Because my Uncle Tony’s business partner was Jewish & my cousin Ron’s best friend is Jewish my childhood experience with Jews was unusual in Chester County.

Also lots of students in Coatesville schools worked at Chertok’s store, including my brother in law. 

Betsy’s first job was at a Jewish owned woman’s clothing store, The Colony Shop.  I can’t think of his name but that store owner Jerry Daghir, vocal music Scott High School, & Ray Pellegrino my barber & family friend were friends.  I think a lot of Chester & Lancaster county residents first experience with Jewish people might have been in the City of Coatesville. 

‘“When Kate Nolt moved from Baltimore to the Chester County suburbs more than a decade ago with her boyfriend, it turned out to be a dramatic change.

"I had culture shock, coming from Baltimore, with 100,000 Jews on every corner, to Chester County, where I could go into a grocery store and barely even find Chanukah candles," said Nolt.

"I would oftentimes go to look for traditional-type items and would really have to go from store to store to find them. Or they were scarce, and the stores would only order a handful, and if I was too late, I was out of luck."

The area, as she put it bluntly, was"devoid of Jews."

That's hardly the case today.”

“According to Susannah Brody, the author of the recently published Remembering Chester County: Stories From Valley Forge to Coatesville, Jews came to Chester County in the early 20th century for the same reasons they went anywhere — seeking opportunity. Many, she said, were merchants, vendors or itinerant peddlers, who often gathered in individual homes for Shabbat or High Holiday services.

The area's first synagogues sprung up. Kesher Israel Congregation in West Chester was established in 1914, while Beth Israel Congregation of Chester County in Eagle was incorporated two years later at its initial home in Coatesville.

Families that kept kosher in the early days — and even in the middle — of the 20th century had to drive to West Philadelphia for kosher meat and other Jewish delicacies, though after World War II, some kosher butchers began delivering to the Chester County area. Prior to that, a shochet, a kosher ritual slaughterer, would come to various homes and slaughter chickens and other fowl, according to residents of the area at the time.

Back then, it seemed that "each of the communities kept to themselves" because they were so geographically separated, according to Bill Chertok, an 81-year-old native of the region who ran a furniture business in Coatesville.

This is understandable, since then as now, Chester County is spread out over 760 square miles, which range from the far western Main Line down to the Delaware state line. Jewish residents tend to be sprinkled from the King of Prussia/ Valley Forge area to the west along the Route 202 business corridor, with pockets in Wayne, Berwyn, Malvern, Phoenixville and West Chester¬

These days, Brody and her husband live in an "Over 55" community in Coatesville, where there are only about 15 Jewish families out of 300, she said, but she noted that she's seen growth in the area, as young families relocate for good schools and more affordable housing, sometimes even followed by their parents…

State Sen. Andrew Dinniman (D-District 19) and his wife Margo first moved to the county in 1972 so he could take a faculty position at West Chester University.

The two-term senator was first elected to public office in 1975, when he joined the Downingtown Area School Board, and has served in various positions since before being elected to the Senate in 2006.

Dinniman, who grew up in New Haven, Conn., said that when he first arrived, the Jewish community was concentrated in only a few locales, like West Chester, Downingtown and Coatesville, but that today, Jewish families and individuals are now spread through the county. That's made the community less insular, even as the diffusion has made cohesion more challenging.

In Chester, he said, an area is Jewish if three out of 40 families belong to the tribe. Long involved with Jewish communal life — he currently serves on the board of the Chester Kehillah — Dinniman observed that, if anything, he thinks the population study undercounted the number of Jews, as well as the number of intermarried families, in the county.

"We are the youngest Jewish community, perhaps between Washington and New York, and perhaps the largest in terms interfaith marriage, and there is more need to come up with innovative approaches," he said. "The paradox is: How do you maintain a Jewish presence in a large area where there is no concentration — no specific concentration of Jewish people?”

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Chester County: Forgotten Frontier?

February 11, 2013

It never occurred to me that the people who painted swastikas in Elkins Park could have been Ukrainian immigrants. The Azov Regiment in Ukraine and United States.

 For a few decades I worked in Elkins Park, PA. 

When Russia was part of the Soviet Union my dentist was deeply involved with bringing  Jews to the United States, many of them were Ukrainian and settled in the Elkins Park area. I worked in dental laboratories in Elkins Park. As a result I knew several people from Ukraine. None of them appeared to be  interested in politics. 

In about 1976 I worked with Valeri a man who came over from Ukraine. In Russia he was a dental technician making crown and bridge work. He had a clandestine business making crown and bridge work for wealthy people in Russia and Ukraine. This was illegal and if the KGB found him he could be put in a Russian Gulag. 

To more than survive in the Soviet Union you needed to be an extraordinary person. Valeri was on the 4th floor of a terraced restaurant. He punched a guy and then realized the guy was KGB. Val jumped from the 4 story terrace to the shrubs below. 

He said in Ukraine I was a millionaire. But the KGB was on to him and he had to come to United States to keep out of prison. His wife was Jewish and that was his ticket to the United States.

He told me the Soviet union would break up. He said the communists are all old men.

I had a habit of eating lunch in local parks that began when I ate lunch in Independence Park in Philly accompanied by rats and pigeons and lunch at Washington Square accompanied by squirrels and pigeons. The squirrels could be aggressive biting my shoes to get a piece of my lunch but the pigeons and rats waited for crumbs. 

Anyway when I ate lunch in the park in Elkins Park there were places you could see the undersides of bridges. There were always swastikas on the undersides of the bridges in this traditionally Jewish area. 

At the time I was beginning to track skinheads & KKK in the Schwenksville area. They had cross lighting ceremonies along the Perkiomen Creek. I helped a woman who was terrified for her children because of skinheads living next door. I spoke to the mayor of Schwenksville and they were gone a few days later. 

It never occurred to me that the people who painted swastikas in Elkins Park could have been Ukrainian immigrants.

***

I learned that the French Connection heroin circulating in Chester County in 1976 came here via CIA transport. I’ve come to believe that the CIA is a quasi governmental military for profit organization that works in its own interests of the moment without consideration of long term effects, such as training Nazi Azov Militia who can end up in the United States.  

***

“A number of prominent individuals among far-right extremist groups in the United States and Europe have actively sought out relationships with representatives of the far-right in Ukraine, specifically the National Corps and its associated militia, the Azov Regiment,” states a 2020 report from the West Point US Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center. “US-based individuals have spoken or written about how the training available in Ukraine might assist them and others in their paramilitary-style activities at home.’

A 2018 FBI affidavit asserted that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States–based white supremacy organizations,” including members of the white supremacist Rise Above Movement, prosecuted for planned assaults on counterprotesters at far-right events, including the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally that Joe Biden later co-opted as a rationale for his presidential campaign. While it seems the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque massacre didn’t travel to Ukraine as he claimed, he clearly took inspiration from the far-right movement there, and wore a symbol used by Azov members while carrying out the attack”

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Jacobin

The CIA May Be Breeding Nazi Terror in Ukraine

BY

BRANKO MARCETIC

The CIA has been secretly training anti-Russian groups in Ukraine since 2015. Everything we know points to the likelihood that includes neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world.

01.15.2022

***

"The snow had just melted on the streets of Kyiv when Shawn Fuller, a U.S. Navy veteran, arrived in the early spring of 2018, his roller suitcase clattering over the pavestones of the Ukrainian capital. On the western edge of town, he found the address that his recruiter had sent him via Facebook, a flophouse with about two dozen beds, each reserved for a foreign fighter.

The men Fuller met inside were mostly from Europe, as was his recruiter, a chain-smoking Norwegian named Joachim Furholm, who had been convicted of bank robbery in Norway in 2010. The two of them had met over Facebook and gotten to know each other well, gaming out their plans to get military training and combat experience from one of Ukraine’s militia groups.

When they finally rendezvoused, Fuller noticed the swastika tattoo on the middle finger of Furholm’s left hand. It didn’t surprise him; the recruiter had made no secret of his neo-Nazi politics. Within the global network of far-right extremists, he served as a point of contact to the Azov movement, the Ukrainian militant group that has trained and inspired white supremacists from around the world, and which Fuller had come to join.

Its fighters resemble the other para-military units—and there are dozens of them—that have helped defend Ukraine against the Russian military over the past six years. But Azov is much more than a militia. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police. Unlike its ideological peers in the U.S. and Europe, it also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armored vehicles to artillery pieces.

Outside Ukraine, Azov occupies a central role in a network of extremist groups stretching from California across Europe to New Zealand, according to law enforcement officials on three continents. And it acts as a magnet for young men eager for combat experience. Ali Soufan, a security consultant and former FBI agent who has studied Azov, estimates that more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries.

The vast majority have no apparent links to far-right ideology. But as Soufan looked into the recruitment methods of Ukraine’s more radical militias, he found an alarming pattern. It reminded him of Afghanistan in the 1990s, after Soviet forces withdrew and the U.S. failed to fill the security vacuum. “Pretty soon the extremists took over. The Taliban was in charge. And we did not wake up until 9/11,” Soufan tells TIME. “This is the parallel now with Ukraine.”

At a hearing of the House Committee on Homeland Security in September 2019, Soufan urged lawmakers to take the threat more seriously. The following month, 40 members of Congress signed a letter calling—unsuccessfully—for the U.S. State Department to designate Azov a foreign terrorist organization. “Azov has been recruiting, radicalizing, and training American citizens for years,” the letter said. Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI, later confirmed in testimony to the U.S. Senate that American white supremacists are “actually traveling overseas to train.”

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TIME

Like, Share, Recruit: How a White-Supremacist Militia Uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New Members

BY SIMON SHUSTER/KYIV, UKRAINE AND BILLY PERRIGO/LONDON

JANUARY 7, 2021 6:20 PM EST

***

***

I knew a man who was forced into the Hitler Youth. He wore the scars of SS lashings on his back the rest of his life. 

As I watched the video below it occurred to me that the trainers at the Azov Youth Camps were using stress position torture methods as punishment for the boys. When they return to their parents no welts or bruises will be visible.