THE JEWISH COMMUNITY

At the beginning of 2000, there were 33,300 Jews in Belarus, following a year in which 6,100 Jews left the country: 2,700 for Israel and 2,500 for Western countries; the rest were lost to the negative birth rate.

There are 20 Jewish organizations and religious communities in Belarus, most of them in the capital Minsk. As in Russia and Ukraine, they are engaged in Jewish education, aid for the needy, and preserving Jewish traditions and the memory of the Holocaust.

ULTRA-NATIONALIST ORGANIZATIONS AND ANTI-SEMITISM

The open exploitation of anti-Semitism by extreme right parties in Belarus diminished significantly in 1999 due to action taken by the authorities against their publications (see below).

Extremist Groups

Several fringe organizations -- the extreme right Belarussian Liberation Party (BPS), Right Revanche (PR) and the White Legion, a paramilitary rightist organization -- ceased to function in 1999. However, the Belarus branch of the neo-Nazi Russian National Unity (RNE), led by Andrei Valliulin, who served on the staff for the 1994 election of President Aleksandr Lukashenko, increased its activities markedly. They now have branches in 11 cities, the most active in Minsk and Vitebsk. They frequently demonstrate in the major cities, distributing nationalist and anti-Semitic materials, unhindered by the authorities. Their ideology is promoted in their newspaper Russkii poriadok (The Russian Order), in books and in posters produced in Russia. Government apathy to the RNE may be explained by the fact that, in addition to its racism, the movement supports the unity of Slavic peoples in one country, a position common to both the Russian and Belarus regime.

Anti-Semitic vandalism continued at about the same level as in 1998. Six incidents of desecration of Jewish cemeteries took place in 1999, as well as several incidents of vandalism of Holocaust memorials. In Rechitsa, for example, 24 tombstones were overturned and a memorial to victims of the Holocaust was destroyed, while in Brest a Holocaust memorial was damaged. In addition, arson attempts were made on the congregational building and on the Beit Israel Synagogue in Minsk, on 12 April 1999. No perpetrators were identified in any of these cases.

RESPONSES TO ANTI-SEMITISM

Under pressure from local Jewish organizations, the Belarus authorities took administrative steps in 1999 against nationalist newspapers which published anti-Semitic material. The government press commission denied a license, on 15 March 1999, to Slavianskaia gazeta (Slavic Gazette), published by the Slavic Rebirth movement whose headquarters are in Moscow, on the grounds that it infringed the law prohibiting racist propaganda (Article 5 of the Belarus Law on the Press). The paper ceased publication. Further, the commission gave an official warning, on 19 May 1999, to other Belarus papers which regularly print anti-Semitic material, including Slavianskii nabat (Slavic Bell), Lichnost (Personality) and Znamia junosti (Youth Banner).

On the other hand, local Jewish organizations lost their case against the distribution of an anti-Semitic book, War According to the Law of Abominations (Minsk, February 2000), published by the religious organization Orthodox Initiative in an edition of 30,000 copies. On 16 March 2000 the judge denied the suit, declaring that the court in Minsk would not decide on a book involving a historical dispute. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion constituted a chapter of the book, which, as a result of the court decision, continued to be distributed in Belarus, particularly in the bookshop chain run by the Russian Orthodox Church.