Burlingame Ukrainian woman fleeing anti-Semitism gets asylum

Confirming the seriousness of anti-Semitism in post-Cold War Ukraine, the Board of Immigration Appeals overturned a lower immigration court's decision and granted asylum to a Burlingame woman and her family.

The recent decision represents the highest such ruling involving a Northern California resident.

Irina Chtchetinin, her husband and three children can now stay in their current home on the Peninsula, where they have spent the last five years during the lengthy appeals process.

"I was worried that I would never get this and I was about to give up," Chtchetinin said. She was originally denied asylum by an Immigration and Naturalization Service officer in April 1992. The officer's decision was later upheld by an immigration court judge.

In overturning that decision, the Board of Immigration Appeals could affect future Jewish immigration from the Ukraine, say those who work with emigres from the former Soviet Union.

"It is a critical point, in that the Jewish community here is able to present the judicial system with evidence of anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union," said Eva Seligman, associate director at the Bay Area Council for Jewish Rescue and Renewal in San Francisco.

"The Jewish community and the community at large thinks that after glasnost and Gorbechev and Yeltsin, things in the former Soviet Union are just wonderful, and unfortunately that's not true."

Chtchetinin's lawyer, Neil Grungras, said by recognizing the persecution of Jews in the Ukraine, the court has taken a historic stand.

"It has never happened on the West Coast that it got this high [in the court system]," Grungras said.

However, Sharon Rummery, director of public affairs for the San Francisco district of the INS, said decisions at that court level rarely set a precedent.

Barry Pettinato, an attorney representing the INS, would not comment on the case.

In her list of complaints about the western Ukrainian region of Lvov, Chtchetinin claimed she had been given an artificially low score on her college entrance examination.

Although she nonetheless graduated summa cum laude from the local forestry institute and was given a job as an engineer, she also claimed her boss did not allow her any engineering duties or pay raises mandated by statute. Instead, she was assigned to a position as a technician on a cigarette-lighter assembly line.

In addition, she claimed that when she was in labor with her third child, the public hospital would neither admit her, allow her to ride in an ambulance to another hospital nor allow her husband to use a hospital phone to call for help.

Throughout these incidents, her persecutors explained their actions with explicitly anti-Semitic remarks, Chtchetinin claimed, adding that other injustices befell her family and friends.

For example, she said her grandfather -- 80 years old, blind, deaf and unable to walk -- was convicted of murdering a neighbor, even though prosecutors admitted he had been framed.

Furthermore, two of Chtchetinin's Jewish neighbors were brutally tortured in their own home. The man was branded with an electric iron, and the woman had her eye pulled out of its socket, while the assailants screamed anti-Semitic epithets.

Ukrainian police refused to investigate the beatings.

"Things became worse and worse," Chtchetinin said. Her friends have reported that the movement in western Ukraine to separate from the rest of the country has grown larger. Recently friends sent her photos in which flags flying over buildings appeared to be adorned with swastikas.

Chtchetinin will soon be joined by her father, who won refugee status this year, and her in-laws, for whom she won an immigration lottery this year. Chtchetinin's sister is already in the United States. She applied for asylum status shortly after Chtchetinin did, and received it immediately.

After their immigration, Chtchetinin will no longer have any family in Lvov.

"I always believed we should win," she said, recalling the first time she met Grungras and discussed her case. "Neil said in the interview, `We must win. We will win.' I don't know why I believed him. I just had that sixth sense."