Senior Wiesenthal Center Official Meets With Chairman of Russian Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs

Senior Wiesenthal Center Official Meets Chairman of Russian Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs to Discuss Cooperationin Combating Glorification of Nazism and Distortion of Holocaust History in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Moscow – The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, today met in Moscow with Russian political leader Mikhail Margelov, Chairman of the Committee for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Senate and President of the “European Democrat Group” in the Council of Europe to discusspractical cooperation in combating recent phenomenon of Holocaust distortion and the glorification of Nazi collaborators in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The discussion focused primarily on theBaltic states and the Ukraine, where such phenomenon have increased in recent months and have included efforts to equalize the benefits of Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis to those ofRed Army veterans who fought against the Germans, as well as the attempts by Lithuania to prosecute Holocaust survivor and scholar and former Yad Vashem Chairman Dr. Yitzchak Arad.

Zuroff presented a number of projects relating to the historical events designed to help combat the wave of revisionism sweepingpost-Communist Europe and discussed the potential participation of Russian and Council of Europe institutions in mounting a campaign to achieve that goal. Margelov expressed his grave concernregarding the recent phenomenon and promised his assistance in helping to forge a working relationship between the Wiesenthal Center and the pertinent bodies in Russia and in the Council ofEurope to launch the effort.

Zuroff, who was a guest of KEROOR, the organization of Russian religious Jewish communities, also met with the local media andpresented an analysis of the problematic policies of post-Communist countries to Holocaust-related issues such as the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, Holocaust education, and documentation . In his words, “the battle for the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators will soon end and we will then face a new and equally-important struggle for truth in history.”
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