Thursday, January 02, 2025
Suspect At Large After Firebombing Chabad Synagogue in Ukraine
A firebomber struck a Chabad synagogue in Ukraine late Tuesday night as Jews across Mykolaiv gathered for public Hanukkah celebrations. Thankfully, no one was hurt in the attack. Police are reportedly still hunting for the suspect, who fled the scene after throwing the explosive.
Rabbi Sholom Gottlieb, who leads the Mykolaiv Jewish community, described how the attacker scoped out the building before striking.
"Last night, just before midnight, an unknown individual approached the synagogue door," he said in a statement to local media. "After checking that there were no people around, he threw the firebomb."
Ukraine's Jewish community, now numbering around 45,000, ranks as Europe's fourth-largest. But those numbers tell a story of decline, as before the Soviet Union fell in 1991, nearly half a million Jews called Ukraine home. Many fled to Israel, America, and Europe after communism's collapse. Russia's illegal 2022 invasion of Ukraine continues to spark further Jewish emigration from the country.
Though Ukraine is led by Jewish president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, its soil witnessed some of history's worst antisemitic atrocities, including the Babyn Yar massacre during the Holocaust. Disturbingly, some Ukrainians still celebrate Nazi collaborators like Stepan Bandera as national heroes.
Bandera led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during WWII. While he advocated for Ukrainian independence from Soviet rule, he also collaborated with Nazi Germany by ordering pogroms and ethnic cleansing against both Jews and Poles.
After the war, Bandera lived in exile in West Germany, continuing to lead the Ukrainian nationalist movement from abroad and working against Soviet influence. A KGB agent named Bohdan Stashynsky killed him on October 15, 1959, by using a cyanide gas gun in the stairwell of his apartment building.
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