How Anti-Semitism Unites a Soviet-style Dictator and a Liberal Harvard Alumni?
Surveys report 34% rate of support to antisemitic stereotypes in Eastern Europe. However, major index do not measure the state of political antisemitism in East European countries. While there are many reports on Russia and Ukraine, researchers often ignore smaller countries such as Moldova and Belarus.
Antisemitism is a widespread phenomenon in Eastern Europe. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) antisemitism index for 2014-2019, 34% of the East European population is prone to antisemitism. This index is based on surveys about the support of stereotypical antisemitic statements. According to the ADL, Ukraine (46%) Romania (47%), Poland (48%), and Hungary (42%) have the highest numbers of support to antisemitic statements. Belarus (38%), Lithuania (36%), Russia (31%), and Moldova (30%) are somewhere in the middle. Estonia (22%) and the Czech Republic (12%) have the lowest rates of support to antisemitic statements.
Source: https://global100.adl.org/map/eeurope
The ADL research is based on mass surveys, which ignore such important factors as political antisemitism. This phenomenon has been thoroughly studied in Russia by the SOVA Center since the early 2000, but has not been widely addressed in countries such as Belarus and Moldova.

Like many other post-Soviet states, these countries have indistinct memories about Holocaust, which allows to political antisemitism to blossom. By 1941, both Belarus and Moldova had significant Jewish populations that suffered Nazi violence and mass executions. The Soviet policy for non-distinguishing the Holocaust out of the narrative about 17,9 mln civil casualties - unified under the supranational term "Soviet people"- left a lot of blank slates in the memories of these two states. This created a political vacuum that has been filled with political agendas.
Belarus
A Holocaust memorial "Yama" at the execution site in Minsk.
In recent years, the Lukashenko regime made multiple attempts to cross out the Jews from the story of mass extermination of the civil population of Belarus during WWII. Belarus suffered terrible losses under the Nazi occupation and became a graveyard for almost 1 mln Jews (90% of all Jewish population of Belarus in 1941).

On Belarus's Independence Day, July 3, 2021, Lukashenko declared that the prosecutor's office had started the investigation of the "Holocaust of the Belarusians." He added that "The Jews managed to prove it. Now the entire world worships them and is even afraid to criticize them." The prosecutors fulfilled Lukashenko's declaration and on August 23, 2021, published a part of its investigation of mass murder in Bronnaya Gora. According to the report, in 1942 the Nazis tortured and killed over 48,000 people there. What is new about this? Only the fact that apparently all of the executed were Belarusians. The prosecutor's office simply removed the Jews from the story (see Yad-Vashem for comparison).
Aleksander Lukashenko
Although the world has become accustomed to Lukashenko's insane behavior, his attempt to snatch the topic of Holocaust yet again proves that he has no moral or ethical boundaries. However, there is a certain political rationality behind Lukashenko's actions. After the brutal repressions of summer 2020, Belarusian society has split in pro and contra, leaving very few citizens in the "neutral zone." There is no way for Lukashenko to restore or enlarge the group of his supporters, so he focuses exclusively on the core of his followers. His attempt to steal the topic of Holocaust is a way to reinforce the WWII myth that resonates among his people, who have fragmentary knowledge about the Holocaust and can consume a new version of it, proposed by "so-called" (an everyday reference to Lukashenko in Belarus). However, it would hardly be surprising if Lukashenko attempts to get a new compensation from Germany for the "Holocaust of Belarusians."
Moldova
A Jewish family gravestone that commemorates the sons fallen in fights with the Nazis in 1945 and grandmother with children and grandchildren killed by the Romanian gendarmes
As in Belarus, the topic of Holocaust in Moldova had never been a part of the WWII discourse. In 1941, Moldova also had a significant Jewish population. Over 300,000 Jews had been exterminated and displaced to transnistrian camps during the Romanian-German invasion. One of the few Moldovan Holocaust historians in Moldova, Sergei Nazaria (1958-2020), argues that the knowledge about this event in this country is close to zero. Professor Nazaria dedicated his career to the study of Holocaust in Moldova and authored multiple influential monographs, one of which will be published post-mortem. After the end of WWII, Moscow had to establish friendship between socialist Romania and Moldova. A part of this policy was whitewashing the Romanian aggression, which removed the topic of Holocaust from historical discourse. But what explains the existence of political antisemitism and the silencing of the Holocaust after 30 years of independence?
Sergei Nazaria (1958-2020)
Prof Nazaria was a friend and advisor of The Bridge. His strive to revive the memory of Holocaust in Moldova was so sincere that he shared all his manuscripts and sources even before they were published.
The memory of the Holocaust does not fit the interest of the "unifiers," a Moldovan political movement that advocates for association with Romania. In the first part of the 20th century, Romania had made multiple attempts to annex Moldova, which Bucharest claims to be its historical land. This idea has many supporters among the "unifiers" in Moldova, who face resistance from the left and pro-Russian parties. The "unifiers" strive to make Moldova an EU country through unification with Romania (full EU member since 2007). Acknowledgement of Romanian crimes against the Jewish population gets in the way of such integration. According to Diana Dumitru, the "unifiers" in academia and political parties hold the process of acknowledgement of Romanian crimes and prefer to silence the Holocaust for political purposes. However, that is not the only problem. The left and pro-Russian parties do nothing to commemorate the Holocaust even when they hold power. The memory of the 300,000 Jews who perished is lost in the political battles between those who want to forget and those who simply do not care.

The disease of Antisemitism affects not only the Soviet-style dictators, but also liberal Presidents with American education. The President of Moldova, Maia Sandu, a Harvard Graduate and a former advisor to the World Bank director in DC, allows to erect monuments to Nazi criminals in the places of mass execution of Jews. On September 17, 2021, administration of Sandu's native province of Făleşti inaugurated a monument to Romanian soldiers. This in a form of a cross depicts the crucifixion. According to the author it has to remind about "sacrifices of Romanian soldiers." The Soviet investigation revealed that these "sacrifices" involved torture and execution of over 5000 Jews, mass rape of girls under 18, theft, and abuse. The Yad-Vashem collection reveals that the "sacrifices" also included executions of kids from 2 to 5 y.o. together with their parents.

In 2018, Maia Sandu's claimed that the Romanian organizer of Holocaust, Ion Antonesku, could be described both "positively and negatively." Today the President claims that she did not mean to whitewash Romanian Furher.
We Call You to Action
Do not let 300,000 perished Jews to be forgotten
As a research network, we conduct a lot of Holocaust-related studies. We often encounter barbaric ignorance, indifference, neglectfulness, and criminal attempts to wipe out the history of Holocaust from public memory. We strive to fight these seeds of hatred and do whatever we can to restore historical justice. One of our projects took us to Transnistria, where we followed the deportation path of Moldovan Jews. In the course of this research we met a school teacher, Yurii Zagorcea, who created an NGO for commemoration of Holocaust in Moldova and called it "Nemurire" [Eternity, Immortality]. Yurii and his wife Tatiana fight the darkness of deliberate neglect of the Holocuast alone (see our article for the context). If you have ever worked with witnesses' testimonies from Moldova, they were likely collected by Yurii and Tatiana. Today this couple strives to commemorate the victims of deportations and establish monuments along the paths from Moldova to the extermination camps in Ukraine. They try to restore the names of the fallen in each execution place and carve them on memorial stones. Their second ambitious project is the introduction of the first school textbook that will tell the history of the Holocaust in Moldova. If you would like to help their project with expertise, media coverage, money, or in any other way, feel free to write me an email at ivan.thebridge@gmail.com. I'll help to establish communication with Yurii and Tatiana.

Let's make history together!

Sincerely,
Ivan Grek, PhD
The Bridge Research Network, CEO
Ivan Grek, CEO
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