Russian Chief Rabbi accuses senior defence official of antisemitism

Berel Lazar levelled the antisemitism accusation at Aleksey Pavlov, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia in connection with the war in Ukraine.

A Chief Rabbi of Russia has accused a senior defence official of antisemitic hate speech in connection with the war in Ukraine, as a spokesperson for the rabbi warned of the onset of “a new era in Russia’s relations with Jews.”

Berel Lazar, one of Russia’s two chief rabbis, on Wednesday levelled the antisemitism accusation at Aleksey Pavlov, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia, a government committee of experts. In a column in the Argumenty i Fakty weekly newspaper, Pavlov spoke of the need to perform “desatanization” in Ukraine, which Pavlov claimed had hundreds of neo-pagan cults. He included “the Chabad-Lubavitch sect,” as Pavlov called it, on a list of various religious groups that he claimed prove his point.

Rabbi Boruch Gorin, the senior-most spokesperson for Lazar, on Wednesday wrote on Facebook that Pavlov’s words went farther than Stalinist propaganda in the 1930s and that he feared that the remark “will go down in history as beginning of a new era in Russia’s relations with Jews.”

Lazar’s office responded to the column with an open letter to unspecified “authorities” in Russia, calling Pavlov’s column “a piece of vulgar antisemitism.” In it, Lazar, whose group has been walking a political tightrope since Russia’s February invasion into Ukraine, said that Russian Jews “demand an immediate, unambiguous response by society and state authorities“ to Pavlov’s statements, which Lazar also termed “dangerous.”