KIEV (EJP)---A Jewish delegation called on the Ukrainian Government to immediately stop all construction work on the site of a burial containing the remains of about 26,000 Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
Excavation on the spot revealed fragments of human bones and personal belongings, the Brussels-based Rabbinical Center of Europe (RCE), which represents over 600 rabbis in Jewish communities across Europe, said, expressing feelings of "disgust and shame."
The Jewish community of Odessa reported that the current diggings by a developer are designated to prepare the ground for the construction of a huge shopping mall on the site of the burial ground.
"When diggings started, workers found bones, skulls and children's toys,” said Rabbi Abraham Wolf, the chief rabbi of Odessa and southern Ukraine.
The rabbi added that the workers removed all the body remnants and personal items to an unknown place, rendering it impossible to retrieve them.
Rabbi Wolf refrained from mentioning the name of the construction company in the hope of finding a solution to end what he called the “shameful” proceedings.
The victims buried in the mass grave were killed in the autumn of 1941, shortly after the German forces invaded the Soviet Union.
The mass grave, which is located on a vacant plot not far from the centre of Odessa, was marked by a few gravestones although the spot was never defined officially as a graveyard.
"It is difficult to describe how it looks – hundreds of hundreds of fragments of skeletons, bones of hands and legs and skulls,” said Rabbi Wolf.
Together with several other Jewish leaders, Rabbi Wolf sent a letter to Ukrainian Prime Minister Julia Tymoshenko, asking for her intervention to put an end to the digging.
Rabbi Wolf added that this move came after attempts by other officials to prevent further digging failed.
"Construction on any site that results in finding body remnants is a desecration of the sanctity and an offense to the memory of the dead", the letter reads.
It added: "It is shocking to witness how the Ukrainian nation 'dances on the blood' of the Jews on the area where over 25,000 of their compatriots had perished.”
Rabbi Wolf’s appeal was joined by Jewish groups and organizations from all parts of Europe.
Not the first time
The Rabbinical Centre of Europe claimed that this was not the first time similar offenses have been reported from Ukraine.
The Centre said it is waging an ongoing battle against the desecration of Jewish cemeteries. “It is always astonishing to see this attitude of disdain towards the memory of the murdered victims.”
The Ukrainian government declined any immediate comment.
According to historical records some 1.4 million Jews were killed in Ukraine during WWII.
Their bodies were buried in all parts of the country in improvised mass graves, many of them unmarked.
Jewish cemeteries and burial grounds get little respect in the former Soviet Union. Graves have been disturbed by construction works elsewhere in Ukraine and in neighboring Belarus.
Earlier this year, another construction company was reported to have been digging on an area that serves as a Jewish cemetery in Ukrainian Vinnitsa to set the ground for construction of a planned apartment building.
The local Jewish community, with the assistance of the RCE, conducted a long and strenuous struggle to stop the construction.
