Israeli flag burned at Kiev Holocaust memorial on Yom Hashoah
Published May 5, 2016
Stray dogs roaming the Babi Yar monument in Kiev, March 14, 2016. Nazis and local collaborators murdered 30,000 Jews at the ravine in 1941. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
(JTA) — A group of young people burned an Israeli flag outside a Ukraine Holocaust memorial in Kiev on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Thursday.
The flag burning near the Babi Yar ravine, where 30,000 Jews were murdered over the course of two days in September 1941, was captured on surveillance video, Interfax-Ukraine reported.
Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko condemned the incident, referring to the flag burners as “young vandals.” He called on law enforcement authorities to investigate.
“This happened on the national Holocaust Remembrance Day, when the Jewish people all over the world remember the 6 million victims who perished during World War II,” the press service of Kiev City State Administration quoted Klitscho saying, according to Interfax.
“It is intolerable to brutalize the memory of the victims, especially at the place which is globally known as one of the symbols of a terrible crime of fascism, at the [Babi Yar], where dozens of thousands of people of different nationalities, the majority of them, Jewish, had been destroyed,” he said.
The flag burning is the latest in a string of anti-Semitic incidents at the memorial, according to the Times of Israel.
Klitschko appealed to law enforcement agencies for help in strengthening security measures at the site.
Last year, the monument was vandalized with swastikas on five separate occasions, according to the Times of Israel.
Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government announced it would allocate approximately $1 million to upgrade the memorial.
