Ukraine – Jewish Leaders to Demand Their Country Come Clean on the Holocaust after Mass Graves Unearthed

Ukraine – With the discovery of a mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis, angry Ukrainian Jewish leaders are demanding their country come clean on the Holocaust.

"During the Soviet era, Ukrainian authorities did not tell the truth about the real number of Holocaust victims" in Ukraine, said Mikhail Frenkel, head of the Association of Jewish Media in Ukraine. "Today some local authorities are still trying to conceal the numbers."

The Gvozdavka grave was found when workers were preparing to lay gas pipelines in the village about 100 miles from Odessa. Residents of Gvozdavka, in the Lyubashivsky District, confirmed that their village contained a ghetto during World War II, and that Romanian and German Nazis brought Jews there from Moldova, as well as from the areas of Odessa and Zhitomir. About 5,000 of the camp's predominantly Jewish prisoners were murdered.

"The locals knew about the tragedy and the massacre but did nothing, and local authorities were also silent," Levitas, a Holocaust expert said. "Only due to the pipeline construction did we learn about the site."

But Ukrainian officials say that isn't the case.

"The situation is a rudiment of Soviet mentality and stereotypes," Vasily Gazhaman of the Ukrainian State Committee on Religions and Nationalities said.

Meanwhile, another grave believed to contain the remains of dozens of Jews killed by the Nazis was found in western Ukraine, workers digging on the site of a future office complex near Netishin, a town in the Khmelnitzky Region, also found what resembled fragments of Torah scrolls.

"Torah fragments suggest that probably this was a massacre of Jews killed in 1942," said Valeriy Malkin, deputy head of the Khmelnitzky regional state administration.

Local authorities assigned a special commission to investigate the case. [J-Post]