MOSCOW, March 22 (JTA) — The Jewish mayor of a Ukrainian city is claiming that his political rivals are playing the Jewish card. In a letter to Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, Dmitri Dvorkis, the mayor of the central Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, urged the president to intervene to stop anti-Semitism being used against him and other Jewish candidates in races for next week’s scheduled elections. “The ethnic terror should be stopped to give the citizens of Jewish origin who consider Ukraine their motherland the opportunity to work for its benefit and not to force them to emigrate,” he wrote. Recently, leaflets were distributed in Vinnitsa calling on voters not to allow “Judeo-Masons” to come to power. According to Dvorkis, the leaflets were distributed by the People’s Democratic Party of Ukraine. The country’s prime minister, Paval Lazarenko, heads the party’s slate in the upcoming elections to Ukraine’s 450-seat Parliament. Dvorkis was elected the mayor of Vinnitsa, a city of 300,000, in 1992. He is one of several Jews holding mayoral posts in the country. Local observers say anti-Semitic rhetoric is being used by politicians of different views to defeat Jewish political rivals. Parliamentary, municipal and mayoral elections are slated to be held in Ukraine on March 29. The former Soviet republic, which has a population of 52 million, is home to 600,000 Jews.
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