Russia - Ukraine - Estonia

• Unknown vandals painted antisemitic threats on the walls of the “Siyanie Chesed” Jewish Center in Murmansk. The words “Beat the Kikes” and “Holocaust 2007”. In July 2006, vandals painted “Death to the kikes” on the building.
• In the late-night hours of 20^th January 2007, a drunken 17-year-old vandal smashed the menorah made of ice that stood in front of the synagogue in Krasnoyarsk. The synagogue guard saw what was happening and hit the emergency button. A police vehicle arrived one minute later and apprehended the thug as he continued to smash the menorah. He was arrested and taken to jail where he will remain throughout the proceedings against him. The man whose serves as the emissary and the town's rabbi, Rabbi Benny Vogner, said: "The entire incident was recorded on the security camera, and luckily it ended with the arrest of the perpetrator".
• A member of Russia's Communist Party's Central Committee has accused Jews of committing genocide against ethnic Russians, according to a January 18 report posted on Antisemitizmu.net.
• Vandals desecrated a synagogue in a southern Russia city at the weekend with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans. An enquiry has been launched into the incident at Voronezh, the Itar-Tass news agency reported, citing local prosecutor Mikhail Usov. The city's Jewish community condemned the act, saying it would only stir up racial tension.
• Justice served: The editor of an antisemitic newspaper in Novgorod was sentenced to two years and four months in prison for inciting ethnic hatred, according to a January 20 report by Antisemitizmu.net.
• A group of youths attacked four Jewish teenagers in the Ramenskoe District of the Moscow Region. On the evening of February 18, the Jewish youths, who study at the Torat Chaim school in Ramenskoe, were waiting for a commuter train when a group of youths between 18 and 25 approached them and demanded to know their ethnicities and see their passports. A brawl ensued, and the Jewish teenagers were robbed of a cell phone and an MP3 player. One of them, an Israeli citizen, was hospitalized with a concussion.
• Vandals painted a swastika and the word "kikes" on a Holocaust memorial in Kaliningrad, Russia, according to a March 30 report by the Russian Jewish web site Jewish.ru. The vandalism took place on March 29 on the grounds of a Jewish cemetery. It is not clear from the report if police are investigating the incident.
• Seven gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in St. Petersburg, Russia were vandalized, according to a March 30 report by the Russian Jewish web site Antisemitizmu.net. Vandals painted swastikas and extremist graffiti on the gravestones. Police are investigating the incident.
• In March, in Minsk - Vandals damaged a monument to the Jews from the German city of Bremen who died in the Minsk ghetto during World War II. Unidentified perpetrators broke off part of a metal tablet fixed on the granite monument, which is part of a larger Holocaust memorial.
• On April 22, the eve of the 137th anniversary of Lenin's birth, vandals painted a Star of David on a large statue of the Soviet leader in Rostov-on-Don, Interfax reported. The perpetrators have not been found, and the motive is puzzling. Lenin, who founded the Soviet Union, had some distant Jewish ancestors but was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church and was extremely hostile to all religions. In a 2006 poll by the ROMIR sociological service he ranked third in popularity among Russian leaders since 1917.
• A Russian Jew has been stabbed to death in northern St. Petersburg, members of the city's Jewish community told Ynetnews. Dimitri Nikoulinsky, 22, was found dead with knife wounds to his throat by his mother minutes after the assault, his friend said. Two members of the Jewish community said the attack was "exactly" like other lethal assaults carried out by neo-Nazi groups against foreign students and an anti-fascist activist, and are convinced that the attack was a hate-crime.
• A bomb exploded in a synagogue in Saratov, according to an Interfax item on May 7. No one was hurt, but the building was slightly damaged, Russia's Congress of Jewish Religious Organizations and Communities told the news agency.
• Oleg Pashchenko, a member of the pro-Kremlin party Just Russia with a long history of antisemitic publishing, has on re-election to the Krasnoyarsk Region's parliament, according to a May 2 report by the Russian Jewish website Antisemitizmu.net. Pashchenko edits the local newspaper "Krasnoyarskaya Gazeta" which features articles that refer to Jews as "kikes" and "filth."
• On May 3, vandals splashed black paint on a synagogue in Dnepropetrovsk. The same day, an unidentified individual set fire to an exhibit in Kharkov organized by the Jewish Agency for Israel.
• On May 5 in Kiev, police warded off several attempts by members of the far-right Ukrainian Conservative Party to attack a left-wing march. While last May, the police "enabled" the same group of attackers to break up the march, this year they "acted decisively but correctly" to prevent violence, according to Likhachyov.
• In May, Brest – Vandals set fire to wreaths and flowers laid at the Holocaust memorial in the city center.
• In April, a Samara community member’s home was attacked by an arsonist and anti-Semitic graffiti reading “Kikes to Israel” was painted on a fence near the synagogue. Anti-Semitic leaflets also have been circulating throughout the city.
• On May 5, an explosive device was detonated in front of a synagogue in Samara. Police in the Russian city have classified an arson attack on a local synagogue as “hooliganism,” angering local Jewish activists. “This was not in any way an act of hooliganism,” a community member quoted on condition of anonymity told the Jewish.ru Web site. “Somebody planned this, somebody built the explosive device, somebody placed it there. I see this as an act aimed against the Jewish people. I hope that this case won’t have the brakes applied to it and that the culprits are found.” The May 5 attack is the latest in a string of attacks on the Jewish community in Samara. Police officials say they're not convinced the attacks are linked and see no reason to investigate them under Russia’s hate-crimes law, which mandates tougher penalties for “the incitement of hatred or enmity” aimed at a particular minority group. “The fact that the explosion took place at the window of the synagogue says nothing in and of itself,” a local police official said.
• On May 16, following complaints by a member of the national parliament, Vladimir Marushchenko, police in Kiev dispersed sellers of antisemitic and neo-Nazi literature on the Maidan, the city's main square. Officers justified the action by citing a technicality in the law -- rather than Ukraine's ban on the public incitement of ethnic hatred.
• On May 23, it was discovered that 20 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery had been vandalized in Chernigov. Police investigated the incident under article 297 of the Ukrainian criminal code ("Mockery of a Gravestone") and later detained a 14-year-old suspect.
• Ervin Kirshtein and a Canadian referred to only as Rabbi Zvi were attacked on Monday evening and berated with anti-Semitic slogans. Officials in Ivanovo, an industrial center northeast of Moscow, are treating the crime under Russia’s hate crime statute. "They were wearing traditional Jewish clothes at the moment of the attack. This possibly caused the attack," the regional prosecutor's office said, according to a report on Interfax. The prosecutor's office went on to say that "police found evidence proving that the suspects belong to the skinhead movement."
• Threatening graffiti was daubed on the door and hallway of an elderly Jewish woman in Murmansk, Russia, according to a June 15 report by the AEN news agency. The words "Death to the Kikes" were painted on the door of Kseniya Makeeva, and the word "Jew" was daubed on a hallway wall, accompanied by an arrow pointing toward her apartment. According to AEN, police "have not reacted to this incident in any way."
• Vandals painted antisemitic graffiti on the entrance arc of a Jewish cemetery in Petrozavodsk, Russia (Republic of Karelia), according to a June 17 report by the AEN news agency. The antissemitic insults, a swastika, and the emblem of the SS were discovered last week. In May, a similar act of vandalism took place at the cemetery. Jewish leaders have requested that police launch an investigation.
• At beginning of game against Macabbi Tel Aviv, Russian basketball club screens laser show depicting image of typical haredi Jew getting run over by steam train. Shocked by what they considered a blatant display of anti-Semitism, the heads of the Israeli team filed an official complaint with their Moscow counterparts.
• Justice Served: Kiev’s mayor Leonid Chernovetsky has ordered the closure of kiosks in the Ukrainian capital that sell anti-Semitic literature. Chernovetsky said that his city was going to remove the ‘illegally installed kiosks’ selling anti-Semitic pamphlets and periodicals published by MAUP, a private Kiev university with a history of anti-Semitism. MAUP's bookstall, not far from the Babi Yar ravine where tens of thousands of Jews were murdered by the Nazis, was removed 30 May despite protests by university representatives. MAUP publishes a wide spectrum of anti-Zionist, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic articles and books by Ukrainian and foreign authors. Jewish leaders in Ukraine have long criticized Ukrainian authorities for not doing enough to curtail anti-Jewish hate propaganda at the university.

Estonia

• Estonia's commemoration of its pro-German World War II past, including the re-enactment of a Nazi victory, has outraged European officials and the Russian Jewish community. Young Estonian ultra-rightists began a week of commemoration by re-enacting the 1941 Erna Campaign, when a diversionary platoon of 42 Estonian paramilitary volunteers trounced the Soviet Red Army. They were accompanied by dozens of young followers dressed in T-shirts with Nazi symbols, along with Estonian officials, including Parliament member Trivimi Velliste and Minister of Defense Jak Aaviksoo.  Estonia’s prewar Jewish population was virtually destroyed during the country’s four years of Nazi occupation. Estonia’s small Jewish population of 3,500 has stayed out of the fray, offering no formal comment on either the statue removal or this week’s commemorative events.

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Ukraine

• On 13^th January 2006, Neo-Nazis sprayed swastikas and antisemitic epithets such as "Jews, choke to death" and "Death to the Jews" on the walls, both inside and outside, of the last synagogue in the Ukrainian town of Mariupol.
• In early January 2007, the Golden Rose Synagogue in Lviv was desecrated. Words were daubed on the Synagogue's walls and in the area around it reading "Death to the Jews", "There will be no Jews in Lviv", "Juds must die" "Juden Raus". It is of note that the site is on the list of protected, historic sites in the country and serves as a center for religious life in the community.
• February: A monument to Holocaust victims and Jewish graves have been defaced with swastikas in southern Ukraine, an activist with a local Jewish community said Tuesday. Unidentified vandals desecrated the Holocaust Monument late Sunday with red swastikas and with the inscription "Congratulations on the Holocaust" and painted swastikas on 270 graves in a Jewish cemetery in the Black Sea port of Odessa, said Boleslav Kapulkin, a spokesman for Odessa's Jewish community. "It is awful. They insulted all Ukrainians and hurt Ukraine's image," Kapulkin told The Associated Press. The monument was erected at the site where thousands of Jews were killed and burned by the Nazis between 1941-1944. Kapulkin said police launched a probe into the vandalism.
• Justice attempted: A leading Ukrainian Orthodox cleric in Ukraine has demanded that the state return confiscated Torah scrolls to the Jewish community, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) has reported. On March 13, Archbishop Yuriy of Donetzk and Mariupol called on President Viktor Yushchenko, Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich, and authorities in the city of Zhitomir to facilitate the return of the scrolls to their original owners.
• Justice denied: The man who entered a Kiev synagogue last year with a large knife and announced his intention to kill the country's chief rabbi has been released from custody, according to a February 13 report by the Russian Jewish web site Antisemitizmu.net. Georgi Dobryansky was never charged with a hate crime despite his confession that he blamed Jews for "genocide" against Ukrainians, but he did serve a one-year sentence that expired this month. After leaving prison, he allegedly called the offices of a Ukrainian Jewish newspaper "Evreysky Obozrevatel" and threatened violence.
• About 70 tombstones of Holocaust victims were toppled, and some destroyed, in a historic cemetery in western Ukraine. The incident in the city of Chernovtsy took place on April 12, but was reported only on April 19. Local law enforcement agencies are investigating. Among the damaged tombstones some had been restored only recently by local businessmen.
• A Holocaust memorial in the town of  Khmelnitsky, in western Ukraine, was vandalized, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on May 2. Local Jewish community sources say that the mass
  grave was desecrated some time in April. The monument was erected after
  World War II, on the site of a Nazi massacre of 8,000 Jews. Activists have
  appealed to the town council to build a fence along the perimeter of the
  memorial.

• A Chabad official in Ukraine was targeted again by anti-Semitic vandals. Anti-Semitic graffiti that included "Death to Jews!" was scrawled last week on the apartment door of Nohum Tamarin, executive director of the Zhitomir branch of the Chabad-affiliated Federation of Jewish Communities. Tamarin and his wife, Broha, were attacked and severely beaten in August near their synagogue by two neo-Nazis. In the summer of 2006, similar graffiti defaced the street-level door of the family's apartment building in western Ukraine.
  

Uzbekistan

• Mark Weil, a theater director in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, was found murdered near his home Thursday night, according to theYediot Acharonot newspaper. There were stab wounds all over his body. Police said the murder was carried out by two men and was believed  to have been anti-Semitic. Weil was involved in the local Jewish community and founded a theater that often hosted Israeli drama and literature festivals.