Israel demands apology after Russia says Hitler had Jewish roots

Israel lambasted Russian Foreign Miner Sergei Lavrov on Monday for claiming that Adolf Hitler had Jewish origins, saying it was an “unforgivable” falsehood that debased the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.
In a signal of sharply deteriorating relations with Moscow, the Israeli foreign minry summoned the Russian ambassador and demanded an apology.
“Such lies are intended to accuse the Jews themselves of the most horrific crimes in hory that were committed against them,” Israeli Prime Miner Naftali Bennett said in a statement. “The use of the Holocaust of the Jewish people for political purposes must stop immediately,” he added.

Lavrov made the assertion on Italian television on Sunday when he was asked why Russia said it needed to “denazify” Ukraine if the country’s own president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was himself Jewish.
“When they say ‘What sort of nazification is this if we are Jews’, well I think that Hitler also had Jewish origins, so it means nothing,” Lavrov told Rete 4 channel, speaking through an Italian interpreter. “For a long time now we’ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say that the biggest anti-Semites are the Jews themselves,” he added.

Russian FM Sergey Lavrov said that Ukraine could still have Nazi elements even if the country’s president is Jewish, claiming that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had Jewish ancestry ⤵️
🔗: https://t.co/3tUiEDMbLl pic.twitter.com/0geRdwklVn
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) May 2, 2022
Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust, said the Russian miner’s remarks were “an insult and a severe blow to the victims of the real Nazism”. Speaking on Kan radio, Dayan said Lavrov was spreading “an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact”.
The identity of one of Hitler’s grandfathers is not known but there has been some speculation, never backed up any evidence, that he might have been a Jew. There was no immediate response for comment from the Russian embassy to Israel or from Lavrov in Moscow.
Strained relations
Kyiv condemned Lavrov’s words, saying his “heinous remarks” were offensive to Zelenskyy, to Israel, Ukraine and Jews.
“More broadly, they demonstrate that today’s Russia is full of hatred towards other nations,” Ukrainian Foreign Miner Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.

FM Lavrov could not help hiding the deeply-rooted antisemitism of the Russian elites. His heinous remarks are offensive to President @ZelenskyyUa, Ukraine, Israel, and the Jewish people. More broadly, they demonstrate that today’s Russia is full of hatred towards other nations.
— Dmytro Kuleba (@DmytroKuleba) May 2, 2022
Israeli Foreign Minry Yair Lapid, whose grandfather died in the Holocaust, said that accusing Jews of being anti-Semites was “the basest level of racism”. He also dismissed Lavrov’s assertion that pro-Nazi elements held sway over the Ukrainian government and military. “The Ukrainians aren’t Nazis. Only the Nazis were Nazis and only they dealt with the systematic destruction of the Jewish people,” Lapid told the YNet news website.
A German government spokesperson said the idea Hitler had Jewish heritage was “absurd” propaganda.
Israel has expressed repeated support for Ukraine following the Russian invasion in February. But wary of straining relations with Russia, a powerbroker in neighbouring Syria, it initially avoided direct criticism of Moscow and has not enforced formal sanctions on Russian oligarchs.
However, relations have grown more strained, with Lapid last month accusing Russia of committing war crimes in Ukraine.
However, the Ukrainian president has also run into flak in Israel looking to draw analogies between the conflict in his country and World War Two. In an address to the Israeli parliament in March, Zelenskyy compared the Russian offensive in Ukraine to Nazi Germany’s plan to murder all Jews within its reach during World War Two.
Yad Vashem called his comments “irresponsible,” saying they trivialised the horical facts of the Holocaust.