Alik Gomelsky has written blog posts for the League of Ukrainian Canadians website, and allegedly “works closely” with Ukrainian Jewish Encounter (UJE), a well-connected Canadian organization that strives to foster a “shared [Ukrainian-Jewish] historical narrative.” Historian Tarik Cyril Amar has criticized the UJE’s “tendency to seek for what it calls a ‘shared narrative’ by evading or de-emphasizing the hardest questions that need addressing in any honest ‘encounter,’ such as Ukrainian nationalist antisemitism and participation in the Holocaust.”

UJE and Gomelsky’s new letterhead organization, the “Association of International History and Political Science,” co-hosted a meeting with Rabbi Azman in Toronto. They met in August at the headquarters of the Ukrainian National Federation (UNF), the original OUN front group in Canada, which still has a Melnykite bent, although it may no longer take directions from the far-right OUN-M in Ukraine.

The UNF president might be the only Ukrainian Canadian leader that has publicly defended Yaroslav Hunka. He worked up the courage not long after sitting down with Gomelsky at a Ukrainian festival in Toronto to discuss “fighting Russian disinformation” for the UNF-affiliated “Kontakt Ukrainian TV.”

In 2019, the UJE organized a controversial ceremony in the historic Jewish cemetery of Sambir, a small city in western Ukraine, to unveil a monument dedicated to 17 members of the OUN who were allegedly shot there by the Germans. According to Eduard Dolinsky, director-general of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee in Kyiv, “It’s like putting a monument to killers on top of the graves of their victims.”

The UJE project leader acknowledged that the story of 17 martyred nationalists is dubious, but shrugged it off as “a necessary compromise” to restore the Jewish cemetery. “I would be very uneasy about such a monument in Canada,” he told Radio Canada International. But UJE has remained silent about the “Nazigate” scandals and Canada’s monuments that honor Ukrainian [Axis] collaborators.

[…]

“I know nothing about 18-year-old activists,” said Karatnycky, who vouched for the Banderites nevertheless. “Nor much about the contemporary OUN-B save for the fact that its leaders are strongly pro-Israel and not antisemitic. Raising concerns about the accuracy and motives of Wiesenthal is not anti-semitic.” This last sentence was referring to an old clip of Zaryckyj promising members of the Ukrainian Youth Association in Canada, “We’re gonna go after [Simon] Wiesenthal,” the famous Nazi hunter, who “wasn’t in the concentration camp all the time,” and “fought our [Banderite] partisans.”

Events that happened today (October 17):

1892: Theodor Eicke, SS general, burdened life with his presence.
1924: Anton Geiser, SS‐Totenkopfverbände member who later settled safely in Imperial America after the 1940s, was unfortunately born.
1941: The USS Kearny became the first U.S. Navy vessel to be torpedoed by a U‐boat.
1943: The Fascists closed down the Sobibór extermination camp after dozens of prisoners staged an uprising.
1967: Puyi (a.k.a. Yaozhi), head of the Empire of Great Manchuria, passed away.
1978: Giovanni Gronchi, Fascist Italy’s (briefly serving) Undersecretary for Industry and Commerce, expired.