Babi Yar Monument Defaced With Swaskitas — Again

An elderly man attends a ceremony at the Babi Yar memorial to Holcaust victims. The monument was defaced with swastikas for the third time in four months. Image by getty images
For the third time in recent months, Nazi swastikas were discovered on the Babi Yar memorial monument for Holocaust victims in Kiev.
The latest incident was discovered Jan. 30 by employees of the National Historical Memorial Site in Babi Yar, where Nazi troops killed more than 33,000 Jews in 1941.
The swastikas were daubed on a monument shaped like a menorah that stands at the entrance to the site, the news website evreiskiy.kiev.ua reported.
The incident closely follows commemorations in Ukraine and across the world on Jan. 27, International Holocaust Memorial Day, which this year attracted considerable media attention because it was the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp.
Similar graffiti was found in Babi Yar in November and in October, directly after the annual commemoration of the massacre there.
The incident in Ukraine comes amid a spate of anti-Semitic vandalism in Europe last week, the included incidents in the former Nazi camp of Mauthausen in Austria and the fence of a Jewish cemetery in Poland.
A fourth incident in France was reported on Sunday on the website of the Israel-based Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism.
It involved a privately-owned automobile in Paris, which on Jan. 29 was photographed after unknown parties wrote on it with white paint: “Jews to the oven” and painted a Star of David on its hood.
The report did not say who owns the car.
An earlier incident in France which occurred Jan. 30 involved anti-Semitic graffiti that was sprayed on the walls of a Catholic private school in Nancy in the country’s northeast. The mayor of Nancy said that a swastika, stars of David and the word “Jew” were sprayed on the school’s fence, the news website ici-c-nancy.fr reported.
The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Most Popular
- 1
Opinion My Jewish moms group ousted me because I work for J Street. Is this what communal life has come to?
- 2
News Student protesters being deported are not ‘martyrs and heroes,’ says former antisemitism envoy
- 3
Fast Forward Suspected arsonist intended to beat Gov. Josh Shapiro with a sledgehammer, investigators say
- 4
News Who is Alan Garber, the Jewish Harvard president who stood up to Trump over antisemitism?
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Dozens of members of UK’s largest Jewish group sign letter condemning war in Gaza
-
Culture Actor Ben Platt says his Jewish identity is ‘not defined’ by Israel, showing a gap between him and his influential family
-
Fast Forward Shapiro house fire suspect targeted Jewish governor over pro-Israel stances, search warrant says
-
Fast Forward Jewish family killed in New York plane crash
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism
Republish This Story
Please read before republishing
We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:
- Credit the Forward
- Retain our pixel
- Preserve our canonical link in Google search
- Add a noindex tag in Google search
See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.
To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.