{"id":2904,"date":"2017-06-02T08:29:37","date_gmt":"2017-06-02T08:29:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/news\/2017\/06\/02\/persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses-in-russia-intensifies\/"},"modified":"2021-08-18T10:25:29","modified_gmt":"2021-08-18T07:25:29","slug":"persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses-in-russia-intensifies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/persecution-of-jehovahs-witnesses-in-russia-intensifies\/","title":{"rendered":"Persecution of Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses in Russia intensifies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Teachers have humiliated Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witness children in front of their classmates. Arsonists have\u00c2\u00a0burned Witnesses\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00c2\u00a0homes. Security forces have raided their meeting halls.<\/p>\n

Since the Russian Supreme Court on April 20 declared the Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses an extremist group, its members have faced increasing harassment from both authorities and suspicious neighbors.<\/p>\n

And last week, for the first time since the decision, a Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witness has been not only detained by police, but jailed by a judge.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153He read the Bible. That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why he was arrested,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Yaroslav Sivulskiy, a representative of the Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses in St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n

For about a month the Witnesses had not felt the full force of the court decision, which calls for the liquidation of the Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses organization\u00c2\u00a0\u00e2\u20ac\u201d not only its Russian headquarters in St. Petersburg, but the 400 or so Kingdom Halls where\u00c2\u00a0more than 100,000 Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses across the nation meet.<\/p>\n

Yet worship had continued at many of these Kingdom Halls.<\/p>\n

Within the past\u00c2\u00a0few weeks, however, intensifying persecution has prompted most congregations to move group worship to private homes, Sivulskiy said.<\/p>\n

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Most worrisome to many Witnesses are the recent instances\u00c2\u00a0in which\u00c2\u00a0schoolteachers, principals and police have turned on children.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Officials who were already minded to take action against Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses are now emboldened, and ordinary people who have long disliked them are also emboldened,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d said Felix Corley,\u00c2\u00a0an Oslo-based religious rights activist who edits the Forum 18 News Service, which tracks abuses in the former Soviet Union\u00c2\u00a0and Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sivulskiy, speaking from St. Petersburg, tells the story of an 8-year-old girl recently forced by her school principal\u00c2\u00a0to sing a patriotic song at school in front of her classmates.<\/p>\n

Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses, an evangelical Christian group founded in Pittsburgh in the late 19th century, see themselves as representatives of God\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s kingdom and remain neutral in politics. They pay taxes but do not recite patriotic pledges, sing nationalistic songs or join the military.<\/p>\n

Witnesses also report an incident, near Moscow, of\u00c2\u00a0another 8-year-old girl, whose parents were brought to\u00c2\u00a0her school after she had sung a Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witness song\u00c2\u00a0and talked about God to classmates. In the presence of the school\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s psychologist and director of security, the principal handed the parents a document informing them that if this behavior continued, the school would no longer educate the girl.<\/p>\n

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In\u00c2\u00a0Bezvodnoye, northeast of Moscow, two sixth-grade girls were\u00c2\u00a0humiliated by a music teacher who defended her actions by noting that Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses are \u00e2\u20ac\u0153banned.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d She reportedly said to the girls\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 mother: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153You are now extremists and there will be no mercy.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

The encounter with the music teacher is\u00c2\u00a0one of 50 detailed in a May 25\u00c2\u00a0report the Witnesses \u00e2\u20ac\u201d whose world headquarters are outside New York \u00e2\u20ac\u201d released on harassment\u00c2\u00a0against their co-religionists in Russia.<\/p>\n

The report also describes:<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2 Physical attacks, including one in Belgorod, just north of the Ukrainian border, where the perpetrator shouted \u00e2\u20ac\u0153you have been banned\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and repeatedly punched a Witness in the head, face and upper body.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00c2\u00a0Arson, including an incident in Zheshart, in the northwest, where a building used for religious services was destroyed and a Molotov cocktail was found at the scene. Another attack occurred in Lustino, near Moscow, where the home of a Witness family burned to the ground.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a2\u00c2\u00a0Disruption of religious services, such as one that\u00c2\u00a0took\u00c2\u00a0place in a private home in Pavlovskiy Posad, 42 miles from Moscow. Police officers in plainclothes told Witnesses\u00c2\u00a0that the court decision meant they could no longer gather and worship.<\/p>\n

On May 25, Dennis Christensen was worshipping in another private home \u00e2\u20ac\u201d in the city of Oryol, about 185 miles south of Moscow \u00e2\u20ac\u201d when 15 armed agents of the FSB, the successor to the KGB, stormed the house and arrested all the men.<\/p>\n

The men spent the night in jail and were released in the morning \u00e2\u20ac\u201d except for Christensen, according to accounts from the Witnesses. The judge reportedly considered\u00c2\u00a0him\u00c2\u00a0a flight risk because of his Danish citizenship. Christensen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00c2\u00a0alleged crime: membership in an extremist group. He faces six to 10 years in prison.<\/p>\n

Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses, with\u00c2\u00a0about 8 million followers worldwide, are far from the only religious group harassed in Russia, where President Vladimir Putin has aligned the government with the formerly communist country\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dominant religion: Russian Orthodoxy.<\/p>\n

Hare Krishna, Muslims, members of Falun Gong, atheists and other evangelical Christians have also suffered. But only the\u00c2\u00a0Witnesses have been officially labeled extremists. They sit on a list of groups that includes the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.<\/p>\n

An \u00e2\u20ac\u0153extremist\u00e2\u20ac\u009d group in Russia can be defined as one that preaches that its path is the only one that can lead to salvation. Only the\u00c2\u00a0Russian Orthodox Church and a select few others may legally make that claim.<\/p>\n

Corley said the Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses will not abandon their faith in the face of increasing persecution and will continue to gather to\u00c2\u00a0worship, discuss Scripture and educate their children in their beliefs.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153It will then become a head-to-head between the government and community members as to who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s going to hold out the longest,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d he said.<\/p>\n

The Russian Supreme Court\u00c2\u00a0will\u00c2\u00a0hear an appeal against the ban ruling on July 17.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.usatoday.com\/story\/news\/world\/2017\/06\/01\/persecution-jehovahs-witnesses-russia-intensifies\/102390226\/\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Teachers have humiliated Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witness children in front of their classmates. Arsonists have\u00c2\u00a0burned Witnesses\u00e2\u20ac\u2122\u00c2\u00a0homes. Security forces have raided their meeting halls. Since the Russian Supreme Court on April 20 declared the Jehovah\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Witnesses an extremist…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-news","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5628,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2904\/revisions\/5628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jwforum.net\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}