Dougoutigo Fadiga outside the Bani Israel clinic near the Senegalese village’s sacred tree, May 2013. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

BANI ISRAEL, Senegal (JTA) — He will welcome you into his earthen-floor home, introduce you to his three wives, and let you sample their cooking. But Dougoutigo Fadiga does not want foreigners to come near the sacred tree of his village deep in the Senegalese bush.

“The tree is holy grounds,” says Fadiga, president of this remote settlement of 4,000 souls. “Our Jewish ancestor, Jacob, planted it when his people first settled here 1,000 years ago.”

The lush kapok tree towers over the parched shrubbery at the edge of Bani Israel, a dusty community in eastern Senegal near the border with Mali. The residents, all Muslims, are members of a tribe whose name means “sons of Israel,” and they trace their lineage to two clans — Sylla and Drame — they say are descended from Egyptian Jews.

“We are all practicing Muslims and we don’t want to become Jewish,” Fadiga says. “In fact, we don’t like to talk too much about our Jewish background, but we don’t hide it either. We know our people came from Egypt to Somalia, and from there to Nigeria, where they split about 1,000 years ago. One branch of the two families went to Mali, another to Guinea, and we settled here.”

The truth of such claims is difficult to establish, but West Africa has had a documented Jewish presence since at least the 14th century, when several Jewish merchants set up shop in Timbuktu, in western Mali. Jews kept trickling in from Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition of the 15th and 16th centuries, and later from Morocco.

Gideon Behar, Israel’s former ambassador to Senegal, says Jews maintained a constant presence in the area until 1943, when the last Jewish settlement was uprooted from Guinea-Bissau, Senegal’s southern neighbor, then a Portuguese colony under the rule of pro-fascist dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar.

“Bani Israel is a striking example because of its name, but there are many, many other ways in which this area’s little-known but rich Jewish presence has influenced it,” says Behar, one of the few Westerners to have visited Bani Israel.

Behar believes the historic presence is responsible for some of the faint Jewish traces still visible in the region. West African musicians often decorate the traditional, 21-string bridge-harp known as kora with Jewish symbols, including the Star of David. And some words in Wolof, a widely spoken language in Senegal, bear more resemblance to Hebrew pronunciation than Arabic, which is spoken in neighboring countries.

The Wolof word for cheek is pronounced “lekhi,” as in Hebrew. One of Wolof’s words for wise is pronounced the same as the Hebrew word “chacham.” A weaver or fabric merchant is called “rab,” similar to rabbi.

The Bani Israel also have a cultural trait in common with Jews: an aversion to intermarriage. According to Fadiga, the community tries not to assimilate, preferring to wed with members of the tribe who live in neighboring villages.

“I believe there is an element of truth to the tradition of the Bani Israel, especially since they have nothing to gain from pretending,” says Behar, who returned from Senegal in 2011. “They’re not seeking Israeli citizenship, nor are they claiming to be Jewish. In fact, their Jewish ancestry and name can only give them problems.”

Though their Jewish association is potentially problematic in a Muslim country — according to Behar, some residents have sought to change the village name in their passports to permit travel to Mecca — the story of Bani Israel’s origin is not universally accepted in Senegal. Abdoul Kader Taslimanka, a Senegalese writer who published a book last year about the community, “Bani Israel of Senegal,” says the name has nothing to do with Jews and in fact is taken from the title of a chapter of the Koran.

Some accounts do, however, support the last leg of the journey that Fadiga describes. Bani Israel are speakers of the Jahanke dialect, the language of the Diakhanke tribe, which the International Journal of African Historical Studies says migrated down the Niger River, settling in Mali, Guinea, Gambia and Senegal.

In his village, Fadiga is known as the marabou, the local equivalent of a shaman or bush doctor. Samba Diop, a villager in his 40s, says Fadiga has special healing powers that allow him to cure snake and scorpion bites with his hands. Children who suffer from epilepsy are encouraged to bite on amulets made by Fadiga’s younger wives from goat skin.

“When a snake bites one of us, we go to him and then the snake dies,” Diop says.

Unlike most villages in the area, the Bani Israel live in houses made of brick instead of mud and thatch huts. It also was the first village in the area to have a clinic and electrical generators, according to Fadiga.

The school in Bani Israel is surrounded by a tall brick wall. Inside, teachers give lessons in French, math and science. The school day begins at 5:30 a.m. and finishes by noon, when the asbestos-roofed classrooms become as hot as ovens.

Such relative luxuries are financed by about 1,000 Bani Israel who live in the Senegalese capital of Dakar or in France, sending monthly donations back to the village. Unusually for the region, the money is not sent directly to relatives but is placed in a communal trust that pays for health services and schools, which in turn service not only the village but the entire remote region.

“This place is blessed and its people are chosen,” Fadiga says. “But some people resent us for it, so it’s best not to talk too much about it.”

NEW YORK (JTA) – Now that it’s clear that the top leaders of the Claims Conference were involved in investigating an anonymous accusation of restitution fraud in 2001, the question is who bears the responsibility for failing to detect that a broad fraud scheme was underway.

The person at the center of the 2001 allegations, Semen Domnitser, turned out to be the ringleader of the $57 million fraud; he was found guilty at trial on May 8.

For most of those who played a role in two botched probes in 2001, the question is academic.

Karl Brozik, the director of the Claims Conference’s German office who oversaw the initial internal organizational probe in June 2001, died in 2004. Gideon Taylor, the then-chief of the Claims Conference who commissioned a second, independent probe of the anonymous allegations, has quit Jewish organizational life and now works in real estate.

But Julius Berman, who as counsel to the Claims Conference in 2001 oversaw the second probe, is now the restitution group’s chairman – a position he has held for more than a decade.

That probe was conducted by a paralegal in Berman’s law office of Kaye Scholer and resulted in an eight-page report filed on Sept. 4, 2001. In the report, which was obtained exclusively by JTA, paralegal Ryan Tan recommends further questioning of Domnitser and calls for more investigation.

There is no evidence that its recommendations were implemented.

In an interview Wednesday with JTA, Berman refused to discuss the details of the 2001 episode, saying he’ll withhold comment until the committee of Claims Conference board members he has assigned to look into the matter recommends a course of action.

But he made clear that he believes he is not to blame.

“Somebody dropped the ball. That’s this issue,” said Berman, 77. “My conscience is totally clean on the role I played.”

Berman said his role in 2001 as counsel, a pro bono position that required fielding the occasional phone call and showing up to one-day-a-year meetings, did not make him privy to the internal processes of the Claims Conference. After the report he oversaw was produced, Berman passed it along to the head of the Claims Conference, Taylor, who told JTA that he gave it to Brozik.

Whatever subsequent actions were taken were not enough to stop the fraud, which continued until 2009.

All the while, the Claims Conference, which was established in 1951 to negotiate Holocaust survivor restitution with Germany, continued its work reviewing claims and processing billions of dollars in German payments to survivors. Since its founding, the conference estimates it has handled more than $70 billion.

In Wednesday’s interview, Berman stood by comments he made to JTA in late 2011 saying he felt “no fault at all” for the fraud, that the controls in place at the Claims Conference to prevent fraud were “reasonably adequate” and that the deception discovered in 2009 was as impossible to anticipate as the attacks of 9/11.

“Until it happens once,” he said at the time. “Then you’re on notice that something you never foresaw can happen.”

Asked this week if the 2001 episode qualified as the “one-time” warning that should have put the organization – and Berman – on notice, he said it did not.

“Once you set up a procedure you believe covers the situation, you usually don’t go back and review it again and again,” Berman said. “You may have to trust the people you trust.

“Only as a matter of hindsight it becomes clear,” he added. “If Y and Z are in cahoots, then you really haven’t done anything.”

As chairman of the Claims Conference, Berman said it wasn’t his place to investigate allegations of mishandled claims, nor was he privy to such complaints. Berman said the 2001 episode was the only time he was ever aware of allegations of fraud at the conference.

“Do I know with any kind of authority one way or the other? I say no, I proudly say no,” he said. “I can’t get involved in that kind of minutiae.”

Berman did, however, acknowledge that the 15-year fraud scheme – which he said was first brought to his attention in November 2009 by the Claims Conference’s executive vice president, Greg Schneider, who told Berman he had discovered a large number of suspicious cases — represented a failure for the organization.

“There was a failure, yes,” Berman said.

Asked if the Claims Conference had apologized or should apologize for the fraud, Berman said an apology would have been misinterpreted by Holocaust survivors who would have thought they had been injured by the fraud. In fact, the cost of the fraud was borne entirely by Germany, which paid out $57 million more in claims than it needed because of the Claims Conference’s failure to weed out some 5,000 false petitions.

The Germans were informed of the fraud scheme soon after it was discovered, when the fraud figure was approximately $300,000, Berman said. In the early part of the investigation, U.S. authorities had been concerned that if word leaked out,  suspect employees, whose actions were being monitored by the FBI, might obstruct the probe. Once the FBI began making arrests, it gave a green light for the Claims Conference to inform its board.

“We immediately notified the Germans, and the Germans said thank you for informing us and keeping us informed,” Berman recalled. “The Germans were informed in the appropriate contrite fashion.”

Asked if the Claims Conference owes an apology to anybody else for the affair that has sullied the reputation of the Jewish organization representing survivor interests – whether survivors, the Claims Conference board or the Jewish community — Berman said the thought never occurred to him.

“I never sat down and considered whether there was a need to make some public contrition,” he said. “I think the best contrition is to make sure [survivors] receive more than ever and we do whatever’s necessary to ensure the pipeline continues.”

As for his own role, Berman said now that he’s coming under increased fire from critics, there’s no question about staying the course.

“I have no choice whatsoever but to continue on because of this. It would look to the world and to posterity and to myself that I was driven out because of this stupidity, and I am not going to do it,” he said. “Every once in a while I say, ‘What do I need this for?’ And what picks me up? Another column by Isi Leibler. I refuse to buckle in to that kind of nonsense.”

On Wednesday, Leibler, a former Jewish organizational leader from Australia who now lives in Israel and writes a column for the Jerusalem Post, published a piece headlined “Claims Conference leaders must resign now.” Leibler noted it was his 21st column calling for reform of the Claims Conference.

Berman, who is also a member of JTA’s board, said he’d be happy to spend time on other things, but now is not the time to step down.

“It’s not really on my agenda today because I would only focus on whether I’ve had enough when this is over, this is behind us and we’re moving forward,” he said. “I’m a fighter. And I’m proud to be a fighter. I make mistakes, too, but if people blame me for making mistakes, I’m certainly not going to cave.”

(JTA) — Itzik Shanan and Abbas Suan watched last week as 100,000 English soccer fans sang along to a live performance by a multiracial quartet at London’s Wembley Stadium.

Shanan, who started a campaign to eliminate racism from Israeli soccer, and Suan, a well-known Arab-Israeli player, were in Britain for five days of anti-hooliganism training in advance of Israel’s hosting next month of a major international soccer tournament.

For Shanan, the operatic rendition of “Abide With Me,” a Christian hymn that has become something of a soccer anthem, was a reminder of the sport’s potential — and its pitfalls.

“It was amazingly cultural,” Shanan told JTA. “It showed me soccer can be truly a cultural event, but [also] reminded me of the long road that lies ahead of Israeli soccer until we catch up to England.”

The ground Shanan believes Israeli soccer needs to cover is not on the field.

For the past decade, England’s Football Association, or F.A., has trained dozens of Israeli activists who hope to re-create what they view as the F.A.’s success in reducing widespread displays of racism that tarnished the image of English soccer. Shanan and Suan were part of a delegation of 10 Israeli Jews and Arabs in Britain last week for F.A. training.

England is described as “a world leader in dealing with soccer racism and hooliganism” on the website of the New Israel Fund, the U.S.-based social justice group that created and bankrolls Shanan’s nonprofit, Kick Racism Out of Israeli Football.

But a recent spate of anti-Semitic incidents in English soccer, and the F.A.’s refusal to fully adopt new European countermeasures, are making some question the association’s suitability to instruct others in countering racist tendencies among fans.

“Clearly, Britain has not resolved its soccer racism and violence problem and is therefore no model for Israel,” said Manfred Gerstenfeld, a Dutch-born scholar of European anti-Semitism at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Critics such as Gerstenfeld point to a string of troubling incidents over the past year.

In November, several West Ham fans hissed loudly to evoke the sound of Nazi gas chambers and gave what appeared to be the Nazi salute. The incident occurred during a match against the Tottenham Hotspurs, a club long associated with North London’s Jewish community. A statement from West Ham subsequently said that two supporters had been “cautioned for racially aggravated gesturing.”

Since then, Israeli midfielder Yossi Benayoun of Chelsea has been the repeated target of anti-Semitic hate speech. Police are investigating the latest incident, in which Benayoun was the target of an anti-Semitic epithet on Twitter. And in January, the Israeli-born Tal Ben Haim, who plays for the Queens Park Rangers, was subject to anti-Semitic abuse on the soccer club’s official Facebook page.

Meanwhile, anti-Semitic slogans are routinely heard at soccer matches elsewhere in Europe. In Budapest, fans shouted Nazi slogans at the Israeli national team during a friendly match in August. In Italy, fans of the Lazio club also chanted anti-Semitic slogans during a match against Tottenham; some are believed to have participated in the stabbing of a Tottenham fan at a Rome bar.

Incidents like these prompted the Union of European Football Associations, or UEFA, to introduce a 10-game ban on anyone caught engaging in racist abuse.

In England, the F.A. last week introduced a five-game ban, drawing sharp criticism. Jason Roberts, a black British soccer player, said it exposed “bad decisions, lack of will, lack of consultation and lack of leadership” by the F.A.

The chairman of England’s Kick It Out organization — one of the F.A.’s main partners in the fight against racism and the inspiration for Shanan’s outfit – warned, “We will look stupid if UEFA goes with 10 and we go with five.”

In December, Kick It Out Chairman Herman Ouseley criticized the F.A. for “delaying” a detailed plan to fight soccer racism.

David Bernstein, the F.A.’s Jewish chairman, told the BBC that a 10-game ban “lacks subtlety” and would limit the association’s ability to treat “different levels of offenses.”

F.A. spokesman Scott Field told JTA that his organization’s work in Israel “doesn’t mean we’re taking our eyes off the ball in England. Expressions of racism do sometimes occur here, but it’s not inappropriate for us to contribute to another community.”

Still, the F.A. does have a proven record on curbing racism, according to Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s anti-Semitism watchdog.

“In England of the 1980s, soccer stadiums became recruiting grounds for neo-Nazi groups, and members would regularly make racist and anti-Semitic chants,” Rich told JTA. That conduct “sometimes happens … [but has] largely disappeared from major English soccer matches.”

According to Rich, this has been achieved through a combination of F.A. action and the Kick It Out organization, which the F.A. helped establish in 1993. Focusing on preventing racism through education, Kick It Out organizes summer activities for children, workshops for soccer players and seminars for educators.

It also inspired Shanan’s Kick Racism Out of Israeli Football organization, which for the past decade has used Kick It Out tools with some local adaptations.

“One lesson we learned from England is to integrate Arab and Jewish children in one team instead of letting them play on opposite teams,” Shanan said.

As in Britain, Israeli soccer racism continues to be a problem despite the efforts of police and activists. The signing of two Chechen Muslims by Beitar Jerusalem this year led to the torching of the team’s trophy room. Last year, Beitar fans attacked several Arabs at Jerusalem’s Malha Mall.

Gerstenfeld, a Dutchman who moved to Jerusalem in 1968, acknowledges that racism exists in Israeli soccer, but is nothing compared to the violence endemic to British and Dutch soccer.

“I remember going to soccer matches as a boy in the Netherlands before racism and hooliganism set in,” he recalls. “Perhaps you need a psychiatrist to explain how it happened.”

Adam Green, a Londoner and Chelsea supporter in Amsterdam last week to watch his team battle Portugal’s Benfica in the Europa League final, offered a simpler distillation of the football hooligan’s credo.

“It’ll go fine if we win,” Green said. “But if we lose, you’re the enemy and we will burn this city the f*** down.”

Fortunately for Amsterdam, Chelsea defeated Benfica, 2-1.

A previously unknown document obtained by JTA shows that concern in 2001 about fraud at the Claims Conference reached the highest levels of the organization. (Claims Conference)

NEW YORK (JTA) — The Claims Conference in recent days has blamed a now-dead regional director for bungling an early warning in 2001 about a massive fraud scheme that wasn’t halted until 2009.

But a document obtained by JTA shows top conference officials were sufficiently concerned by the allegations that they launched their own probe in 2001 that failed to detect there was a wider fraud. Those involved in the second investigation included the organization’s chief professional at the time, Gideon Taylor, and its counsel, Julius Berman.

The probe resulted in an eight-page report that raised questions about the handling of several fraudulent cases by Semen Domnitser, a Claims Conference employee who was found guilty on March 8 of orchestrating the $57 million scheme.

The revelation of the report leaves unanswered the question of whether Claims Conference leaders showed gross negligence in failing to detect that Domnitser was orchestrating a widespread fraud, as some critics contend, or whether Domnitser, who was questioned in the two 2001 probes, was such a shrewd operator that Claims Conference officials couldn’t help but be fooled.

[UPDATE: Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky adds voice to calls for an independent investigation of allegations against Claims Conference leaders.]

The first probe was sparked by an anonymous letter in June 2001 alleging that five fraudulent claims had been approved for restitution payments. The letter reached the director of the Claims Conference office in Germany, Karl Brozik, who conducted an assessment that included questioning Domnitser about his handling of the claims.

Domnitser responded to Brozik by fax, acknowledging some inadvertent errors but lying about other facts to cover up his criminality. Brozik shared Domnitser’s responses with the staffer he had assigned to look into the matter, who marked them up with a lot of question marks. But there is no evidence in the public record indicating that the inquiry was taken further, and last week Claims Conference spokeswoman Hillary Kessler-Godin blamed Brozik, who died in 2004, for failing to pursue the matter.

However, it turns out that the Claims Conference’s top leaders launched a second probe of their own.

The investigation was assigned to a paralegal at Berman’s law office, Kaye Scholer LLP, who went to the Claims Conference office in New York on Aug. 27, 2001 to review the five fraudulent claims and question Domnitser.

The paralegal, Ryan Tan, produced a report that Berman sent to Taylor on Sept. 5, 2001. The report, a copy of which was obtained by JTA, raised questions about Domnitser’s handling of the fraudulent cases but did not suggest Domnitser was party to fraud.

“A majority of the claims made by the person who wrote the anonymous letter were refuted by Mr. Domnitser,” the report said. “However, the accusations did raise further questions about the way the cases were handled by the Conference.”

In reference to one case, Tan writes: “Mr. Domnitser has indicated that a caseworker named Voskreskney also handled the case, but no signature or stamp bearing that person’s name appear on the file. Further inquiry is needed in this case. An interview with [Claims Conference caseworker] Krylyak may clarify some of the discrepancies in this matter.”

Another case involved Mariya Fortel, the sister of Polina Berenson, a Claims Conference employee who this March pleaded guilty to participating in the fraud. After noting that Fortel received payment from two separate restitution funds in violation of the rules, Tan writes, “Because the Conference does not allow the applicants to receive both funds, Mr. Domnitser explained during the interview that Fortel had to forfeit the DM 5,000 that she obtained from the Hardship Fund. Unfortunately, the file does not contain a record that this money was ever given back or deducted.”

The report contains no smoking gun fingering Domnitser as perpetrating the fraud, and it’s not clear how common allegations of fraud were at the Claims Conference. However, the report demonstrates that the organization’s top leaders considered the matter sufficiently alarming that they had an outsider conduct an independent probe even after an internal inquiry had been conducted two months earlier.

Despite whatever actions Berman and Taylor took after receiving the Kaye Scholler report, Domnitser and his cronies managed to fleece the Claims Conference of millions more for another eight years.

In an email to JTA, Taylor blamed Brozik for dropping the ball, saying Brozik oversaw the review of the allegations in the 2001 letter and was sent the Kaye Scholer report.

“The report indicated that there should be specific follow up on allegations about the improper processing of five cases involving Claims Conference staff members,” Taylor wrote. “Karl Brozik subsequently indicated to me that no further action regarding the New York staff was required concerning the issues in the report.”

In all, at least six senior Claims Conference figures were made aware in 2001 of the allegations involving fraud, though some were not privy to all the details: Domnitser, who perpetrated it; Brozik, who is dead; Taylor, who left the conference in mid-2009 and now works in real estate; former Claims Conference chief Saul Kagan, who is in his 90s and retired; Berman; and Greg Schneider, then assistant executive vice president and director of allocations and now the Claims Conference’s chief executive.

Of them, only Berman and Schneider still play prominent roles at the organization.

Berman, who is also a member of JTA’s board, was traveling as of press time and could not be reached for comment. But the Claims Conference released a statement to JTA attributed to Berman in which he cites recent error-laden press reports about the 2001 episode and notes that he has appointed a committee to “review all of the materials and recommend a course of action.”

“In deference to the work of that committee,” Berman says, “the Claims Conference will not publicly comment on any aspect of events that fall within the purview of the Committee until after the committee has concluded its work.”

In an interview with JTA in late 2011, Berman, who had been chairman of the Claims Conference for about 10 years, rejected the notion that he bore any responsibility for failing to detect the fraud over the years.

“I feel no fault at all,” Berman said in the interview, excerpts of which were published in a 2012 JTA profile of Schneider. “No one has ever suggested that I should resign.”

Calling the controls that the Claims Conference had in place to prevent fraud “reasonably adequate,” Berman said the deception was as impossible to anticipate as the attacks of 9/11. “Until it happens once,” he added. “Then you’re on notice that something you never foresaw can happen.”

Schneider declined to comment to JTA, but last week Kessler-Godin told JTA that Schneider is not to blame because he never saw the original anonymous letter and the other people CC’d on the correspondence were senior to him. Therefore, Kessler-Godin said, Schneider reasonably assumed they were handling the matter.

Ultimately, it was Schneider who finally halted the massive fraud scheme, when he and a colleague, Karen Heilig, came across a pair of suspicious claims approvals in November 2009 and began to investigate further. They quickly found hundreds more suspicious cases — what turned out to be the tip of the iceberg in a fraud scheme involving nearly 5,000 falsified claims.

Within hours, Schneider alerted Berman. They had the law firm of Proskauer Rose LLP do an initial investigation, and a few weeks later the conference alerted the FBI. Eventually, a total of 31 people were arrested in connection with the scheme. Twenty-eight pleaded guilty; the three who did not, including Domnitser, were found guilty at trial on May 8.

In all, there were at least 3,839 falsified applications to the Hardship Fund, an account established by the German government to provide one-time payments of approximately $3,360 to those who fled the Nazis as they moved east through Germany, and 1,112 false claims to the Article 2 Fund, through which the German government gives pension payments of approximately $411 per month to needy Nazi victims who spent significant time in a concentration camp, in a Jewish ghetto in hiding or living under a false identity to avoid the Nazis.

Domnitser oversaw both those two funds.

The September 2001 Kaye Scholer report was unearthed at the Claims Conference’s Germany office in 2010 by those working on rooting out the fraud, Kessler-Godin told JTA, and the report subsequently was passed along to the FBI. Because the prosecution did not use the material during the fraud trial, it did not appear in the trial’s public record.

However, the original 2001 anonymous letter did, and the prosecution cited it as evidence of Domnitser’s shrewdness at misleading his superiors. The Forward was the first news outlet to report the letter’s existence.

President Barack Obama and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk speaking at a news conference in Warsaw, Poland, May 2011. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)

WASHINGTON (JTA) — Poland is a stalwart American ally in Europe, a bulwark against an increasingly belligerent Russia and, with the recent opening of a major new Warsaw museum, is enjoying a flush of accolades for its belated embrace of its Jewish roots.

But there’s a thorn in the bouquet: Poland is seen as having the world’s worst record on the restitution of Jewish property lost during the Holocaust.

Officials of Jewish groups seeking restitution say they will be making a renewed push to put the restitution issue on Congress’ agenda and expect new pressure to advance the issue. But ratcheting up the pressure on Poland poses an acute dilemma for U.S. policymakers.

The country’s outlier status — it is the sole European country that does not offer private property restitution to survivors of the Holocaust or their heirs — makes it an obvious target for Jewish activists. But Poland is also among the most reliable U.S. allies and has close relations with Israel and American Jewish groups. Poland’s foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, will be featured next month as a guest at the American Jewish Committee’s annual conclave.

Perhaps as a result, few Jewish officials or members of Congress were willing to discuss the issue on the record. Requests for comment from the Polish Foreign Ministry and the Polish Embassy in Washington were not answered.

Efforts to pressure the Poles have remained largely in the realm of the rhetorical, with no legislation proposed to address the problem as was done in the past on other thorny issues of Holocaust restitution, like unpaid Holocaust-era insurance policies.

In January, during confirmation hearings for U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.), the co-chair of the congressional Committee on Security and Cooperation in Europe, sought reassurances that Kerry would continue to press Poland on the issue.

Cardin noted that Poland tells heirs seeking compensation to turn to the country’s courts, an arduous and expensive process. It’s also a process likely to fail because the government refuses to advance legislation that could underpin such litigation.

Recourse to the courts, “a process that presents insurmountable obstacles for most victims of property theft and especially victims of the Holocaust, will ultimately be futile for most claimants, and even for a tiny fraction of successful claimants would be drawn out and needlessly burdensome,” Cardin said.

Kerry replied that he would “continue to encourage Poland to address property claimants’ concerns quickly and fairly.”

More recently, Wendy Sherman, the undersecretary of state for political affairs, brought up restitution in a March 17 security meeting with Polish officials.

Douglas Davidson, the State Department’s special envoy on the Holocaust, also is deeply involved in advancing the restitution issue, Jewish organizational leaders said. Davidson, who was traveling, could not be reached for comment.

Jewish officials also said that the Obama administration has been engaged on the issue, with the president himself bringing it up in his meetings with Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister.

Such entreaties, however, have largely failed to move the Polish government.

In November, Poland sent only a low-level diplomat to a conference in Prague on restituting private property. The conference featured the presentation of a paper by the Claims Conference and the World Jewish Restitution Organization describing the treatment of the restitution issue by successive Polish governments as a backward trajectory.

“While the government has issued numerous draft laws with respect to regulating private property restitution, Poland has never enacted a single law pertaining to immovable properties seized from private owners in the country during the Holocaust era and its aftermath,” the paper said.

In part, the problem is a result of vastly decreased U.S. leverage over Poland, where the restitution of private property remains deeply unpopular because of the potential for upheaval among the current residents of the properties. Restituting communal property such as synagogues and graveyards is more straightforward.

Moreover, nations that once cultivated U.S. Jews in their quest for membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization are now members of the alliance. And they have thriving economies, to boot.

“It’s a different world than it was 10 years ago for these countries,” one Jewish official said. “Poland is becoming a wealthier country than it was 10 years ago.”

An official of another Jewish group, speaking on background, said one avenue of pressure could be to withhold Jewish support for Poland achieving visa waiver status, a measure that would allow its citizens to enter the United States for 90 days without a prearranged visa.

But Rabbi Andrew Baker, the American Jewish Committee’s international Jewish affairs director, said such a move would be counterproductive.

“These issues are not popular with the domestic constituencies in any of the Eastern Europeans countries where we’ve pressed it,” Baker said. “The last thing we want is to make it more unpopular.”

NEW YORK (JTA) – Who knew what, and when?

Those are the questions critics are asking following the disclosure that the Claims Conference received an anonymous letter in 2001 identifying several fraudulent Holocaust-era restitution claims — nearly a decade before the organization halted a massive fraud scheme.

By 2009, when the magnitude of the scheme was discovered, the fraud had been running for 15 years and managed to extract more than $57 million in illegitimate payouts.

Last Friday, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder sent a letter to the Claims Conference’s chairman, Julius Berman, and executive vice president, Greg Schneider, demanding answers to whether the 2001 episode was ever disclosed to Claims Conference board members.

“We have received numerous inquiries of concern in the wake of news stories in the Forward, the New York Jewish Week and JTA regarding the existence of an anonymous letter dated June 6, 2001 that apparently raised questions with respect to the fraud being perpetrated against the Claims Conference,” Lauder wrote.

In a separate letter, Lauder referred to allegations of a cover-up, calling them a “long-term issue with potentially serious implications,” and announcing that the WJC, which has a seat on the Claims Conference board, was forming a task force to investigate, The Jerusalem Post reported.

On Sunday, Berman emailed the Claims Conference board to say that he had asked the chairman of the board’s executive, former Israeli diplomat Reuven Merhav, to “head a Select Leadership Committee of the board to formulate an appropriate course of action for the Conference with respect to the issues surrounding the 2001 letter.”

The brouhaha was sparked by a May 14 story in the Forward newspaper about the existence of the 2001 letter.

Though the Forward reported it first, the discovery of the letter was no journalistic scoop: The letter had been introduced as evidence in the corruption trial of the ringleader of the fraud, Semen Domnitser, and was discussed at length during the courtroom proceedings.

Domnister was queried in 2001 about the allegations in the anonymous letter, and the prosecution used the episode to show how Domnitser in his response shrewdly managed to keep his superiors from discovering that he was perpetrating an ongoing fraud.

The trial, which concluded this month, resulted in the conviction of Domnitser and two other Claims Conference employees on all counts, bringing guilty pleas or verdicts to all 31 people arrested in connection with the fraud.

The original Forward story appears to have gotten some key facts wrong: It said the current chief of the Claims Conference, Schneider, had received a copy of the anonymous letter in 2001, and the letter subsequently sent to Domnitser questioning him about the allegations. But there is no evidence that Schneider saw either of the letters. Rather, Schneider was one of several people that Domnitser CC’d on his 2001 responses, the Claims Conference says. (The Forward story was later changed online, but failed to note that corrections had been made.)

The way the anonymous letter was handled in 2001 and during the run-up to the recent trial is important to understanding whether there was an attempt to cover up the 2001 episode and who ultimately is to blame for bungling the early warning of the fraud.

Critics of the Claims Conference, such as longtime gadfly Isi Leibler, a former Jewish organizational official from Australia who now lives in Israel and writes a column for The Jerusalem Post, called the mishandling of the 2001 episode evidence of “gross negligence” at the Holocaust restitution organization. Leibler alleged that Berman and Schneider engaged in “systematic and deliberate efforts to conceal the incompetence and breakdown of their management and leadership which enabled this fraud to occur under their very noses.”

Berman could not be reached for comment, and Schneider declined to speak to JTA on the record.

The Claims Conference, which controls the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, is a frequent target of critics who disagree with the group’s allocations and see its leaders as a club of insiders that is unresponsive to outsiders. The critics say the fact that the fraud was able to run undetected from 1993 to 2009 and run up a bill – ultimately paid by Germany – of more than $57 million in false claims is evidence that Claims Conference leaders are not doing an adequate job.

“It was outrageous that the management responsible for overseeing these funds failed to accept any responsibility or accountability,” Leibler wrote in his column.

The fraud involved falsifying applications to the Hardship Fund, an account established by the German government to provide one-time payments of approximately $3,360 to those who fled the Nazis as they moved east through Germany, and the Article 2 Fund, through which the German government gives pension payments of approximately $411 per month to needy Nazi victims who spent significant time in a concentration camp, in a Jewish ghetto in hiding or living under a false identity to avoid the Nazis. Domnitser oversaw the two funds.

Though $57 million was stolen in the scheme, no genuine Holocaust survivors were deprived of any money. Germany has borne the cost of the fraudulent payouts, and several million dollars of the stolen money has been recouped.

On the question of who ultimately is responsible for bungling the 2001 episode, Claims Conference spokeswoman Hillary Kessler-Godin pointed to Karl Brozik, the head of the Claims Conference office in Frankfurt, Germany, which received the anonymous letter. Brozik, who died in 2004, handled the review of the letter’s allegations.

When the letter was brought to his attention in 2001, Brozik had a Claims Conference caseworker, Julia Gafsi, assess whether there was any merit to the allegations, according to Claims Conference documentation. Gafsi found numerous questionable elements.

Brozik then queried Domnitser, who was responsible for approving the claims in New York. In his response to Brozik, Domnitser acknowledged some inadvertent errors but lied about other facts in a bid to deflect attention from his fraud scheme.

Among those who were CC’d on Domnitser’s responses to Brozik were former Claims Conference head Saul Kagan; its chief at the time, Gideon Taylor; and Schneider, who in 2001 was assistant executive vice president and director of allocations.

Domnitser’s feint apparently was successful. Brozik forwarded Domnitser’s responses to the caseworker who had conducted the review, and though the caseworker said there still were elements of the story that seemed strange, Brozik appears to have let the matter end there. That’s where the paper trail ends, the Claims Conference says.

As the only senior official of all those involved in the episode who still works at the Claims Conference, Schneider’s role in the episode has come under great scrutiny.

The Claims Conference spokeswoman, Kessler-Godin, says Schneider is not to blame because he never saw the original letter, the other people CC’d on the correspondence were senior to Schneider and Brozik ultimately was responsible.

She also noted that it was Schneider and colleague Karen Heilig who discovered the fraud in November 2009 and subsequently alerted the FBI to the scheme. After he found the documentation from 2001, Schneider was the one who brought it to the attention of the FBI, Kessler-Godin said.

But Claims Conference officials have yet to answer Lauder’s question about whether the 2001 episode was shared with the organization’s board and, if not, why.

Ilan Fluss from Mashav, the Israeli Foreign Ministry’s aid agency, helps to implement an advanced irrigation system in Senegal in 2011. (Israel21c)

Struggling to be heard over a flock of bleating sheep, Israel’s ambassador to Senegal invites a crowd of impoverished Muslims to help themselves to about 100 sacrificial animals that the embassy corralled at a dusty community center here.

The October distribution, held as French troops battled Islamists in neighboring Mali and one month after Muslim radicals killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya, is held annually in honor of Tabaski, the local name of the Muslim Eid al-Adha feast. The distribution is broadcast on national television in a land that is 95 percent Muslim, providing Israel with a powerful platform to burnish its image among Senegalese.

“It registers very strongly with locals that Israelis give them sheep for a Muslim holiday while most Arab embassies do nothing,” said Eli Ben-Tura, the Israeli ambassador.

The animals are just part of the millions that Israel has spent over the years in Senegal, a French-speaking Western African nation of 12 million where the average monthly salary is $158. In return, Senegal has supported Israel’s erection of a barrier to protect itself from Palestinian terrorism and, in December, signed over oil prospecting rights in its territorial waters to an Israeli-owned mining company.

Over the past decade, Israel’s trade with Senegal has more than tripled.

“Like Israel, Senegal is an island of stability in an unstable region,” Ben-Tura told JTA in an interview earlier this month at the Israeli Embassy overlooking Independence Plaza in Dakar, the capital city.

The importance Israel places on its partnership with Senegal was evident in Ben-Tura’s speech on April 30 at Israel’s 65th Independence Day celebration at the Grand Theatre National, a magnificent structure built with Chinese funding in 2011 near Dakar’s main port.

Speaking to an audience of 1,000, Ben-Tura listed Israel’s latest gifts to the country: training for hundreds of farmers; preparations to train thousands more by Israeli experts stationed in the country; and the establishment of a permanent depot for agricultural equipment and disease control.

Even intercultural activities have not been overlooked. After speeches by Ben-Tura and Mamadou Talla, Senegal’s minister of professional training, Israel Ballet artistic director Ido Tadmor and 40 local artists performed a modern dance routine featuring tea cups. Dozens of onlookers avidly recorded their every move on smartphones.

“Cultural exchange with Africa has been neglected for too long,” Ben-Tura said.

Yet beneath this seemingly symbiotic partnership may be a deeper concern.

Mali, which used to be part of a federal entity with Senegal, last year witnessed an Islamic insurgency so powerful that French troops were called in to quell it. Some 475,000 people became refugees, many of them in Senegal. Some observers believe Senegal is wooing Israel and the West mainly for protection from the Islamic upheaval.

“The effects of the insurgency are not felt here for the time being,” said Oleg Sergeev, minister-counselor of the Russian Embassy in Dakar. “But the Senegalese authorities are turning westward out of concern over the possibility that the Mali insurgency may be trickling over.”

As an impoverished Muslim nation heavily dependent on foreign aid, Senegal must toe a careful line in its embrace of the Jewish state. Anti-Semitic books with titles such as “Hitler the Zionist Puppet” are sold here at bookstands and in 2009 several hundred people burned an Israeli flag at a rally to protest Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

The Senegalese government, then chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, condemned the attack as “unjustified and unacceptable.” Still, the government’s condemnations never went beyond words.

“It was a very strong reaction, but it didn’t have an impact on diplomatic relations,” said Christian Clages, the German ambassador to Senegal.

Senegalese officials declined to address the reasons for their country’s closeness with Israel. But observers attribute it variously to the country’s moderate brand of Islam, its relative openness to the West and its past disillusionment with Arab regimes. In 1973, under pressure from Arab countries, Senegal severed its ties with Israel.

“The Arabs threatened sanctions and promised free oil but never delivered, to the bitter disappointment of the Senegalese,” said Zvi Mazel, a former Israeli Foreign Ministry official who negotiated the restoration of diplomatic relations in 1994.

Senegalese moderation was on display in 2012 when Jamra, one of the country’s leading Islamic associations, protested the release of an anti-Muslim film, “The Innocence of Muslims.” The online video triggered violent protests around the world, but in Senegal, it led to the first meeting between Jamra and the Israeli Embassy.

Jamra’s executive president, Imam Massamba Diop, told JTA he learned in his November meeting with Ben-Tura that Israel had nothing to do with the film. And despite his organization’s generally pro-Palestinian posture — it considers Israel’s blockade on Gaza illegal and organizes pro-Palestinian activities in Dakar — Diop supports his government’s friendly relations with Israel.

“The Senegalese people deeply appreciate the event,” Diop said of the embassy’s sheep distribution.

Another Senegalese Muslim leader, Sheikh Paye, arrived at the Israel Independence Day celebration in a shiny, traditional white-and-gold imam robe. A spiritual leader in one of Dakar’s 19 neighborhoods, Paye told JTA that his attachment to Israel stems neither from gratitude for its largesse nor considerations of realpolitik.

“My late father used to be a good friend of several Israeli ambassadors here,” Paye said. “He died three months ago, shortly before the Israeli Embassy’s invitation arrived. It’s an honor to represent him here to people from a country he loved but never visited.”

Abdellah Boutadghart, right, of the Moroccan embassy in Senegal, and Rabbi Eliezer Di Martino of Lisbon at the main cemetery in Praia for the burial of a Cape Verde resident, May 2, 2013. (Cnaan Liphshiz)

PRAIA, Cape Verde (JTA) — A Portuguese rabbi and a Moroccan diplomat stood shoulder to shoulder in a Catholic cemetery here while 200 mourners howled in grief as they buried a resident of this island off the western coast of Africa.

The foreigners had come to Cape Verde’s main cemetery earlier this month not to bury a local, but for the rededication of 10 gravestones of Moroccan Jews — members of an extinct community whose roots trace to the 1860s.

With virtually no practicing Jews on Cape Verde today, the cemeteries had fallen into neglect. Now a Washington-based nonprofit is spearheading their restoration.

The Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project has a board stuffed with prominent Jewish Washingtonians, but its funding comes almost entirely from one man — King Mohammed VI of Morocco. According to the group’s U.S. tax filings, the king was the organization’s sole donor in 2011, giving $100,000.

Andre Azoulay, a senior Jewish adviser to the king and a member of the project’s advisory board, told JTA that the effort is reflective of the king’s “deep commitment” to preserving Jewish heritage in Morocco and elsewhere. But even if, as some speculate, it is motivated by a desire to attract tourists and curry favor with American Jews, the king’s drive clearly sets Morocco apart from other Middle Eastern countries where Jewish sites have faced increasing threats under new Islamist governments.

“This is all part of a strong push from His Majesty the King that started three, four years ago, when we saw cemeteries have become vulnerable because of lacking care by all of us,” Azoulay told JTA.

Approximately 3,000 Jews are living in Morocco, a North African monarchy about the size of Texas that had been home to a large and thriving Jewish community for centuries. In the 19th century, a number of Moroccan-Jewish families resettled in Cape Verde, attracted by the financial potential of this transatlantic hub.

Over time the families totally assimilated, though their Creole-speaking, Christian descendants include some of Cape Verde’s most prominent businessmen and politicians, including the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Carlos Alberto Wahnon de Carvalho Veiga.

Unlike many Arab countries with once sizable Jewish communities, Morocco has taken wide-ranging steps to preserve its Jewish history. The Casablanca Jewish museum was restored, the small but colorful 17th century synagogue in Fez was renovated, and dozens of former Jewish schools and more than 100 synagogues were rehabilitated with funding from the crown.

In 2011, in a move that Azoulay calls unprecedented in the modern Middle East, the Moroccan constitution was changed to note that the country has been “nourished and enriched … [by] Hebraic influences,” among others. The Moroccan parliament adopted the new language along with amendments that transferred some powers from the king to elected parties.

“I am not trying to paint a one-sided rosy picture. There are some difficult and maybe black pages in the book of Moroccan Jewry,” Azoulay told JTA. “But there are many, many more beautiful chapters.”

The king’s restoration activity already has brought benefits in the form of increased Jewish tourism. More than 19,000 Israelis entered Morocco in 2010, a 42 percent leap from the previous year, according to Israel’s Tourism Ministry. The World Federation of Moroccan Jewry says the kingdom receives another 30,000 non-Israeli Jews annually.

Among them was Joel Rubinfeld, the Brussels-based co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament, who spent 12 days in Morocco in March meeting with government officials and visiting his mother’s hometown. Rubinfeld believes the government’s intention to honor the country’s Jewish past is sincere, but he said other considerations are at work as well.

“There may certainly be pragmatic incentives: attracting tourism and investments down the line,” Rubinfeld said. “For some, it is a political calculation to improve Morocco’s international standing.”

A Moroccan diplomat, who spoke to JTA on condition of anonymity, said the restoration project could bring political dividends for Morocco, which has been accused of human rights abuses in Western Sahara, a disputed territory to which the kingdom lays partial claim.

“To Morocco’s great consternation, the U.S. last month proposed the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Western Sahara help monitor human rights,” the diplomat said. “It’s very useful for us to have someone — a strong lobby group, perhaps — to help talk the State Department out of this idea. The Jewish lobby is a very strong one.”

The board of the Cape Verde Jewish Heritage Project includes Howard Berman, a former California congressman who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee until his defeat last year; Daniel Mariaschin, the executive director of B’nai B’rith International; Herman Cohen, a former U.S. assistant secretary of state; and Toby Dershowitz, who heads a Washington public affairs consultancy.

But Azoulay grows indignant at any suggestion the king has his eye on the economic or political benefits of his largesse.

“This effort is the concrete manifestation of a consensus in Moroccan society, that our society is partly built on Jewish culture, a culture deeply rooted in three millennia of history,” he said.

“You have to understand the purity of it,” Azoulay added. “Those who think it is to attract tourists are just out of order.”

As popular revolutions have swept the Arab world since late 2010, Jewish heritage has suffered under newly empowered Islamist governments. Two Jewish cemeteries were desecrated earlier this year in Tunisia, prompting Israel to express concerns for the safety of the country’s Jews, the daily Maariv reported.

In Egypt, the government prevented several dozen Israelis from making the annual Passover pilgrimage to Alexandria’s main synagogue, one of the few properly maintained and functioning Jewish sites in the country. Egypt also briefly censored a film about the flight of its Jews following Israel’s establishment.

But in Morocco, a similar film, titled “Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah,” won a prize last month at the Tangier Film Festival. It also triggered protests from a few hundred Islamists and left-wing activists saying the film promoted “normalization” of ties with Israel, The Associated Press reported.

Still, many Jewish visitors speak of Morocco as a friendly place. Nuno Wahnon Martins, the director of European Affairs at B’nai B’rith International, said he felt safe enough to abandon all caution when asking for directions to synagogues during a recent visit. And Rubinfeld said he was surprised to hear a Hebrew song blasting from the stereo of a shop in Casablanca’s main market.

“Being a Jew in Morocco is safer today than on some streets in Brussels,” said Rubinfeld.

People laying flowers at Umschlagplatz at the Warsaw Ghetto, the monument at the site from which Jews were deported to Treblinka. (Ruth Ellen Gruber)

WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — In Warsaw, sirens wailed and church bells rang to mark the 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, a valiant but failed revolt by Jewish fighters against the Nazi occupiers who already had deported hundreds of thousands of Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp.

An official commemoration, held April 19 in a plaza between the monument honoring the ghetto heroes and the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, was attended by Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, as well as Israeli Education Minister Shai Piron. But a half-mile away, a small group gathered under leaden skies at the entrance to Warsaw’s huge Jewish cemetery for an alternative memorial.

Carrying bunches of bright yellow daffodils, they walked down the main path and laid the flowers on the grave of Marek Edelman, the last surviving uprising commander, who died in 2009 in his early 90s. The group, most now in their 60s and 70s, has come together for decades to mark the anniversary of the uprising. Until his death, Edelman was usually with them, laying a bunch of daffodils at the towering, dark monument to ghetto heroes.

For years, Edelman had received yellow flowers, usually daffodils, from an anonymous person on the anniversary. Eventually the flowers became a symbol of the remembrance. The group laying flowers on Edelman’s grave this year included an Italian who wrote a book about Edelman, several Polish Jews forced to leave the country during the communist anti-Semitic campaign of 1968, and former dissidents and Solidarity activists.

One of them, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, served as Poland’s defense minister following the fall of communism. In 1983, he was arrested and jailed for four months by the communist regime for speaking at an anniversary ceremony organized by dissidents.

“We had all hoped that Marek Edelman would turn up and say a few words, but he couldn’t because he was being held under house arrest in Lodz,” Onyszkiewicz told JTA. “He only sent a letter that was read. I felt that everyone was waiting for something to happen, so I got up and delivered a speech, and as a result, I was arrested immediately.”

He added, “What was rather funny is that when the secret police agent arrested me, he was rather curious. He asked me, ‘Why did you come here, you’re not a Jew?’ I replied that no, I’m not — but so what!”

Yellow daffodils were a memorial motif; a stylized daffodil was an official logo of this year’s commemorations. People placed daffodils at the foot of the ghetto memorial and at the monument at Umschlagplatz, the site from which hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Jews were deported to Treblinka. Pots and vases of daffodils decorated the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, where thousands of visitors flocked to see the striking new building, attend concerts and films, and buy souvenirs in the gift shop.

Throughout the city, young volunteers handed out paper daffodils for people to wear on their jackets or lapels. All over Warsaw, people could be seen sporting the symbol, which was reminiscent of the yellow Star of David the Nazis forced Jews to wear.

“I think one of the most moving things I’ve seen in all my years in Poland was watching volunteers all around the city giving out the daffodils and watching Warsavians walking around the city wearing them, evoking the Star of David,” said Jonathan Ornstein, the executive director of the JCC Krakow, who was in Warsaw for the commemorations. “It really felt as if the city was commemorating something from Polish history, not only Jewish history, and it made me aware that Poles realize the shared heritage.”

The anniversary proceedings attracted Jews with Polish roots from all over the world. Among them were Holocaust survivors and emigres — such as American philanthropists Tad Taube and Sigmund Rolat — and those who had fled during communism. Members of Poland’s contemporary Jewish community also turned out in numbers.

For many, this made it an old home week of sorts, filled with emotional reunions. The high-profile presence of visiting Jews created one of the more unusual sightings. Late at night after the April 19 ceremonies, the tower of the Marriott Hotel in the center of Warsaw bore a message spelled out in lights that moved around the top of the building: kosherfood.pl.

The website, it turns out, is for the Marriott’s own kosher catering service.

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Svoboda supporters attending a party rally in western Ukraine, 2012. (Svoboda.org.ua)

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — Marching in formation, six young men in dark jackets approach an anti-government rally in Cherkasy, a city some 125 miles southeast of Kiev.

At the appointed moment, they remove their windbreakers to reveal white T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Beat the kikes.” Their jackets carry the name of Svoboda, the ultranationalist Ukrainian political party.

A small riot quickly ensues. Angry protestors rip at the T-shirts, but the Svoboda-labeled men give as good as they get. One of the men beats Victor Smal, a lawyer and human rights activist, so savagely that he is rendered barely recognizable.

In the days after this April 6 melee, Svoboda denied that the provocateurs at the rally were their men. Yuriy Syrotiuk, a Svoboda parliamentarian, called the men criminals and complained that police were not responding to an act of incitement, Interfax reported. Some suggested the men were anti-Svoboda activists seeking to tarnish its image.

But denials notwithstanding, the incident has raised anxieties among Ukrainian Jews fearful of rising xenophobia and racially motivated violence they say is inspired by Svoboda, a party with neo-Nazi roots and a penchant for thuggery.

“Svoboda lifted the lid from the sewer of anti-Semitism in Ukraine and it’s spilling out,” said Joel Rubinfeld, co-chair of the European Jewish Parliament.

A U.S. State Department report this month singled out Ukraine, along with Hungary and Greece, as places of “concern” because of growing anti-Semitic parties. But open anti-Semitism is still rare in Ukraine. Tel Aviv University’s Kantor Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry documented just 15 cases of anti-Semitic violence in 2012. In France, the number was 200.

But the behavior of some Svoboda politicians risks changing that, some Ukrainian Jews worry.

Founded in 2004, Svoboda (“freedom” in Ukrainian) is the latest incarnation of the Social-National Party, a far-right movement ideologically aligned with Nazism. But while the Social-National Party never enjoyed any electoral success, Svoboda garnered more than 10 percent of the vote in the 2012 elections, becoming the country’s fourth-largest party.

“Svoboda is perhaps the biggest challenge facing Ukrainian Jewry today,” Ukrainian Jewish Committee President Oleksandr Feldman told JTA. “It has no structure and operates in a political vacuum and turmoil which allow it to run rampant.”

Svoboda’s unstructured nature also makes it difficult to pigeonhole. Party leader Oleh Tyahnybok has praised supporters for being the “worst fear of the Jewish-Russian mafia” and has called Jews “kikes.”

Yet the party also speaks admiringly of Israel, and Tyahnybok has made a point of advertising his meeting last December with Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine. Alexander Aronets, Svoboda’s press secretary, has praised Israel on his Facebook page as ”one of the most nationalistic countries in the world.”

Good relations with Israel may be desirable to Svoboda as a defense against accusations of anti-Semitism, a tactic employed by other European nationalist movements that have made overtures in Israel’s direction.

“They know anti-Semitism is preventing the good relations they seek,” said Moshe Azman, Ukraine’s Chabad-affiliated chief rabbi. “But Svoboda is not a uniform entity and I’m not sure the leaders control the rank and file.”

Feldman, an energetic businessman, lawmaker and founder of the Kyiv Interfaith Forum, says Svoboda has helped erode the shame associated with open expressions of anti-Semitism and other ethnic hatreds. His interfaith forum, which each year brings together hundreds of clerics from five faiths, was marred for the first time this year by a minor assault on a Muslim participant outside the conference.

“Svoboda is very frightening to Ukrainian Jews and other minorities because it is an ultra-Jobbik that evolved quickly,” Feldman said, referring to the anti-Semitic and Iran-friendly Hungarian party that also has enjoyed recent electoral success.

“We had hoped Svoboda would tone it down once it’s in parliament, but the opposite has happened,” said Vyacheslav Likhachev, a Ukrainian researcher with the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress. “The electoral gains have emboldened Svoboda lawmakers to incorporate thuggery as a modus operandi, a very dangerous development.”

One example came in February, when party member Igor Miroshnichenko shimmied up the towering statue of Vladimir Lenin in the town of Akhtyrka, threw a rope around the communist leader’s head, tied the other end to a truck and brought down the monument.

In December, the same man said Mila Kunis, a Ukrainian-American Jewish actress, was “no Ukrainian, but a kike.” Asked by a newspaper if Miroshnichenko could be prosecuted for making a racial insult, a Justice Ministry official said the word he used — “zhydovka,” a feminized version of kike — was permissible and part of the official vocabulary.

“This was another Svoboda success in poisoning the public sphere,” Likhachev says.

Svoboda officials declined several JTA requests for comment for this story.

In February, Likhachev signed a letter along with several other Jewish Ukrainians asking the Jewish Agency for Israel to cancel plans to hold its board of governors meeting in Kiev in June. The letter, which several Jewish leaders dismissed as overblown, said that poor democratic standards and Svoboda’s ascent made Kiev an ill-suited choice.

“Svoboda are riffraff — nothing comparable to Jobbik, which has its own militia and coherent policy,” said Yaakov Bleich, a Ukrainian chief rabbi.

“Svoboda is troubling as a symptom of the main challenges facing Ukrainian Jewry: the economic recession and political uncertainty,” Bleich said. Still, he added, “because Svoboda is a mob, it’s less predictable than Jobbik. Svoboda’s leaders may be unable to control anti-Semitic displays.”

Despite the disagreements, many Jewish leaders seem to agree that Svoboda’s success owes more to frustration with the establishment than to its anti-Semitic statements. Likhachev pointed specifically to the discontent that emerged in the wake of the Orange Revolution, the protests following the 2004 election that brought former president Viktor Yushchenko to power on a platform of greater government accountability.

Bickering and disunity cost Yushchenko the presidency in 2010. He was succeeded by Viktor Yanukovych, the man whom protestors accused five years earlier of election fraud. That development strengthened Svoboda in two ways, Likhachev says.

“First, it radicalized disgruntled voters,” Likhachev says. “Second, the opposition allies learned they needed to stay united to win. So they are willing to overlook Svoboda’s anti-Semitism — to the detriment of Ukrainian society and its Jewish population.”

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