service. To have harmed the soldier would have made them combatants against Russia.
“We wondered later: Should we have killed the soldier and kept it secret?” one of Karamalikov’s watchmen, Andriy Skvortsov told the New York Times. “But I’ve decided no, that wouldn’t have been good.”
“With a life in his hands, I can’t imagine Illia ever killing anyone,” Wolff told the newspaper. “What he did was the most humane decision he could make.”
—
The post In a Ukrainian city liberated from Russia, local Jewish leaders are being accused of collaboration appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Chicago Adopts IHRA Definition of Antisemitism
Chicago, United States, on Aug. 22, 2024. Photo: J.W. Hendricks/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
The City Council of Chicago, Illinois, voted on Tuesday to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, becoming one of many governments and municipalities to affirm its utility as a reference tool for identifying antisemitic hate crimes and a safeguard of Jewish civil rights.
The measure was passed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorated the 81st anniversary of the day when Jewish prisoners were liberated from Auschwitz, the Nazis’ deadliest extermination camp during World War II.
“Chicago now proudly joins a global consensus of more than 1,200 entities worldwide, including the United States, 37 US state governments, and 98 city and country bodies who have adopted this definition,” city council member Debra Silverstein, alderman of the 50th Ward, said in a statement praising the adoption. “At a time when antisemitic hate crimes are surging locally, this unanimous City Council action sends an unmistakable message that anti-Jewish hate has no place in Chicago.”
IHRA — an intergovernmental organization comprising dozens of countries including the US and Israel — adopted the “working definition” of antisemitism in 2016. Since then, the definition has been widely accepted by Jewish groups and lawmakers across the political spectrum, and it is now used by hundreds of governing institutions, including the US State Department, European Union, and United Nations.
According to the definition, antisemitism “is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere. Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
Chicago’s embrace of the definition comes amid a historic surge in antisemitic incidents across the US and the world.
In 2024, as reported by the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) latest annual audit, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents — an average of 25.6 a day — across the US, creating an atmosphere of hate not experienced in the nearly thirty years since the ADL began tracking such data in 1979. Incidents of harassment, vandalism, and assault all increased by double digits, and for the first time ever a majority of outrages — 58 percent — were related to the existence of Israel as the world’s only Jewish state.
The ADL also reported dramatic rises in incidents on college campuses, which saw the largest growth in 2024. The 1,694 incidents tallied by the ADL amounted to an 84 percent increase over the previous year. Additionally, antisemites were emboldened to commit more offenses in public in 2024 than they did in 2023, perpetrating 19 percent more attacks on Jewish people, pro-Israel demonstrators, and businesses perceived as being Jewish-owned or affiliated with Jews.
Illinois alone saw the eighth most antisemitic incidents in the country with 336, a 59 percent increase from the previous year which led the nation.
The ADL’s “Heat Map,” which tracks hate crimes in real time, shows 105 antisemitic hate incidents recorded in 2025.
In one disturbing incident in the Highland Park suburb of Chicago, an antisemitic letter threatening violence was mailed to a resident’s home. So severe were its contents that the FBI and the Illinois Terrorism and Intelligence Center were called to the scene to establish that there was no imminent danger, according to local news outlets. Later, the local government shuttered all religious institutions as a precautionary measure.
With Tuesday’s measure, Chicago became the second largest US city to adopt the IHRA definition. However, it is now the largest to have it on the books as New York City under its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, recently revoked it along with a series of other executive orders enacted by his predecessor to combat antisemitism
US Jewish groups sharply criticized the move.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry similarly lambasted the reversal as an invitation for intensified bigotry against Jewish New Yorkers, saying, “On his very first day as New York City mayor, Mamdani shows his true face: He scraps the IHRA definition of antisemitism and lifts restrictions on boycotting Israel. This isn’t leadership. It’s antisemitic gasoline on an open fire.”
The definition could have been problematic for Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and avowed anti-Zionist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career and been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. A supporter of boycotting all entities tied to Israel, he has repeatedly refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; routinely accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; and refused to clearly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used to call for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
Israel is teaming up with the far right to fight global antisemitism
The Israeli government’s second annual antisemitism conference in Jerusalem this week is part of a relatively recent move by the country to concern itself with countering global antisemitism.
Early Zionists presented the State of Israel as a solution to antisemitism, sometimes downplaying the concern Jews expressed about their persecution. “The Jewish people were mistaken for blaming antisemitism for all the troubles and suffering endured in the diaspora,” David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister, wrote in 1950. “This is one of the blind spots that the Jewish people were stricken with in exile.”
But in the decades since, and especially since the government established its Ministry of Strategic Affairs 20 years ago, Israel has poured tens of millions of dollars into fighting antisemitism in the diaspora.
“You must declare, no more antisemitism. Not here. Not now. Not anywhere,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told attendees at the Jerusalem conference. “Not on the right, not on the left.”
Netanyahu’s rhetoric mirrored the way many American Jews think about antisemitism, with concern shifting since Oct. 7 from an overwhelming focus on the far right to equal levels of concern across the political spectrum.
Israel, though, has adopted a strategy to combat antisemitism with little precedent in the diaspora: It’s partnering with the far right to fight two groups that Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs and countering antisemitism, believes are a shared enemy for Jews and European nationalists: the “woke far left” and Muslim extremists.
Concern about antisemitism on the right is relegated to what Chikli calls the “woke right,” meaning figures like Tucker Carlson and former U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have turned against Israel in recent years.
This framework leaves space to partner with European officials like Jordan Bardella, a French politician who attended the conference and has called for closer ties between Israel and France even as he leads a party founded by a Holocaust denier.
Chikli’s approach threw last year’s inaugural conference into turmoil as Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, British Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and several other prominent leaders pulled out of the event over the inclusion of far-right figures.
Yet Chikli doubled-down this year, reportedly dropping the ADL from his guest list while welcoming Sebastian Kurtz, the former Austrian chancellor who has railed against “political Islam,” far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders, and Dominik Tarczynski, a Polish member of European parliament who has called Islamists “sick animals” and pledged to “fight for Christian Europe until the final victory.”
***
Some have argued that Jews should embrace these tactical alliances so long as they help address a common goal — support for Israel in Europe, say, or pressure on university leaders to address campus protests in the U.S.
But most diaspora Jews have taken a much dimmer view of antisemitism strategies that appear too one-sided. While the Israeli government presented Leo Terrell, Trump’s antisemitism task force chair, with its annual Award of Honor ahead of the conference, many Jews in the U.S. have opposed the antisemitism policies that Terrell and the White House have promoted.
And when the Heritage Foundation released their blueprint for Trump to fight antisemitism, several prominent Jewish organizations rushed to distance themselves from the plan, despite supporting some of its ideas for targeting anti-Zionists, because it completely ignored far-right antisemitism.
Israel, though, is in a bind.
Given their relatively small share of the population, Jews inevitably seek to craft narratives about antisemitism that can help build a broader coalition of supporters.
For liberal Jews, who make up a majority of the American Jewish community, that often means joining with other minority groups by connecting antisemitism to other forms of racism and discrimination.
But that’s a nonstarter for the Israeli government, which is now treated as a pariah by most non-Jewish liberals outside the country, compelling it to embrace a different narrative that views its controversial conduct in Gaza as an asset: Israel is on the front lines of the battle against the threat radical Islam poses not only to Israelis and Jews but also to white, Christian Europeans and Americans.
“This conference seeks to banish political correctness,” Chikli declared during his welcome address, outlining a “struggle of the free world against the imperialism and tyranny of radical Islam.”
It’s an effective strategy for joining Israel’s cause to that of the growing nationalist movements in Europe, though it also threatens to drive a deeper wedge between American Jews and Israel.
Chikli, at least, seems to have made his peace with such a rupture and suggested that it was liberal Jews who had gone “against Torah” by succumbing to “progressive, woke neo-communist ideology.”
“This is the reality,” he said. “At the core, we’re very different.”
GO DEEPER:
- Hosting Europe’s far-right again, minister says Diaspora criticism ‘just a disagreement’ (Times of Israel)
- Israel’s antisemitism confab welcomes far-right pols, but draws less fire than last year (Times of Israel)
The post Israel is teaming up with the far right to fight global antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
BBC Apologizes for Not Mentioning Jews During Holocaust Remembrance Day Coverage
The BBC logo is displayed above the entrance to the BBC headquarters in London, Britain, July 10, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams
The BBC apologized on Tuesday night after at least four of its presenters failed to mention the murder of Jews in the Holocaust during the national broadcaster’s coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“BBC Breakfast” presenter Jon Kay said on air Tuesday morning that Holocaust Remembrance Day was “for remembering the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime over 80 years ago.” Several BBC broadcasts by some of its most well-known presenters included similar comments that omitted the mention of Jewish victims when discussing the Holocaust.
In one broadcast, “BBC News” presenter Martine Croxall also said Holocaust Remembrance Day is a day “for remembering the six million people who were murdered by the Nazi regime over 80 years ago.”
BBC World News presenter Matthew Amroliwala introduced a bulletin on his show with the same scripted line.
On the BBC Radio 4 program “Today,” presenter Caroline Nicholls discussed plans to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and said in part: “Buildings across the UK will be illuminated this evening to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the six million people murdered by the Nazi regime more than 80 years ago.”
“Is the BBC trying to sever all ties with their Jewish listeners? Even on Holocaust Memorial Day, the BBC cannot bring itself to properly address antisemitism,” the Campaign Against Antisemitism posted on X. “This is absolutely disgraceful broadcasting. BBC, we demand an explanation for how this could have happened.”
“The ‘Today’ program featured interviews with relatives of Holocaust survivors, and a report from our religion editor. In both of these items we referenced the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust,” the statement read in part, as cited by GB News. “‘BBC Breakfast’ featured a project organized by the Holocaust Educational Trust in which a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust recorded her memories. In the news bulletins on ‘Today’ and in the introduction to the story on ‘BBC Breakfast’ there were references to Holocaust Memorial Day which were incorrectly worded, and for which we apologize. Both should have referred to ‘six million Jewish people’ and we will be issuing a correction on our website.”
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said in a post on X that the BBC’s not mentioning Jews during its coverage of Holocaust Remembrance Day is “hurtful, disrespectful, and wrong.”
“The Holocaust was the murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children. Any attempt to dilute the Holocaust, strip it of its Jewish specificity, or compare it to contemporary events is unacceptable on any day,” she added.
Danny Cohen, the BBC’s former director of television, said the mistake, especially on Holocaust Remembrance Day, “marks a new low point” for the broadcaster. He said the mishap will surely be hurtful to many in the Jewish community “and will reinforce their view that the BBC is insensitive to the concerns of British Jews.”
“It is surely the bare minimum to expect the BBC to correctly identify that it was six million Jews killed during the Holocaust,” said Cohen, as cited by the Daily Mail. “To say anything else is an insult to their memory and plays into the hands of extremists who have desperately sought to rewrite the historical truth of history’s greatest crime.”
This year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day marks the 81st anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration camp in 1945. On Tuesday, King Charles and the Queen Camilla lit candles at Buckingham Palace in honor of the annual commemoration and hosted a reception for Holocaust survivors and their families. Last year, King Charles, who is patron of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, became the first British monarch to visit Auschwitz on the 80th anniversary of its liberation.
Tuesday was not the first time that the BBC has come under fire for its coverage of issues concerning the Jewish community or Israel.
In February 2025, the BBC apologized for “unacceptable” and “serious flaws” in its documentary about Palestinian children living in the Gaza Strip, after it was revealed that the documentary’s narrator was the son of a senior Hamas official. An internal review by the British public broadcaster also revealed that the documentary breached the BBC’s editorial guidelines on accuracy.
In July, the BBC apologized for streaming a live performance by the British punk rap duo Bob Vylan at the Glastonbury Festival, during which the band’s lead singer led the audience in chanting “Death to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
Also last year, the host of “Good Morning Britain” apologized on-air for failing to mention Jewish victims of the Holocaust during her coverage of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.