Anna Nemtsova
Published Nov. 01, 2023 4:49 AM EDT 

The hotel’s management went along with the gang and put a sign on the door that read: “The entrance of Jews is strictly forbidden.”

“To us it looks like the beginning of a new Holocaust in Russia.” — Alla

The Kremlin did nothing. The following day, the Jewish Cultural Center in Nalchik, the capital of the Kabardino-Balkaria republic in southern Russia, was set on fire amid the rising wave of antisemitism. The attackers left clumsily written graffiti on the wall that read: “Death to Yahuds [an Arabic word for Jews].”

Still, Putin was silent, and the rampaging mob was emboldened. By Sunday night, a crowd of more than 1,500 people had stormed the Makhachkala airport in Dagestan to meet a plane arriving from Tel Aviv.

A local lawmaker in St. Petersburg, Boris Vishnevsky, told The Daily Beast that he was outraged to see Moscow’s impotence. “There are not many words that the Russian language has given the world; the word ‘pogrom’ is one of them. Today the community of about 150,000 Russian Jews cannot feel safe, there is nobody to defend us,” Vishnevsky told The Daily Beast. “The Kremlin is silent… there must be criminal cases opened, there must investigations into this nationalist hate. What is this? Who allows this? Who is responsible?”
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