In the hyper-sensitive international atmosphere surrounding Russia’s 2014 forceful annexation of Crimea, even a name tag can create a crisis. This lesson was learned by Chabad-Lubavitch, the Broklyn-based Haredi group which convened its annual emissaries conference in New Jersey on November 19. Among the 5,600 emissaries, or shluchim, from across the world attending the convention…
(JTA) — Police in Crimea, a territory that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, are investigating the desecration by robbers of a mass grave of Holocaust victims near the city of Simferopol. The investigation opened Tuesday following the unauthorized exhumations performed last week at the site of a firing trench, where Nazis and their collaborators…
This piece is part of a series about the issues in the 2016 presidential election. The next President has an enormous mess to clean up. Eight years of President Obama’s utopian rationalism has resulted in a sense of global unraveling — both of geostrategic stability and of American interests — and nowhere has it been…
During a meeting with Vladimir Putin, a leader of Reform Jews in Crimea said his community’s situation has improved since Russia annexed the peninsula from Ukraine. Anatoly Gendin, chairman of the Ner Tamid Reform Synagogue in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, thanked the Russian president Monday for what Gendin described as Russian authorities’ attentiveness to…
This was a year when stories of violence and injustice refused to die quietly. Near-universal access to high-quality cell phone video and social media has amplified the voices of the powerless so much that the powerful lost control of the spin. In early March, the Ukrainian region of Crimea was inundated by uniformed men without…
Leaders of a prominent Jewish community in Ukraine criticized European rabbis who attended a Kremlin-sponsored Holocaust commemoration ceremony in Crimea. The Jewish Community of Dnepropetrovsk condemned the actions of the rabbis in a statement that it posted on its website last week in connection with a ceremony that was held on July 10 in Sevastopol….
Russia’s chief rabbi Berel Lazar brought armed policemen, including riot police, to tour Crimea’s Reform synagogue in Simferopol, video footage shows. The chairman of the Ner Tamid Reform synagogue, Anatoliy Gendin, sharply criticized Lazar’s July 10 visit to his synagogue, suggesting that Lazar bullied his way inside the shul. Gendin, who was not in the…
A prominent Chabad rabbi from Moscow denied accusations that he and several of his colleagues, including a chief rabbi of Russia, forced their way into a Crimean Reform synagogue’s offices. Anatoly Gendin, chairman of the Ner Tamid Reform Synagogue in the Crimean capital of Simferopol, made the accusation in a Facebook post Friday titled “synagogue…
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