RUSSIA – Demonstrators Call for Banning of Chabad in Russia

JP UPDATES – 19APR16  –  On Saturday, more than 100 demonstrators in the Russian city of Perm protested the municipal authorities allocation of land to the local Jewish community and called for an outlawing of Chabad in the city as well, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

At the demonstration, protesters sang the song “Holy War,” which is generally associated with the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazism in World War II.

At the protest, demonstrators carried signs reading “Chabad Out” and “Liberate us Russians from Chabad.” Still, more ominously, signs were carried reading “Chabad settlement is over the line: 1547,” possibly referring to Ivan the Terrible’s ban of Jews from entering or living in Russia that year, on the grounds that they “bring about great evil.”

Friction in Perm was sparked in 2013, over allegations that the Jewish community had made unauthorized use of a theater. Unknown individuals attempted to set fire to the local synagogue, presumably in retaliation. Chabad rabbi Boruch Gorin, who serves as co-chief rabbi of Russia along with Berel Lazar, denied the demonstrators claims that they were only opposed to Chabad, rather than Jews as a whole.

“The attempt to present Chabad as one thing and the Jewish community as another is false,” Gorin was quoted as saying by JTA. Chabad is currently Russia’s largest Jewish movement, with a presence in more than 100 cities throughout the country.

In a statement on April 10, state lawmaker candidate Vladislav Vikhorev said that in the 1990s, Jews were behind a “Jewish revolution that put Russian sovereignty itself on the brink of extinction,” which was “a well-planned, well-designed program of destruction of national culture, national education, national production and the national financial system.” Vikhorev’s statement was quoted by the news website Apostroph.