Pig’s Head Dumped at Ukraine Chabad Synagogue
A pig’s head was left on the doorstep of a synagogue being built in Sevastopol, the Ukrainian city’s Jewish community said.
Amid intensifying opposition to the synagogue’s construction, the news site zarusskiy.org reported Wednesday that the head was discovered Monday by members of the Jewish community.
The Chabad movement began building last year in the southern Ukrainian coastal city; the synagogue is planned to open next year.
Chabad’s emissary to Sevastopol, Rabbi Binyomin Wolff, was not available for comment on the incident.
Some critics of the building say the construction area was a mass grave for non-Jewish Ukrainian prisoners killed by fascists during World War II.
On Oct. 30, several dozen residents of Sevastopol demonstrated in front of the building. One of the rally’s organizers, Vladimir Tyunin, was quoted as telling the news site 15minut.org that Chabad was a “hateful, Zionist sect.” He added: “We are not against other religions, but we support those religions that are traditional.”
Boris Nesterenko, a spokesman for the Sevastopol Jewish community, told 15minut that the building will have three stories and a capacity of 400 worshipers.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
