A recent attack on a young Jew in Ukraine was an attempted murder, owing to authorities’ lax attitude toward previous anti-Semitic incidents, one of the country’s chief rabbis said. Chaim Gorbov, a 20-year-old rabbinical student, was attacked by a gang of skinheads in Dnepropetrovsk on April 20. He was stabbed in the chest and suffered head injuries. He left the hospital this week, and doctors have described his condition as satisfactory. Rabbi Azriel Haikin, one of the chief rabbis of Ukraine and the main Chabad-Lubavitch authority in the country, said Gorbov was attacked because of his religion, and that “much depends on the reaction of the Ukrainian state and society.” “The authorities should take strong measures to stop activities of all groups that incite inter-ethnic and interfaith hatred,” Haikin said in a statement this week. According to an annual audit of anti-Semitism in Ukraine published earlier this month by the Jewish Agency for Israel, the number of violent anti-Semitic attacks against individuals increased 50 percent last year.
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