Israel slammed Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday for implying that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had Jewish ancestors and demanded an apology from Moscow.
Yair Lapid, the Israeli foreign minister, said the Russian ambassador would be summoned for ‘a serious chat’ over Lavrov’s statements, which he made in an interview with Italian television on Sunday.
‘It’s an unacceptable, disgraceful comment, a huge historical blunder,’ Lapid told the YNet news website.
The Russian embassy did not respond.
Lavrov was questioned how Russia could say that it wanted to ‘denazify’ Ukraine since the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, was Jewish during an interview with Italy’s Rete 4 station.
‘When people say, What kind of nazification is this if we are Jews, I believe Hitler had Jewish ancestors as well, therefore that means nothing,’ Lavrov remarked through an Italian interpreter.
‘We’ve been hearing the wise Jewish people say for a long time now that the biggest anti-Semites are the Jews themselves,’ he continued.
‘An insult and a serious blow to the victims of actual Nazism,’ said Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the six million Jews slain in the Holocaust.
Dayan alleged that Lavrov was peddling ‘an antisemitic conspiracy theory with no basis in fact’ on Israel’s Kan radio.
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