June 18, Pozirk. The organizers in Israel have canceled a conference marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Belarus from the Nazis because of Alaksandar Łukašenka’s recent antisemitic remark, a reliable source has told Pozirk.
The Chaim Herzog Museum of the Jewish Soldier planned to hold the conference on June 27.
It was to include a wreath-laying ceremony for Jewish partisans and ghetto fighters, a dinner and a World War II exhibition.
An association of Jewish refugees and Holocaust survivors and the All-Israeli Association of Immigrants from Belarus were organizing the conference with support from the Belarusian embassy.
Łukašenka made the controversial remark on June 14, while discussing a corruption probe involving dozens of officials.
“I beg your pardon, I’m not antisemitic, but more than half of them are Jews,” he said. “Do they have a privileged position in our country, that they steal and do not think about their future?”
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz described the statement as “unacceptable and outrageous,” jns.org reported. Such statements “sound like clear antisemitic comments,” Katz noted.
In the past, Łukašenka demonstrated his antisemitic views on several occasions. Back in 2007, he blamed Jews for turning Babrujsk, a Belarusian city with rich Jewish history, into a “pigsty.”
In 2015, he said he wanted to keep the Jewish population “under control” and reign in Jews such as the late founder of tut.by Juryj Zisier.
