Josef Zissels

J. Zissels: It is important for me to live in a country where each year it becomes more and more clear that today’s citizens of Ukraine are mostly descendants of those righteous Ukrainians rather than of executioners

I am officially stating that author Will Stewart and the editors of MailOnline deceived their readers by attributing to me, without any grounds, the phrase about the ethnicity of the killers of the Jews in the context of the story of mass killing of the Jews in Western Ukraine. I have never, under any circumstances, made any statements to this effect. Neither have I made any other statements that could be interpreted this way in connection with the Ukrainian tragedy. I urge MailOnline to stop quoting the statements ascribed to me in this article and to never appeal to them in any public form.

Ukrainian Jewish Leader Josef Zissels in Toronto: The Truth About Ukraine

“It’s very important that Jews take part in Maidan. Jews took part in Maidan, yes. Three died on the barricades of Maidan. But I don’t want to exaggerate the role of Jews on Maidan. I’m a realistic person. I was the first of the Jewish leaders to help Maidan, the only one. But there were 3-4 Jewish leaders who upheld Yanukovych too (with their calls and articles) not very actively but the world saw it, and once they did this it raised the anxiety in the Jewish community. They said that anti-Semitism was growing. I knew that this was not true, and I wrote and spoke everywhere that there is no growth in anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Over a seven year period we see that it has been decreasing, I will give you our reports. [EAJC Xenophobia MonitoringEAJC Analytics]. We are the most professional organization that monitors and analyzes anti-Semitism. And we’ve seen that for seven years anti-semitism has been decreasing. And it continues–some leaders are publicly saying it is growing–and this is a lie. And every day we worked on correcting these lies. I sat until 2 and 3am on my computer and we published positive Jewish reports about Maidan.

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