Donetsk – Jewish Man Reported Shot And Killed By Ukrainian Rebels

Donetsk – A Jewish man was shot to death by pro-Russian insurgents in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk on Friday, community leaders told The Jerusalem Post on Monday.

According to Eduard Dolinsky, executive director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee in Kiev, the man was shot when attempting to prevent militants from commandeering his neighbors house. Rabbi Pinchas Vishedski, the spiritual leader of Donetsk’s orthodox community confirmed the man’s death. The Jerusalem Post was unable to confirm the deceased name.

Jews are not being specifically targeted by the rebels, Ukrainian Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich said.

“They are shooting indiscriminately and people are being killed so even if a Jew was killed, I don’t think anybody was killed because they were Jewish.”

Vishedski and other eastern Ukrainian leaders have previously made statements along the same lines, explaining that any danger to the local community comes from its presence in a conflict zone and not from any specific animus against Jews by either side.

Separatist leaders vehemently distanced themselves from flyers calling on the Jews of Donetsk to register with the city’s rebel administration during the early days of the civil war.

Bleich has previously accused Russia of using the spectre of anti-semitism as an excuse for intervention in Ukraine and has gone so far as to accuse Moscow of staging provocations against Jews to further its interests there.

The Russians “are cynically willing to play the Jewish card in the implementation of their objectives, and are therefore [shown to be] willing to sacrifice Jews,” Josef Zissels of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine, also known as the Vaad, told the Post in April.

There may be less than one thousand Jews left in Donetsk out of a pre-war population of eleven thousand, Vishedski told the Jerusalem Post earlier this week from Mariupol, where he fled with over a hundred families.