The Jewish community of Odessa, Ukraine, has asked the country's government to stop construction on the site of a grave containing the remains of an estimated 26,000 victims of the Holocaust. Avrohom Wolf, who serves as a local Chabad rabbi, told the news agency AP that a developer had begun building a shopping mall on the site of a burial ground. When construction workers began digging they found bones, skulls and children's toys. He said the builder had taken away all the remains that were dug out to an unknown place.
The victims were executed in the fall of 1941, shortly after German troops invaded the Soviet Union, according to Wolf. The grave - a plot of barren land not far from the center of the city - was marked by several Jewish monuments, but not officially labeled a cemetery. "It is difficult to describe how horrible it looked - hundreds and hundreds of people, hands, legs, skulls," he told AP. Wolf and other Jewish leaders sent a letter to prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko, asking her to intervene. Wolf said local officials had tried to help but failed. "Construction on the site where there are bones wherever you dig cannot be called anything but blasphemy and an insult to the memory of the dead," the letter said.
An estimated 1.4 million of Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed, starved to death or died of disease during World War II. Their remains are strewn around the country in common graves, many of them ignored and unmarked. Earlier this year, another developer began construction of an apartment building on a pre-World War II Jewish cemetery in the city of Vinnytsia. The local Jewish community had to fight hard to stop the project.