Lev Golinkin is the author of the memoir “A Backpack, a Bear, and Eight Crates of Vodka.”
The pageant isn’t short on spectacle: The Holy Family, richly robed wise men, armored Roman soldiers and peasants dressed in bright Ukrainian embroidery all catch the eye. But even amid that explosion of color, the Jew is easy to spot.
He appears on stage as a caricature of a Hasidic innkeep, including payot sidelocks. The character’s name is Moshko the zhyd — a slur for “Jew” — and he is there to remind audience members of the evil in their midst.
“If you need to borrow money, Moishe Yakovlevich will gladly provide,” Moshko says, tempting the shepherds and wise men away from celebrating the Nativity.
“You lend money, then kick people out of their homes,” a shepherd replies.
Moshko responds by cursing the believers, summoning the Devil as well as “the Roma” — the other ethnic villain of the play — to help him defeat Jesus.
This vestige of medieval antisemitism was just publicly live-streamed by St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Catholic Church in Orlando, Florida, whose Facebook page invites viewers to “immerse yourselves in the magic of Christmas.” But I don’t mean to single out this church; its pageant is not unusual. Every winter, hundreds of Moshkos don the Jewish equivalent of blackface and scuffle onto stages in churches and community centers from New York to Chicago, Connecticut to Ohio, Dublin to Dubai. And many of the pageants, called verteps, are propagated by a branch of the Roman Catholic Church.
The most jarring aspect of some of these spectacles is seeing children scream for the zhyd to get out, or dress up as Moshko and his wife, “Sarah,” themselves, proclaiming their wickedness to the encouragement of parents, teachers and priests in the audience.
“Zhyd out!” My family and I fled the Soviet Union, lived as refugees in Europe and crossed an ocean to escape those words. They framed the background to my childhood in Ukraine during the last rotting decade of the Soviet Union and could be found emblazoned on toilet stalls and alleyways or hurled by drunk men in parks and at bus stops.
I’m certainly not the first immigrant to discover Old World darkness lurking in the U.S. But there was something obscenely mesmerizing about scrolling through social media and coming across little children — kids for whom Hasidic innkeeps might as well be Ottoman padishahs — being coaxed into shouting an antisemitic slur in churches and credit unions tucked amid strip malls. Old hatreds have been lovingly packed and replanted. My nightmare was another’s nostalgia.
The typical vertep script isn’t subtle: After learning about Jesus’ birth, Moshko calls the Roma and the Devil to plague the believers. Both promptly materialize, the Devil greeting the Jew as a friend and assuring him that, together, they’ll keep the peasants ignorant of Jesus and wallowing in sin.
“Lord, save us from the forces of Satan,” beseech the shepherds as Moshko and the Devil dance to cement their alliance. Angels appear, announcing, “We’ve been sent to protect you from this evil filth,” and urging believers to love Christ and stay out of taverns.
Moshko, alarmed by the possibility of losing business — “If peasants don’t drink, Moshko can’t make money!” — runs to Herod, warning the jealous monarch that the people have a new king called Jesus. Moshko sells Herod the information that Christ is in Bethlehem, and Herod sends soldiers to kill the infant Messiah.
At the end, after Herod is thwarted and Jesus survives, Moshko comes out to collect donations from the audience.
You could teach a course on antisemitism based on vertep tropes. It starts with the oldest charge against Jews — deicide (killing God) — proceeds to medieval calumnies of blood libel, greed and Devil worship, and culminates in conspiracy theories of early modernity — corrupting people with vice and acting as agents of the king.
Plenty of vertep troupes have replaced problematic characters with new villains. Unsurprisingly, Vladimir Putin and Russian soldiers shelling churches and kidnapping Ukrainian children are popular choices. Ukraine has no shortage of creativity and, unfortunately, no shortage of bad guys. But Moshko won’t go quietly into the night. In some pageants, the seedy innkeep has morphed into a slick oligarch renting out cheap housing. During covid, verteps in Spain had Moshko hawking vaccines, a reflection of conspiracy theories linking Jews to the pandemic. And after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, war profiteering was written into verteps from Chicago to Ivano-Frankivsk. It’s modern antisemitism absorbed by the play.
“The Church does not tolerate antisemitism,” Pope Leo XIV proclaimed in a speech this October. If the new pontiff is serious, he’s got his work cut out for him.
The 4 million-plus-member Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, or UGCC, retains the trappings of Orthodox Christianity, from onion domes to bishops festooned in crown-like miters. However, each of those bishops is appointed or confirmed by the pope. The UGCC is firmly part of the Vatican — the two regularly hold joint ceremonies and issue statements affirming their union.
Antisemitic pageants are legitimized at the UGCC’s highest levels, starting with Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, confirmed UGCC head by Benedict XVI. Last Christmas, Shevchuk hosted a youth vertep starring a zhyd, and UGCC dioceses in Italy and Ukraine organize elaborate vertep competitions, Moshkos and Sarahs waddling down the streets waving to crowds.
In the United States, the UGCC is divided into four jurisdictions, called eparchies, composed of more than 200 parishes in 43 states. The Philadelphia and Stamford, Connecticut, eparchies have children who look barely old enough for second grade playing Moshko. The Chicago eparchy equips its Moshko with a fake nose and “Torah,” which he uses to help Herod locate Christ. Last year, Chicago’s bishop posed with a vertep cast featuring a zhyd in payot.
Does the Vatican administration know about this? I doubt it. The pageants and accompanying social media posts by bishops and dioceses are nearly always in Ukrainian. But poison pumped out by the UGCC is created using the implied blessing of the Holy See.
I’ve tried to meet Moshko halfway, I really have. When I heard a Dublin school use “Hava Nagila” as Moshko’s entrance music, I genuinely appreciated the attention to detail. When I saw photos of a vertep zhyd in a 1949 displaced-persons camp, the American in me was shocked at people who prioritized mockery even when they had nothing else. But I, too, was once displaced. The part of me that made toy soldiers out of discarded cheese wrappers to ring in the new year in an Austrian refugee shelter understood why someone cobbled together a zhyd costume in the middle of nowhere. You hold on to the little things in the wasteland, lest you dissolve.
But American suburbs aren’t the wasteland. And “the Church does not tolerate antisemitism” isn’t a statement of fact — it’s an ideal. The reality is that right now bishops and priests across the globe, including in Pope Leo’s hometown of Chicago, are carrying out an annual tradition of teaching children to hate Jews and Roma. Will the church continue to tolerate it?
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