Jerusalem and New York – Two senior officials of the Simon Wiesenthal Center have urged the Ukrainian authoritiesto expedite an investigation recently initiated to determine why the police in the western Ukrainian city of Kolomiya demanded a list of all members of the local Jewish religious organization andtheir personal details, including home addresses and phone numbers.
Dr. Efraim Zuroff, director of the Center's Israel Office and Eastern European Affairs, wrote to Ukrainian ambassador to IsraelHennadii Nadolenko, and Mark Weitzman, director of government affairs, wrote to Ukrainian ambassador to the United States Volodymyr Yelchenko, to express the Center's concerns regarding thispotentially ominous development.
According to Zuroff:
"Such steps are unfortunately reminiscent of dark periods in our history, when demands of this kind were the precursor ofhorrific victimization and mass murder.
"I am aware that the Ukrainian authorities have initiated an investigation of the situation. Allow me, therefore, to urgethem to expedite their work in order to quickly identify those responsible and hold them promptly accountable."
According to Weitzman:
"I am writing on behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to express our outrage over learning about the attempted registrationof Jews in the city of Kolomyia. This is an extremely disturbing and shocking act that singles out Jews in a manner reminiscent of the harshest antisemitism of the past.
"This type of action falls precisely into the categories of antisemitism as defined by the International HolocaustRemembrance Alliance's (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism.
(Read the Center's recent report: A Watershed In the Fight AgainstAnti-Semitism).
"I call upon the government of Ukraine to react in a proper manner and to strongly condemnthis action and to immediately institute educational and training procedures to ensure that type of antisemitism is not repeated or encouraged."
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The Simon Wiesenthal Center is one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations with over 400,000 member families in theUnited States. It is an NGO at international agencies including the United Nations, UNESCO, the OSCE, the OAS, the Council of Europe and the Latin American Parliament(Parlatino).