Russian minister Sergei Lavrov sparked outrage amongst the Jewish community when in an interview on Italian TV he claimed Hitler was part Jewish and that ‘some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews’.
President Putin has maintained that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is an attempt to ‘de-nazify’ the country, saying that the invasion is a ‘special military operation’ geared towards removing Ukraine’s neo-Nazi leadership.
When asked in the interview to justify Putin’s claim given that Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish, Lavrov said: ‘So what if Zelensky is Jewish’, before explaining that Hitler too had Jewish ancestry, and therefore, Zelensky’s being Jewish ‘doesn’t mean anything’.
Lavrov’s comments were described by Israeli foreign minister Yair Labid as ‘scandalous and a horrible historical error’, explaining that ‘The Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to blame Jews themselves for antisemitism’.
In a memoir published in 1953, Hitler’s lawyer Hans Frank claimed to have unearthed evidence proving that Hitler’s grandfather was a Jew, however the claim has been treated with scepticism by most mainstream historians.
Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennet, referred to Lavrov’s comments as ‘lies’ and an attempt to blame Jews for the most terrible crimes in history and thus ‘free the oppressors of the Jews from their responsibility’.
‘No war today is the Holocaust or is like the Holocaust’, he added.
The head of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, Dani Dayan, added his condemnation of Lavrov’s claims, calling them ‘absurd’, ‘delusional’, and ‘dangerous’.
‘Lavrov deals with the reversal of the Holocaust: turning the victims into criminals, based on the promotion of a completely unfounded claim that Hitler was of Jewish descent.’
Israel, who has largely remained neutral during the Russian war on Ukraine, has demanded an apology from the Russian ambassador.
BBC foreign reporter in Jerusalem, Jon Donnison, remarked on the strength of the reaction to Lavrov’s comments from Jews in Israel and around the world, and added that they will ‘test Israel’s relations with Russia’.