(JTA) — A regional leader of the Svoboda far-right party in Ukraine posted on Facebook a picture of a Cossack beating a Jew with a bloody flail, along with a poem celebrating the “threshing.”
Yuri Gorbinko, head of the party in Fastiv, a municipality near Kiev, posted the picture earlier this month, Eduard Dolinsky, the head of Ukrainian Jewish Committee, wrote on the same social network.
It shows a man dressed in traditional garb of the Cossacks, a Slavic group that lived in Eastern Ukraine and some parts of Russia that was responsible for countless pogroms against Jews and other minority groups well into the 20th century.
The picture came with a short poem extolling agricultural work, including “threshing.”
The Jewish figure, dressed in Hasidic style, is on his knees looking up in horror at the Cossack. A second figure, a disfigured blond-haired man, possibly representing Polish people, is seen lying in a pool of blood. A third individual, possibly Russian, is holding up his arms defensibly.
Gorbinko in the summer of 2017 wrote that he regretted that Adolf Hitler did not “finish the job,” Dolinsky wrote. His statement was reported to police but went unprocessed, according to Dolinsky.
“These are the results of impunity, passivity and irresponsibility of law enforcement,” he wrote.
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