President of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine Boris Lozhkin on Monday thanked the Ministry of Internal Affairs for finding and placing under house arrest the perpetrators who attempted to set fire to the synagogue in Kherson on April 20 (Holocaust Memorial Day).
Lozhkin psoted on his Facebook page: “Less than a month has passed since the attempt to set fire to the synagogue in Kherson. The suspects have already been placed under round-the-clock house arrest.
“According to the investigators, the two perpetrators, who decided to ‘mark’ the Holocaust Remembrance Day, Yom Hashoah, in this way, happened to be sworn anti-Semites. If they knew a little more about the scale of the Holocaust and its reasons, they would probably not have committed this crime.
“The failed Kherson synagogue arson and the detention of the perpetrators showed the effectiveness of the cooperation between the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which we reached with the Minister of Internal Affairs Arsen Avakov in 2018. Since the beginning of this year, 7 cases of anti-Semitism have emerged, and were followed by an immediate reaction from law enforcement authorities.
“Once again, I would like to thank the Ministry of Internal Affairs for its effective work in detecting and curbing manifestations of anti-Semitism. The fewer such incidents, the healthier and more tolerant the whole society will be.”
Among the seven anti-Semitic cases there was damage to the property of the Cultural and Educational Center Beys Stern Shulman synagogue in Kryvyi Rih; an attack by a drunk man on Jewish community member in the synagogue in Vinnytsia; and calls to exterminate Jews and dissemination of anti-Semitic materials on social media by the residents of Cherkassy and Ivano-Frankivsk.