Earlocks swaying, the character called Moshko entered the room to the tune of “Hava Nagila,” offered a greeting in mock Yiddish, and announced that he was selling liquor, in a brazen effort to distract the Christians from reverence about the birth of Jesus.

The pageant that took place at St. Mary Protectress Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Clifton, New Jersey, is known as a vertep — a form of theater prominent in Slavic Christmas celebrations. Caricatures of Jewish figures that promote stereotypes about Jews and greed are a longstanding and frequent feature.

Especially as Ukraine has sought to shed any association with antisemitism amid its ongoing conflict with Russia, calls to remove the vertep’s antisemitic components have gained traction. In recent years, some have replaced Jews with Russians as the villainous characters.

But some communities have continued to embrace the Jewish caricature — leading Lev Golinkin, a Jewish author born in Ukraine who has written about antisemitism there, recently to call out the importation of antisemitic stereotypes from the old country to Ukrainian diaspora communities, usually under the auspices of the Catholic church.

Golinkin said in an interview that seeing the Clifton pageant on Facebook, where the church posted a video, was a “jarring” reminder of antisemitism he experienced as a child.

“It feels like a betrayal,” Golinkin said. “America should be where things are left behind and there are new starts — and there you have this show, this pageant that it seems like it’s a new generation of mockery, teaching kids to mock.”