Shoah memorial in Kiev defaced with swastikas
Nazi symbols found on monument in for victims murdered in Babi Yar massacre; local Jews say anti-Semitism on the rise.
Vandals sprayed swastikas on a memorial for Jewish victims of the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev, Ukraine, a tour group discovered on Wednesday.
The memorial honors the thousands of Jews who were shot dead by Nazis in the Babi Yar ravine over the course of three days in September, 1941.
Rabbi David Stav, chairman of the Tzohar organization, visited the site and said that "the swastikas are what strengthened our determination and feeling of urgency to carry out the work we do.
"Today more than ever, we have the duty to help local Jews, who experienced the Holocaust and 70 years of Soviet rule that forced them to hide their Judaism, to return once more to the arms of the Jewish people," he added.
The massacre site looks today like yet another park in the heart of Ukraine's capital, located within walking distance of Kiev's main street.
The Jewish memorial in Babi Yar is a large bronze menorah and was defaced with black marker. Members of the local Jewish community said that ever since the uprising in Ukraine about a year ago and the fighting against Russia, there has been an increase in expressions of anti-Semitism.
Shalom Norman, head of the Triguboff Foundation that helps fund the Shorashim organization, said the swastika was a reminder of the grim reality that remains despite the relative freedom of Ukraine's Jews.
Norman voiced his concern that awareness of this part of the Holocaust was not strong enough. "There is no Jewish child who does not now about Auschwitz, Treblinka, or Sobibor, and there is hardly anyone who knows that in Kiev tens of thousands of Jews, if not hundreds of thousands, were murdered.
"There is almost no awareness in the Israeli discourse. There is forgetfulness about the Holocaust of Ukrainian Jews and the mass murder sites like Babi Yar."
