Russian artillery fire damaged a large Menorah sculpture that was part of the Drobytsky Yar Holocaust Memorial Park and Museum on the eastern outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials and others reported.
The memorial complex, opened in 2002, commemorates some 15,000 Jews who were massacred by the Nazis at a ravine there in December 1941-January 1942.
“People died basically just outside their homes, in pits and forests,” Izabella Tabarovsky, a scholar at the Kennan Institute, a part of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, told Smithsonian Magazine in 2016. “They were killed in full view of their neighbors. If their neighbors did not directly murder them, they certainly witnessed them.”
An image posted on social media Saturday (March 26) by various sources showed the damage to the towering Menorah structure, a central feature of the sprawling Dobrytsky Yar memorial park.
Last year, a new interactive installation at the memorial museum was installed, dedicated as a ceremony in December marking the 80th anniversary of the massacres.
In a tweet, Ukrainian Foreign Ministery Dmytro Kuleba posted a photo of the damaged Menorah and lashed out at Russia.
“Why Russia keeps attacking Holocaust memorials in Ukraine? I expect Israel to strongly condemn this barbarism,” he said.
There were reports March 1 that Russian shelling of a Ukrainian TV tower and communications complex had damaged the nearby Holocaust memorial site at Babyn Yar, outside Kyiv, where tens of thousands of Jews were massacred by German occupation troops and Ukrainian helpers during World War II.
The reports sparked outrage, but reporters who visited the scene said the sprawling Babyn Yar memorial site — which includes memorial sculptures and a newly built synagogue — had not been harmed.
Watch a video of the dedication of the interactive installation at the memorial museum at Drobytsky Yar in December 2021: