Kiev, Ukraine – A Jewish group says a Holocaust memorial has been vandalized in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
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Oleksandr Nazar of the city’s Sholem Aleichem Jewish Culture Center said Friday that unknown assailants on Wednesday smeared red and blue paint over the memorial in central Lviv.
He said the vandals also wrote a statement on the memorial which “humiliates both Jews and Ukrainians.”
Nazar said Friday that activists have cleaned off most of the paint and that Lviv police have launched an investigation.
Lviv, a vibrant center of Jewish life before the Holocaust, is now home to a few thousand Jews, according to Nazar. Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine’s 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during World War II.
Jewish groups complain that anti-Semitism persists in Ukraine.
Lviv, Lwow or Lemberg was the scene of a massacre of Jews carried out by the loczal Ukrainians in 1941 when the Germans entered. The were and probably still are virulent antisemites ready to kill Jews again. My mother’s family was murdered in Lemberg/Lwow and now Lviv