Senior Wiesenthal Center Official Meets With Chairman of Russian Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs

October 30, 2007

Senior Wiesenthal Center Official Meets Chairman of Russian Senate Committee for Foreign Affairs to Discuss Cooperation in Combating Glorification of Nazism and Distortion of Holocaust History in Post-Communist Eastern Europe

Moscow – The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s chief Nazi-hunter, Israel director Dr. Efraim Zuroff, today met in Moscow with  Russian political leader Mikhail Margelov, Chairman of the Committee for Foreign Affairs of the Russian Senate and President of the “European Democrat Group” in the Council of Europe to discuss practical cooperation in combating recent phenomenon of Holocaust distortion and the glorification of Nazi collaborators in post-Communist Eastern Europe. The discussion focused primarily on the Baltic states and the Ukraine, where such phenomenon have increased in recent months and have included efforts to equalize the benefits of Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis to those of Red Army veterans who fought against the Germans, as well as the attempts by Lithuania to prosecute Holocaust survivor and scholar and former Yad Vashem Chairman Dr. Yitzchak Arad.

Zuroff presented a number of projects relating to the historical events designed to help combat the wave of revisionism sweeping post-Communist Europe and discussed the potential participation of Russian and Council of Europe institutions in mounting a campaign to achieve that goal. Margelov expressed his grave concern regarding the recent phenomenon and promised his assistance in helping to forge a working relationship between the Wiesenthal Center and the pertinent bodies in Russia and in the Council of Europe to launch the effort.

Zuroff, who was a guest of KEROOR, the organization of Russian religious Jewish communities, also met with the local media and presented an analysis of the problematic policies of post-Communist countries to Holocaust-related issues such as the prosecution of Nazi war criminals, Holocaust education, and  documentation . In his words, “the battle for the prosecution of Holocaust perpetrators will soon end and we will then face a new and equally-important struggle for truth in history.”
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