“I Thought There Was Going to Be a Pogrom”

LIGHT IN DARKNESS Normally Rebbe Nachman’s kever is a place for prayer and meditation. That changed in an instant last Tuesday (Photos: AFP/Imagebank)

T he attack happened suddenly stoking fears of violence in a land soaked with Jewish blood. Shmuel Cohen was standing in the synagogue built atop Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s kever in Uman Ukraine last week when vandals threw a severed pig’s head and blood-red paint into the holy structure.

“I thought there was going to be a pogrom” Cohen recalled in an interview with Mishpacha. The incident which occurred at 2 a.m. last Tuesday took only seconds to unfold recounted Cohen. Two men “entered and within three seconds threw the head and red paint and left ” he said. “I didn’t see their faces it was fast. One of the goyim filmed it when he was doing it. They had a jeep [waiting outside] and they fled.”

While day-to-day anti-Semitism isn’t a problem in Ukraine vandalism against Jewish sites has spiked since early 2014 when an uprising in Kiev (the so-called Euromaidan Revolution) ousted pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and sparked a Russian-backed insurgency in the country’s east. A memorial at the Babi Yar massacre site in Kiev for instance was defaced six times in 2015. In 2014 several synagogues in Zaporizhya Simferopol Mykolaiv Kiev and Hust were targeted in attempted arson attacks.