Local historians in Ukraine have discovered that a farmer destroyed a 150-year-old Jewish cemetery with a tractor near the city of Yuzhnoukrainsk in the Mykolaiv region.
Land adjacent to the cemetery had been leased to the farmer, but he gradually began encroaching on the cemetery grounds. He later destroyed the gravestones and plowed the land. The damage was discovered by Vasyl Slyabin and Oleksandr Shiva.
Vitali Kamozin, CEO of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, reported that the serious incident occurred in Yuzhnoukrainsk, near the village of Pankratove. In the 19th century, a German settlement stood at the site, where a small Jewish community lived alongside German settlers and was allocated a separate burial ground.
The location of the cemetery was also confirmed by Red Army maps from the 1930s and by testimony from local elderly residents. Kamuzin appealed to law enforcement authorities to punish the farmer and to properly fence off the cemetery site. A complaint was filed with local police, which have opened an investigation into the incident.