Archbishop Ionafan (Yeletskyh) of Tulchyn and Bratslav of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP)addressed his flock with an official call to repent. The address reads that the reason for repentance is "the mass ethnocide of Jews under Hetman of Ukraine Bohdan Khmelnytskyi." "In Soviet times, this theme was prohibited. It is not found in school textbooks even now. But the Jewish chronicles of that sad time call out to heaven about these little known black spots of Ukrainian history," reads the address of the bishop.
The address, posted at the web site of the bishop, says that the nation-wide liberation war against the Polish economic, national and religious oppression of many centuries was accompanied with "systematic shed of blood of hundreds of thousands of Jews: elderly people, fathers, mothers, babies and children." The bishop of theUOC-MP described that time as one when only Jews "who converted to Orthodoxy under the threat of death" were allowed to live. "Uman, Tulchyn, Bratslav, Nemyriv are only a small part of the towns where the mass annihilation of our fellow-countrymen, Jews ,was carried out," stressed the archbishop.
He stressed that the time has come to speak the truth "however bitter it may be: the dreadful truth of Katyn, Tallergof, Auschwitz, Chornobyl, Holocaust and Holodomor."
According to the archbishop, it is the present generation, the descendants of the Cossacks, that "should open up the infected wounds of the anti-Semitism of its distant difficult history... and apologize for mass ethnocide to the Jewish people, the descendants of those who were illegitimately deprived of life in our land, apologize for our own purification so that such things should never be repeated," stated the archbishop
The archbishop compared "the consequences of the genocide of the Jews executed by the Cossacks of Khmelnytskyi" with the scale of the Holocaust.