Republic of Belarus 2005

 

The level of antisemitic activity in 2005 remained unchanged from the previous year and relatively low compared to that in Russia and Ukraine. Violence was expressed mainly in the desecration of Jewish graves and anti-Jewish graffiti in public places. Since 1988 no antisemitic incident in Belarus has been seriously investigated, no perpetrator punished and most cases go unpublicized. Nevertheless, in 2005 there were several attempts to obtain a public condemnation of the authors of antisemitic publications.

 

background

Head of the republic since 1994 is President Aleksandr Lukashenko. Amendments to the Constitution, approved in 1996, strengthened his power. Formally, the highest legislative body is the Parliament – the National Assembly of the Republic of Belarus, with two chambers: the House of Representatives and the Republican Council. The government holds executive power. Nevertheless, the rains of power are solely in the hands of the president and his close supporters. The regime is a very centralist and nothing is done without the president’s approval. All opposition and any opinions that contradict those of the president are suppressed. This process reached a peak in October 2004 when a referendum allowed Lukashenko to be elected for a third term, contravening the country’s constitution. These characteristics of the regime caused a deterioration in relations with the West and several of Lukashenko’s supporters were even forbidden entry to European Union countries and the US However, Belarus has very good relations with its neighbor Russia, and the authorities nurture the Soviet legacy and Russian anti-western nationalism.

The law on religion (‘On Freedom of Religious Believers and Religious Organizations’, 2002) formalized restrictions on religious freedom, inter alia, limiting the freedom of religious organizations to conduct religious education. Foreigners are not allowed to head religious organizations, which must also obtain governmental permission before distributing any publication or carrying out any activity such as a conference. A Concordat was signed in 2003 with the Belarusian Orthodox Church (BOC), which elevated its status and provided it with privileges not enjoyed by other faiths. The Concordat gave the BOC exclusive rights to disseminate religious propaganda in the country.

 

the Jewish Community

According to the last census held in 1999, there were 29,000 Jews in Belarus (out of about 9 million). However, local Jewish organizations put the figure at 50,000 Jews, while the Jewish Agency estimates that 70,000 people are entitled to immigrate to Israel. About half of the Jews live in the capital Minsk.

The Orthodox Union, Lubavich and Reform represent the Jewish religion in Belarus. The Union of Jewish Associations and Communities headed by Leonid Levin, has branches in 24 cities; it is financed mostly by the Joint, which also funds the organization’s monthly newspaper, Aviv. Other publications are: Berega (a monthly published by the religious Orthodox Union), Gesher (published by the Bobruisk Jewish community) and Karlin (published by the Pinsk Jewish community). The yearly journal Mishpokha is issued in Vitebsk. Other organizations active in Belarus are the Union of Former Ghetto and Concentration Camps Inmates, the Union of World War II Veterans, the Holocaust Foundation in Minsk (with a branch in Brest), Maccabi and a children’s choir. In November 2005 a Public Academy for Jewish Culture and Arts was established; however the Ministry of Justice refused to register it, allegedly because its name contains the word ‘academy’, which can only be used for state institutions.

The Jewish pre-school and school education system consists of 13 Sunday schools under the patronage of the Union of Jewish Associations and Communities and the Jewish Agency (about 500 pupils around the republic); two Sunday schools under the auspices of Reform Judaism (in Bobruisk and Grodno); and one Sunday school for Jewish deaf children. There are Jewish classes at Minsk School No. 132 (supported by ORT) and a Jewish national school in Gomel. In Minsk, the Orthodox Union supports Bnei Akiva schools; Chabad backs two high schools (in Minsk and Bobruisk); and the Karlin-Stolin congregation funds a high school in Pinsk.

The Museum of History and Culture of Belarusian Jews was opened in 2002. It holds educational events, and engages in teaching and researching the Holocaust and the history and culture of the Jewish people.

Charitable activities in the republic are carried out by organizations (kheseds) which provide services such as food, homecare and medical care. Belarus victims of the Holocaust receive compensation from the Swiss Fund for Needy Victims of the Holocaust.

Although the 2002 law on religion classified Judaism as a ‘traditional confession’, restitution of community property is moving very slowly. During the past years only a few buildings of former synagogues were transferred to the Jewish communities.

 

antisemitic activity and extremist groups

The level of antisemitic activity in 2005 remained unchanged from the previous year and relatively low compared to that in Russia and Ukraine. The response to antisemitic incidents was even weaker than in Russia and Ukraine.

 

Violence and Vandalism

Violence was expressed mainly in the desecration of Jewish graves and anti-Jewish graffiti in public places. The large-scale destruction of gravestones and Holocaust memorials has become a routine event; in many cases the authorities refuse not only to help restore the gravestones but to react to these incidents. Swastikas painted on walls, fences and in underground passages were frequently observed.

In March 2005 memorial stones to Jews from Hamburg, Düsseldorf and Bremen (murdered in the Minsk ghetto in 1941−42) at the former Jewish cemetery in Minsk (where the Minsk Ghetto was located during the Holocaust) were desecrated. At the end of the summer, the symbol ‘SS’ was painted on the central stone of the same memorial. In early April a swastika and antisemitic insults were painted on one of the Holocaust memorials in Pinsk and on 26 April one of three Holocaust memorials in Lida was desecrated. Also in April, 20 tombstones were broken at the Jewish cemetery in Mikashevich, Brest region. On 28 May and in November gravestones were broken at the Jewish cemetery in Rechitsa. In July and August memorial plaques at places of mass murder of local and west European Jews (1941 and 1943) in the Borisov region were destroyed.

In December 2005 the Kuropaty memorial complex to Jewish, Muslim and Christian victims of the Stalinist repressions was vandalized. The perpetrators painted swastikas, ‘Slavianskii Soiuz’ the letters ‘SS’ and the number 1488 on the monument. Slavianskii Soiuz (SS) is a skinhead movement, founded in Russia in 1999 and headed by Dmitrii Demushkin. The number 1488 is the year when the first attempt to expose and punish the ‘Judaizers’ (a group of dissenters in Russia who refused to accept the official religious canon and were alleged by the Russian Orthodox Church to have been influenced by Judaism) took place in Novgorod. This might be interpreted as a threat to the Jewish population of Belarus. In addition, the number 14 usually stands for the 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children,” and the number 88 signifies “Heil Hitler.”

 

Antisemitic Publications

As in previous years, the “Belarusian Pravoslav Calendar” for 2005, distributed by the Holy Petropavlovskii Cathedral in Minsk, marks 3 May as a day of a prayer in memory of the child saint Gavriil, allegedly murdered by the Jews in 1690. The text of the prayer contains insults toward the Jews (see ASW 2003/4).

The newspaper Kommunist Belorussii (of the Belarus Communist Party) published in its 7th and 8th editions (February and March 2005) an article by a biology professor from Moscow, B. Protasov, entitled “Inter-Racial Marriages – A Means to Exterminate a Nation.” The piece paraphrased the Nazi theory about the destructive influence of the Jews in countries where they succeeded in seizing power.

Publication of books containing anti-Jewish propaganda continued at the Pravoslavnaia initsiativa, 70 percent of whose stocks are held by the Pravoslav diocese. An example is the book Convicting Those Who Slaughterl Russia, by Boris Mironov, formerly Russian minister of the press. This is a collection of articles attacking globalization, Jews and Zionism and including citations from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, antisemitic caricatures, the idea that the tsar’s family was murdered as part of a Jewish ritual, and Judaism and Zionism as being synonymous with Nazism.

In December 2005 the book Stalin’s Testament by Belarusian antisemitic author Eduard Skobelev appeared on sale. The book, containing the inscription “published with the support of the President of the Republic of Belarus,” includes odious fabrications about the Jewish people. In 2003 the manuscript of the book was partly published in the Neman journal. In his introduction Skobelev then wrote that the Jews have enormous capital and political influence and “a special technology … for maximizing their power.” Anti-Jewish motifs can be found in many of Skobelev’s publications. For example, on 5 April 2005 Respublika, the newspaper of the Belarusian Cabinet Council, published his article “Do Not Allow a Belarusian Maiidan [literally, ‘square’ or ‘assembly place’; after the Orange Revolution (2004) it became a synonym for the revolution],” containing stereotypes from the Soviet times and citations from the antisemitic press replacing the word ‘Jew’ with phrases such as ‘world government’, and ‘global/God-chosen architects’.

Antisemitic motifs can also be traced in articles written by Belarusian journalists abroad. In an article published on 7 September 2005 in the chauvinistic Moscow newspaper Zavtra, Evgenii Rostikov (a journalist at the above mentioned Respublika) continues the decades-old attempt to discredit the renowned Jewish painter from Belarus, Marc Chagall. Among other things, he names the events commemorating Chagall as “ritual dancing.”

 

Responses to Antisemitism

Since 1988 no antisemitic incident in Belarus has been seriously investigated, no perpetrator punished and most cases go unpublicized (as in Soviet times, when it was believed that if you did not talk about it, it did not exist).

In 2005 there were several attempts to obtain a public condemnation of the authors of antisemitic publications. On 15 March the Belarus Helsinki Committee (a voluntary, independent human rights organization, registered in 1995 by the Ministry of Justice) handed the Belarus Prosecutor’s Office and the minister of information a declaration, entitled “On Calls for Ethnic and Racist Hatred,” concerning the above mentioned article by B. Protasov in Communist Belorussii. The prosecutor replied that according to the Belarusian law of publishing and mass media, the newspaper and the journalist could not be held responsible for publishing material insulting the honor and dignity of a citizen or abusing the freedom of the press if it had previously been published by another source; thus, since Communist Belorussii had reprinted the article from the Russian newspaper Marsh Slavianki, the former could not be held responsible. At the same time, the Central Committee of the Belarusian Communist Party admitted that it was a mistake to publish the article since its content contradicted Marxist-Leninist ideology and the party’s political platform on the national question. This announcement was published in the edition of Communist Belorussii following the one containing the article. No other measures to discredit or disavow the article were taken.

In regard to E. Skobelev’s articles, the Israeli embassy in Belarus sent a letter expressing its concern to the Belarusian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Information, the Office of the President of the Republic of Belarus and to Respublika. The embassy published a press release on 13 May 2005 in the independent newspaper Belorusskaia Delovaia Gazeta.