Ukraine Holocaust Memorial Defaced With Swastika
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
A Holocaust monument in Ukraine was vandalized with a red swastika that the perpetrators painted over a Star of David symbol.
The vandalism in Nikopol, an eastern Ukrainian city located 60 miles from Dnepropetrovsk, occurred on June 16, according to a report Tuesday by the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine.
Alexander Taratuta, who heads Nikopol’s small Jewish community, said he filed a complaint with police about the act of vandalism, the perpetrators of which are unidentified.
In April, the monument commemorating Jewish victims of the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev was desecrated for the fourth time in recent months, possibly on Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
A total of about 20,000 Jews were murdered in Dnepropetrovsk alone during the German occupation of the area, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Most of the bodies of the murdered Jews were burned in October 1943 by Sonderkommando 1005 – a unit made up of Nazi prisoners, including Jews, whose task was to eliminate the traces of the Nazi crimes.
Most of the Jews of Dnepropetrovsk were evacuated ahead of the German invasion.
Today, Dnepropetrovsk’s Menorah Jewish community center and office building houses the country’s largest museum about the genocide, the Tkuma Ukrainian Institute For Holocaust Studies.
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