Lviv City Councilmen Want Jewish Group Investigated

(December 19, 2008)
Members of the far-right "Freedom" party on the Lviv, Ukraine city council sent an official request to the prosecutor's office demanding criminal charges against leaders of a local Jewish community organization, according to a December 18, 2008 report posted on the local news web site Zakhid.net.

The document, replete with antisemitic pejoratives, focuses on a November 3 screening of a film about the Holocaust that focused on what happened to the Jews of Lviv, the majority of whom were massacred by the Nazis with some help from Ukrainian collaborators. It is the latter point that the far-right city councilmen focused on, claiming that it inaccurately depicted Ukrainians as playing an integral role in the extermination of the Lviv Jewish community. Since the Chesed Arye organization distributed the film to a Polish language school and other schools in the city, the councilmen demanded criminal charges against that organization based on laws prohibiting ethnic discrimination. UCSJ