Wasili Shikula, a member of the City Soviet of Poltava, was sentenced to two months’ compulsory labor for spreading a blood libel. He had alleged that Sarah Lichnizkaia, a Jewess, living next door to him, had kidnapped his little girl in order to kill her and obtain her blood for ritual purposes. “It is nothing new.” he said, “that Jews use the blood of Christian children. Only recently the Jews of Charkow killed Christian children to obtain their blood for Passover.” He called upon the neighbors to save his child from the Jews.
At the trial it came out that Shikula was in the habit of thrashing his child, who used to run away and hide in Lichnizkaia’s house, where she was always well treated.
In sentencing Shikula to two months’ compulsory labor, the Judge also fined Lichnizkaia five roubles on a complaint that she had insulted Shikula. The decision caused a great deal of dissatisfaction in Communist circles in Poltava, both on account of the fine imposed on Lichnizkaia and the mildness of Shikula’s sentence. The Moscow “Pravda” has also taken up the matter, and complains against the manner in which justice is being administered generally in Poltava. “Jewish officials in the Poltava Courts,” it says, “are being regularly persecuted, and anti-Semitic cases are hushed up, the Court refusing to deal with complaints regarding them.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
