New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Two years after the “Orange Revolution” overturned a presidential election in Ukraine, a former congressman from Cedar Grove returned from overseeing a new round of voting to proclaim that Ukrainian democracy and its Jewish community are both in good shape.

Herbert Klein, the president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Clifton/Passaic, represented New Jersey’s eighth district from 1993 to 1995.

He spent part of March in Ukraine as one of six former members of Congress — three Republicans and three Democrats, including Klein — who served as election monitors under the auspices of the United States Agency for International Development, an arm of the State Department.

“We were there solely to see that it was an open and honest election and that it would continue to foster the spread of democracy,” he told NJ Jewish News.

Even before legislative elections were scheduled for March 26, there was widespread concern about their potential for being corrupted.

Following the November 2004 presidential race, pro-Western forces charged that the victorious pro-Russian candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, had rigged the outcome. The protesters claimed his victory came about only because of pervasive corruption of the electoral process.

Supporters of the pro-Western candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, dressed in orange and took to the streets. Their weeks of demonstrations brought about a second vote a month later, a victory by Yushchenko, and a set of electoral reforms enacted by the legislature.

According to Klein, Ukrainian-Jewish communities played a large role in supporting the country’s burgeoning democracy movement, especially while the Orange Revolution was in full swing.

Most notably, he saluted the country’s chief rabbi, who serves at the largest of three congregations in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev.

“He did a remarkable thing during the presidential election” by opening his synagogue to pro-democracy demonstrators who had flocked to the capital by the thousands, said Klein.

There, he fed 500 protestors and housed 300 of them “for simply humanitarian reasons.”

Although Klein said the rabbi was not a political partisan, his act of charity helped forge “a very strong relationship between Yushchenko and the 500,000 people in Ukraine’s Jewish community. Yushchenko visited the rabbi for the past two Hanukkas and joined in the synagogue’s holiday celebrations.”

When Klein and his five fellow delegates arrived two years later, they spent part of the week before election day in Kiev, meeting with national leaders of the 45 different political parties that fielded candidates for the legislature.

“We said to them: ‘You tell us how you think it’s going,’” said Klein.

“Then we went to about 30 local areas, particularly near Kharkiv — a region of the country near the Russian border that is considered generally sympathetic to Kremlin policies.”

In the days before the vote, Klein said, “we lived with people who administer the elections. We wanted to learn how lists of voters were put together. Then we met with the press to find out what they were doing, and the local leaders of all 45 parties.”

As it turned out, the president’s political rivals in the Russian-oriented All Regions Party won 32 percent of the vote, while Yushchenko’s party finished third with 13 percent of the seats.

Even so, Klein praised Yushchenko for having done “a great job in ensuring an honest election. His political party, which was clearly in control during the election process, made sure the media were available to all of the parties. All of the parties had a completely fair and open opportunity to win the election.”

He said he believes that although “the pro-Russians who won legislative seats are obviously a party to be reckoned with, most of the population is happy not to be part of the Soviet Union,” although some “think there ought to be some kind of communist or socialist government.”

Overall, Klein said, he found “a strong sympathy toward the West. My perception is that people like the West. They like the United States. They don’t like the Bush administration, and they don’t like its Iraq policies, but they look at the U.S. as a role model of what they would like their country to be.”

But he also added that he believes the Ukrainian democracy to be a fragile institution that should be nurtured with American foreign aid.

“Economic development is one of the major shortcomings of the Yushchenko government,” he said. “People think he has done a great job of delivering democracy but not such a great job in delivering on his economic promises. There are a little more than 50 million people in Ukraine. It is not an insignificant country. For maybe one one-hundredth of what we are spending in Iraq, we could make an economic impact on Ukraine.”

Comment | Print | Subscribe