The head rabbi of Ukraine and Kiev said today he would reject a national award over the recent decision by the country’s outgoing president to declare “Nazi collaborator” Stepan Bandera a national hero.
Viktor Yushchenko‘s January 22 move has already fueled fierce debate in Ukraine, where Bandera is a controversial figure, with his mainly West Ukrainian supporters considering him a hero.
An MP from Sevastopol in the Crimea burned his passport in protest against the move, and two people have challenged the decree in court.
“I was awarded Ukraine’s Order of Merit, 3rd Class, but because of Yushchenko’s decree I am planning to give it back to the government soon,” Rabbi Moshe Reuven Asman told the Segodnya daily.
The religious leader of Ukrainian Jews said he was indignant at the president’s move which he said had no political future.
“This is a hideous blow to Ukraine’s international image, and, unfortunately, the new authorities will have to face the consequences,” Asman said.
Yushchenko lost the January 17 elections and will leave office soon as the ex-Soviet country is facing a runoff on February 7 between frontrunner Viktor Yanukovych, the leader of the opposition Party of Regions, and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko.
An influential Jewish human rights organization based in the United States, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, expressed its concern last weekend by the fact that Yushchenko’s controversial decree came “at the period when the world pauses to remember the victims of the Holocaust on January 27.”
