The leading candidate for these tasks is Petro Poroshenko, 48, an
oligarch from Odessa and the head of a confectionary empire. Polls
predict Poroshenko will take 30 percent of the vote in the first
round of balloting.Yulia Tymoshenko, a former prime minister
recently released from jail after serving three years on what
she claims were charges trumped up by the Yanukovych regime, is
expected to finish second with anywhere from 6 to 18 percent.
Assuming no candidate takes more than 50 percent of the vote
— more than 20 are competing — a runoff election between the top
two finishers would take place on the following Sunday.
Jewish community leaders have remained officially neutral
about the candidates, but many Ukrainian Jews support
Poroshenko, a former foreign minister rumored to have Jewish
roots.
“He has a unique set of skills that absolutely make him the
man for the job,” said Igor Schupak, a Jewish historian and
director of the Dnepropetrovsk-based Jewish Memory and Holocaust
in Ukraine Museum. Business know-how and foreign relations
experience “give Poroshenko a toolbox that places him in a
league of his own in comparison to the other candidates.”
The sense that Poroshenko is the preferred candidate only when compared to other
lesser options isn’t an uncommon one, even among those working to put the
oligarch in office.“He’s no saint — none of them are,” said Svetlana Golnik,
who volunteers with the Poroshenko headquarters twice a week in
downtown Kiev. “But he is cleaner than most other oligarchs and
he delivers on his promises. Anyway, right now he’s what we have
to work with.”
James Temerty, a non-Jewish Canadian business magnate who
founded the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter to promote interethnic
dialogue, said it would be very difficult for Poroshenko to make
significant changes without further destabilizing the economy.
“The best hope here is to move toward Europe, and that will
stop the corruption gradually,” Temerty said. “He said he’d do
it.”
According to the popular Russian television channel Russia-1,
Poroshenko’s father was a Jew named Alexei Valtsman from the
Odessa region who in 1956 took on the last name of his wife,
Yevgenya Poroshenko.
Poroshenko’s media team did not reply to JTA requests for
comment, but they are not indifferent about the subject.
Last year, Poroshenko’s spokeswoman asked Forbes Israel to
remove her boss’ name from a list of the world’s richest Jews, a
magazine source confirmed.
Moshe Azman, a chief rabbi of Ukraine, said he asked
Poroshenko directly about the rumors.
“He told me he wasn’t Jewish,” Azman said.
Even if the rumors were true, Poroshenko wouldn’t be the only
candidate for president with Jewish roots. Vadim Rabinovich, a
billionaire media mogul and founder of the All-Ukrainian Jewish
Congress, is running on a platform combining a tolerant attitude
toward Ukrainian minorities with plans to dispense with
Ukraine’s quasi-federal political system and reduce taxes.
Although he barely registers in the polls — current figures
show him taking just over half-a-percent of the vote — his
candidacy has at least one high-profile supporter: Rostislav
Melnyk, who became famous in Ukraine after surviving a savage
beating by Yanukovych forces.
“I support Rabinovich’s platform and I will vote for him,”
Melnyk said, “also because he is good for the future of the
Jewish community.”
Kolomoisky´s private broadcasting group 1+1 Media own the English
language TV-channel "Ukraine Today". Among its first guest
was the Zionist-Jewish agent provocateur and
pseudo-intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. In the broadcast, Lévy
hailed the new
channel, under arch-Jew Kolomoisky's direction, with the
following words of chutzpah:
Russia has asked for Kolomoisky to be put on Interpol's wanted
list.
On 2 July 2014 a Russian District Court authorized his arrest
in absentia for "organizing the killing of civilians" and for the
“use of illegal means and methods to wage war”.