Wiesenthal Center pans Svoboda march but many Ukrainian Jews aren’t worried
A new year’s torchlight march through downtown Ukraine in honor of Holocaust era-Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera drew harsh criticism from the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Sunday, but failed to elicit condemnations by Ukrainian Jews.
Members of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party and the Right Sector movement marched down Khreshchatyk Street, one of Kiev’s main boulevard’s and the site of last year’s EuroMaidan revolution, to celebrate the one 106th birthday of Stepan Bandera, whose faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists helped murder thousands of Jews during the Second World War.
Five thousand people participated in the march, according to organizers, The Kyiv Post reported.
The “current government came to power using Bandera’s slogans, so it has to follow his ideas,” Svoboda leader Oleh Tyanhybok said before the march began, according to the Ukrainian newspaper.
“Holocaust perpetrators are the last people on Earth who deserve to be glorified, regardless of their nationalist credentials. This phenomenon, currently so common in post-Communist Eastern Europe, and especially in Ukraine and the Baltics, clearly shows that these countries don’t fully comprehend the obligations of true democracy,” SWC Jerusalem bureau director Dr. Efraim Zuroff said in a statement.
http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Wiesenthal-Center-pans-Svoboda-march-but-many-Ukrainian-Jews-arent-worried-386642
