Anna Nemtsova
Published Nov. 01, 2023 4:49 AM EDT
The Kremlin’s top ideologues, Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov, have never been shy about their antisemitism. But the anti-Jewish propaganda has reached even greater heights since the Oct. 7 Hamas brutal attack on Israel, with many officials taking the side of the Palestinians and ignoring Israel’s rights.
Putin refused to condemn Hamas for the massacre and welcomed a Hamas delegation to Moscow last week. One prominent Russian Jewish pundit claimed there were many antisemites within the ranks of Russian government officials, who “livened up” after the attack. Before he could be fired from his TV station, Yevgeny Satanovsky said the spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry, Maria Zakharova, was “a heavy-drinking skank, who does not like the Jews and can’t stand Israel.”
This was the climate in which radicals believed the events in Dagestan and the Caucasus over the weekend would be tolerated. The minority Jewish community in the region is shaken.
“This is caveman antisemitism. If the attackers found Jews on the plane, they would have torn them into pieces. I was shocked and appalled to see the videos of the Jew hunt,” Georgia-based journalist Misha Dzhinzhikashvili told The Daily Beast. “We crossed paths with Dagestan’s Mountain Jews in Azerbaijan and in Tbilisi, where many Mountain Jews moved in different years and where we have two synagogues. We Jews of the Caucasus always lived a peaceful life, nobody attacked us even in the worst years of the pogroms in Ukraine or Moldova.”
She said today’s threat was higher than ever. “The hate boiled over and showed its face, it is ugly, wild,” Dzhinzhikashvili said.
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