Joe Millis travels to central Asia and meets Jerusalem-born and British-educated Rabbi Yeshaya Cohen who presides over the small community in the country
The editors of the jewseurasia.org website have approached the Chairman of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress (EAJC) Program Committee, one of the Congress founders, Josef Zissels to ask for his comments on the current situation within the EAJC.
The project was implemented by the Lukshtein Center of Jewish Education in the Diaspora (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) with the support from the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress.
Not to take into consideration the remarkable inner work that the Ukrainian people have done would be another form of dishonesty, another corruption of memory, another version of the same rewriting of history—it would be an unwriting, yes, carried out by stopping the recording of a process worthy of being memorized at a moment that suited the Russian writers of Ukrainian history.
Speech of the Vice President of the World Jewish Congress, co-President of the Association of Jewish Communities and Organizations (Vaad) Ukraine Andrei Adamovsky.
Those who died at the Maidan are called the Heaven’s Hundred in Ukraine, because a “hundred” was the structural unit of Maidan’s Self Defense Forces. It is largely a symbolic name - not all of those murdered in the death throes of the criminal regime were active participants of these groups, which were created over the three months of protests. But the name stuck nonetheless. It has been proposed to rename Institutskaya street, covered in blood on February 20th, the day of the massacre, into Heaven’s Hundred Street. I am certain that someday I will show my children a memorial to the Heaven’s Hundred. It will be on the Maidan, restored after the battles and washed of grime. I will lay flowers and a small stone at the monument, as it is done in the Jewish tradition, and will keep my silence for some time, for I do not know how to pray.
Wearing a kasket cap instead of a kippah in public is a typical Jewish look – this young man could pass as a teacher of national-religious yeshiva, and yet – he is one of the key people in a complex defense system of Maidan and the barricades on Hrushevskoho Street.
On December 15, 2013, Josef Zissels, Congress of National Communities of Ukraine (CNCU Executive Director), Head of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine (VAAD of Ukraine), member of the Helsinki group since 1978, former political prisoner gave a speech at the People’s Assembly of Euromaidan, during the Day of Dignity in Kyiv.