Hoax or provocation in Donetsk

Donetsk is an industrial city in Eastern Ukraine. On the eve of Pesach armed men handed out leaflets calling on Jews in the city to register their religion and property with the interim pro-Russian government or risk deportation and the loss of their citizenship. No one claimed responsibility for this incident and it was dismissed as a hoax or provocation. But as a hoax it was in spectacularly bad taste. Within living memory, in December 1941, Einzatzcommando-6 murdered several hundred Jews. In April 1942 the Germans took the Jews from the ghetto to the abandoned Maria mine and threw most of them down the shafts alive. They also used gas vans, throwing the bodies into the mine. Some 15,000 Jews were murdered. Provocation it might well have been. Russians have been accusing extreme right wing Ukranians of anti-Semitism. What better way of getting back at the Russians than cooking up this incident to show that the Russians are even worse anti-Semites. There is a precedent of the proposal that the Jews be registered. A Jobbik, right wing member of the Hungarian Parliament came up with such a suggestion. He backed down, he implied that he was misunderstood, but the idea might have taken wings. The Jews of Donetsk have no more involvement in the showdown between the Ukrainian government and those Russian sympathizers who occupy public buildings than other citizens of Donetsk, but yet again, as so many times in the past, Jews are used to confront issues of society that have nothing to do with Jews.