July 20-21 an international seminar "Rights of national minorities in democracy" was held in Sebastopol. It was organized by the representation of Council of Europe (Stefani Marsal, Strasbourg), fund of K. Adenauer in Ukraine (Manfred Lomann, Kiev, Magulena Hoffman, Institute of international law named after M. Plank) and the Sebastopol human rights' group.

Representatives of over 20 political and national cultural organizations of Ukraine and Crimea, people's deputies, officials of the state administration, journalists considered problems on actualizing the European convention on national minorities in Ukraine and in country's legislation, ways of overcoming national ethnic and religious conflicts and prejudices, developing interethnic cooperation. Particular attention was rendered to settlement problems of deported Crimean peoples, in the first turn, of Crimean Tatars, representation of national minorities in power structures, renaissance of cultural heritage.

Though, participants of the seminar passed over in silence, at first, the theme of anti-Semitism which, as the Sebastopol Jewish community believes, is manifested in publications of a number of Ukrainian editions, in particular, the newspaper "Dzvin Sevastopolya" (Bell of Sebastopol") - the T. Shevchenko "Prosvita" society's organ. A set of propaganda cliches about "Yids Bolsheviks" and Jews of this edition coincides with the articles of a pro-fascist newspaper "Voice of Crimea" accomplices of Hitlerite invaders issued until the last days of occupation. Even the author of "How the steel was tempered" is a Shepetovka Yiddie, according to "Dzvin". The Lvov "Idealist" also excelled having dedicated three pages of its June issue to a list of several hundreds of names of officials, writers, actors, businessmen, doctors of the XX - XXI centuries who "ruled, rule and are eager to rule, turn native Ukrainians into slaves, exterminating the nation!". We find here Leonid Kuchma (Kuchman-Goldshtein), Leonid Kravchuk (Blum), Golda Meir, Ilya Mechnikov, Vitaly Korotich, Ilya Ilf, academicians Yevgeny Paton and Boris Paton and many others.

The invariable motto is placed on the front page of "Idealist", "let's adopt a law on deportation of Yids from Ukraine".

Those making speeches were unanimous anti-Semitism exerts a negative influence on Ukraine's image but pronounced an opinion excessive attention to editions like this one only attracts readers and recommended the Jewish community to apply to the court in such cases. By the way, the European court in Strasbourg is not so far away.

Though the Chairman of Association of Sebastopol national cultural communities Valery Milodan noted the circulation of "Dzvin" over the last half a year had increased from 3 thousand to 5 thousand copies. The representative of Institute of democracy after Pylyp Orlik (Kiev), doctor Natalia Belitser took the copies of "Dzvin Sevastopolya" to further study and assess them from the point of view of European convention on human rights.