UKRAINE (JTA) – A Ukrainian Jewish group accused the nation’s police force of “open anti-Semitism” after a high-ranking police official requested a list of all Jews in the western city of Kolomyya as part of an inquiry into organized crime.
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The official request to the head of Kolomyya’s Jewish community is dated Feb. 18, 2020, according to a photograph of the document that Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee, shared on Twitter Sunday.
“Please provide us the following information regarding the Orthodox Jewish religious community of Kolomyya, namely: The organization’s charter; list of members of the Jewish religious community, with indication of data, mobile phones and their places of residence,” read the letter.
The letter was signed by Myhaylo Bank, a high-ranking officer in the national police force who handles organized crime. The letter did not explain his unit’s particular interest in Kolomyya’s Jews.
The head of the city’s Jewish community, Jacob Zalichker, declined on Feb. 25 to provide the requested information, adding that his community would comply only when presented with a court-ordered warrant.
“It’s a total disgrace and open anti-Semitism,” Dolinsky told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s especially dangerous when it comes from a law enforcement agency that we have to fight the very thing it is perpetrating.”
Kolomyya and its environs, located about 250 miles southwest of Kiev, has several hundred Jews.
Get the hell out of town brothers & sisters!!! Don’t wait until too late
Disgraceful and disgusting bigotry.
The whole western ukrainia should be wiped out Lemberg, lwow and no lviv , they anticipated the advance of the Nazis and as they approached the initiated a program during which thousands of Jews were murdered and thousands of women raped. YMSH the entire western unkrainia
Western Ukrain was also known under Hitler ymsh as SS Standarte Galizien
A Yid meant to state “pogrom”, and not “program”.
Boroch you are correct /sorry for the typo
Can I ask why there are ONLY 9 comments about a story as terrible as this and every other stupid story about what this rav said or didn’t say Or any other story gets hundreds of comments??? What is wrong with VIN readers
Learn from – unusually recent- history. Go! Leave! You don’t belong there anymore. Come the US, go to Canada, Israel- anywhere, just get the heck out while you can still keep your possessions – and your children, and your lives
Remember, Yidden, Urkraine is where the Babi Yar massacre took place. The Nazis chose that place, because they knew that the local population of Ukrainians could have cared less as to the plight of Jews. I knew of a youth leader from a Shul, who about fifteen years ago, took a group of teens from the USA to see the site at Babi Yar. As they were walking through the area, they received weird and hostile looks from the locals. They were thinking “What are all of these Jews doing here, as we thought that we got rid of all of them”.