Survey of Ukrainian newspapers shows high level of anti-Semitism

MOSCOW, June 4 (JTA) — One-fifth of all mentions of Jews in the Ukrainian press during 1996 were made within an anti-Semitic context, according to an annual audit of Ukrainian newspapers by the Kiev Center for Political Research. The center recorded 280 articles that contained anti-Semitic slurs or propagated anti-Jewish prejudices. The articles were found in a dozen newspapers published mainly in the western part of Ukraine and in the capital of Kiev. According to Alexander Naiman, an expert with the Kiev Jewish community, this number represented an approximate 10 percent increase over 1995. The audit revealed that the largest number of anti-Semitic articles was printed by Za Vilnu Ukrainu, or For a Free Ukraine, an ultranationalist newspaper in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. The paper, which has a reported circulation 135,000, published 124 anti-Semitic articles during 1996. But the center also found that anti-Semitic articles also occasionally appeared in the mainstream press. Kiev’s leading evening newspaper, Vecherny Kyiv, published in 1996 47 articles that contained anti-Semitic slurs. The publication of hate propaganda is a violation of Ukraine’s press laws. Some of the Ukrainian newspapers responsible for publishing anti-Semitic articles received official warnings during 1996 from the country’s Information Ministry.