Anti-Semites harrass beauty queen
Miss World 1998 Linor Abargil says group of drunken Russian men verbally harrassed her and friends in Moscow
TEL AVIV - A former Miss World and Israeli beauty queen said a group of Russian men shouted anti-Semitic slogans at her in Moscow, a local newspaper reported on Thursday.
Linor Abargil, who had traveled to the Russian capital to perform in a play, said she and her friends were speaking Hebrew in the subway when a few drunken men boarded the train. She said they started following the group of friends and sat near them in the same compartment.
“They started pushing, swearing and calling out racist slogans. I’ve never encountered so much anti-Semitism in my life,” Abargil told the “Tel Aviv” weekly newspaper. “My friend..knows Russian and quietly translated for us. When we heard what they were saying, we went into a crazy panic.
“We sat there in fear and were quiet like fish,” she said.
'It feels like 60 years never passed'
Abargil said her friend went to talk to a policeman in an adjacent compartment, who then grabbed a club and tried to remove the Russian men from the subway. However, she and her friends left the train at the next stop because two men remained and continued to curse at them.
“It was the first time I encountered such a thing,” she said. “It was so horrible. It feels like 60 years never passed.”
Abargil won the Miss World beauty pageant in 1998 and is now enrolled in acting school in Israel.
Anti-Semitism has risen in Russia over the past years, especially since the start of a four-year-old Palestinian uprising in September 2000. President Vladimir Putin visited Israel last week and told Prime Minister Ariel Sharon he would combat the issue.
"The Holocaust marks the worst human suffering in history and cannot be forgotten," Putin told reporters in Jerusalem. "In our century, we must strive to make sure there is no longer hatred between nations, only brotherhood."
