Euroasian Jewish News

Letter to EAJC President on the official Congress website

Dear Mikhail Mikhailovich!

I am writing to you concerning the strange situation that has coalesced around the work of the Euro-Asian Jewish Congress website (eajc.org).

Over the first 15 years of the Congress’ existence, its website has always been a source of timely and trustworthy information on the activities of the organization. In 2009, we made a serious and successful effort to develop the website into a full-fledged bilingual internet portal that would inform its readers about the life of Jewish communities in the region, publish exclusive analytical materials, and would thus be in high demand among readers. We had up to 30 thousand unique visits per day in peak instances. Our materials have been reprinted by leading online media.

This was achieved because of the diligent and meticulous work of the website staff. We were together with the Congress through times both good and bad, and have incessantly worked for the good of the organizations.

Last summer we, like many other staff members at all Congress offices, had hoped that the period of uncertainty has passed for our organization. We took to our job with renewed enthusiasm and have published on the work on the Extraordinary General Assembly (EGA) and the creation of new governing bodies for the Congress.

By now it has become obvious that our hopes were premature and that they would not come to fruitiion. We know that other Congress programs have also not received much-needed financial support. We, however, have been hit the hardest by this decision. Unlike some of the other Congress programs, including educational programs and youth-oriented programs, a corporate website is simply not an attractive investment for outside donors. Because of this, the website staff are fully dependent on internal funding.

But it turned out that the very existence of the website as a full scale information and analytical portal is not part of the plan for the new General Directorate. It was painful to realize that our work is no longer neede, and we believe that this decision was a mistake. However, we accept the right of the new managers to create new informational policies according to their own criteria. We were ready to continue work in a new format and collaborate with our new colleagues in PR. We gave them direct access to the website and did not interfere with their informational policy despite the inexcusably rude way they communicated with us and despite the fact that we soon saw that they were quite unprofessional in general. We continued to do our job, which now included constantly correcting the many mistakes our new colleagues would regularly make, both in the facts they presented and in the languages they presented them in. We are used to presenting precise and trustworthy information on our website, and we felt that we had a continued responsibility to our readers.

Time ticked on, and the website, a program of the EAJC Kyiv office, had still received no financing since the time of the EGA. The acting Director General of the Congress directly told the staff that we had to transfer the website and domain name to the new Information Department that would create a new website for the Congress. Even though this decision was a painful one for us, who had put so much of our efforts, time, and creativity into the site and who were able to make it into an attractive source of information for visitors, we agreed to this as well.

In essence, this decision meant firing people who have worked for the Congress for years, the staff of the Kyiv office - five people who have tirelessly worked to make the Congress recognizable, including one who is on sick leave. This is both unethical and, under Ukrainian law, illegal. Even though we do not believe these actions to be correct and well-founded, we are ready to accept this decision as well. However, we find it completely inadmissible that letting us go would happen without any kind of compensation at all. This is even more unacceptable since, as far as we are aware of, there was an agreement made before the EGA that all of the staff at the existing offices would continue their work on the Congress’s program.

Moreover, to the best of our knowledge, after the decision was made to transfer full responsibility for the website from the staff who created it to the new Information Department, you and the leaders of the EAJC Kyiv office reached an agreement to fully compensate the staff who were fired. Even though prior agreements had already been broken and this one had a large number of additional strings attached, we thought that we could trust the word of the Congress President. We would very much like to hope that we are mistaken here.

Dear Mikhail Mikhailovich, we have fulfilled all of the demands that the Directorate General made of us. We have a habit of fulfilling our obligations. We would very much like to believe that both sides in this situation have this habit.

Respectfully, and with hopes of solving the current situation,

Vyacheslav Likhachev

former editor-in-chief of the EAJC website, eajc.org

February 26, 2018