Father Tikhon Shevkunov, the Orthodox bishop heading an investigatory panel, is among members of the church who claim the final Russian emperor was murdered in a Jewish ritual.
Tsar Nicholas was shot with his wife and five children by Communist Bolsheviks in 1918 after Vladimir Lenin came to power, and rumours about the circumstances surrounding his death have circulated ever since.
Boruch Gorin, a spokesman for the Federation of Jewish Communities, Russia’s largest Jewish group, expressed a strong concern about the claims, which he described as a ‘throwback to the darkest ages’.
Some Christians in medieval Europe believed Jews murdered Christians to use their blood for ritual purposes.
The tsar and his family were executed by a Bolshevik firing squad on July 17, 1918, in a basement room of a merchant’s house where they were held in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. The Russian Orthodox Church made them saints in 2000.
Mr Gorin said his group was shocked and angered by the statements from both the bishop and the Investigative Committee, which he said sounded like a revival of the century-old ‘anti-Semitic myth’ about the killing of the imperial family.
Discussing the Tsar’s murder, Father Shevkunov claimed the ‘Bolsheviks and their allies engaged in the most unexpected and diverse ritual symbolism’.
He claimed that ‘quite a few people involved in the execution – in Moscow or Yekaterinburg – saw the killing of the deposed Russian emperor as a special ritual of…