Pessah blood libel resurfaces in Siberia

Posters in Novosibirsk, Russia's third-largest city, warn Jews will drain children's blood for matzot.

siberia 224.88 (photo credit: )
siberia 224.88
(photo credit: )
The 13,000-strong Jewish community in Novosibirsk feels "like a return to the Middle Ages," the Jewish Agency's emissary there said, after someone hung posters around the city this week warning locals to guard their children against being kidnapped by Jews for use in ritual slaughter. Novosibirsk is Russia's third-largest city, with about 1.4 million inhabitants. The agency received a report on Wednesday from its emissary in the Siberian municipality that posters plastered on the entrances to apartment buildings throughout the city center were warning that local children were in mortal peril because of the approach of Pessah, during which the Jews "needed blood in order to bake their sacred bread" in worship of "their gods." "This was posted throughout the city center," said Amos Hermon, head of the Jewish Agency's Task Force for Combating Anti-Semitism. "No one who went to work could have missed it. It was in the neighborhoods with huge apartment buildings, where hundreds of people pass by each building entrance." The posters claimed the Jews disposed of the bodies after ritually draining their blood, and that local criminals accused by Russian authorities of kidnapping and murdering children had a "Jewish appearance" and were, in fact, Jews. According to Hermon, the agency plans "to complain to the Russian government about this. We don't remember such an event. This happens in Iran, and among the most radical Islamic [TV] networks such as [Hizbullah's] al-Manar. But in the West, we haven't seen this for decades."