JEWISH PRESS IN THE CIS

WHAT SHOULD ONE DO WHEN HE LOVES?

ONE «AMENDMENT» TO ANOTHER AMENDMENT

MUST THE JEWS OF UKRAINE FEEL SORRY?

Anatoliy Shengait - is the Executive Director of the Kiev City Jewish community, a member of the Coordination Council of the Jewish Confederation of Ukraine.

Almost every week a new Jewish edition appears in the CIS countries. There are dozens of hundreds of them already. In spite of their apparent variety, most of these newspapers are built by the same conception model - reflection of the position of the founder-organization and reflection of the founder's real or imaginary activities.

This question that was formulated by Plato in his dialogue "Feast" is a philosophical challenge to the humanity. Jews had got the answer to this question long ago. According to the Russian language one can "love" sweets and country walks, a girl or modern art, native land or a sport commentator, an army order or your people and God after all. Nevertheless, the Jewish nature of the question is in its formulation: what should one do? It's possible to explain why, when and how this question becomes really Russian, but we'll write about it in some other article.

New political winds are blowing in the world after the September acts of terrorism in the USA. Recently, the American President George Bush addressed the Congress to cancel the famous "Jackson-Venick amendment" towards the CIS countries. Sure, this was done to come closer to Russia which plays an important role in the anti-terrorist coalition. Ukraine doesn't stand aside too.

It seems that nothing new can be said about our eternal Jewish question - how to go on living? To answer it we should first of all identify what are we, Jews?