“I am very often in Ukraine, and I know a lot about what is going on there. There is no anti-Semitism at the state level. The fact that we have a Jewish president at the moment, open Jewish president, the guy who actually stated that he is a Jew before he started his run to presidency, it tells you a lot,” said the director and producer Alexander Rodnyansky, speaking at KJF 2020.
On the other hand, Rodnyansky noted, there are many anti-Semites in Ukraine in the routine, everyday life level.
“My dad, my mom, my granddad, they were working in the same studio at the very beginning of the 60s, when I was born. Physically, I grew up in a documentary studio situated in the downtown of Kyiv, my native city. Of course, behind the camera in the Soviet Union there were always a lot of Jews. But we were hidden, you would hardly actually hear the word of Jew on the screen, that was life... The first time I entered the synagogue when I was like 25 or 26 years old. It was a tiny synagogue somewhere in one of the Kyiv districts. And I had a special feeling that when I go there, someone would definitely write me down,” the producer recalled.
As reported, Kyiv Jewish Forum 2020 was held online on September 8-9. The forum was organized by the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine in partnership with the Jerusalem Post. On the first day of the forum, the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the participants with a welcoming speech. According to the JCU President Boris Lozhkin, the annual Kyiv Jewish Forum has become a global platform for discussing the most relevant issues of the Jewish community and the whole world.