Tag #148333 - Interview #95114 (Lazar Sherishevskiy)

I’ve always identified myself as a Jew. My father implanted the knowledge of Jewish history and Jewish culture in me, when I was a child. Besides, this self-identification became very acute in 1933, when Hitler came to power and Europe was smashed by a huge wave of anti-Semitism. At school I suffered more being the son of an arrested man rather than being a Jew. It was the same during the war, when I was in a camp and sensed the breath of state anti-Semitism in the 1950s, - 60s, when I started working in newspapers after graduating from the university. I sensed the official trend ‘to stop’, to not admit, ‘to not allow’. I also felt this moving to Moscow in the 1970s. Some publishers did not publish Jews in principal and openly expressed their anti-Semitic positions.  

Feeling myself as a person 5raised on the Russian and partially Jewish culture I do not believe there exist exclusive nations. I wrote: ‘There are no God chosen nations in the world, there God chosen people’. I do not believe in any exclusiveness giving one nation the right to believe they were higher and had the right to dictate. This refers to all. I also reject anti-Semitism decisively. Like any other national hostility.