(JTA) — A monument to the victims of the Holocaust-era ghetto of Lviv in western Ukraine was vandalized in what police suspect is an anti-Semitic incident.
Unidentified vandals on Friday threw several gallons of green paint on the memorial, which was erected in 1992 in memory of tens of thousands of Jews who were kept in the ghetto after the German invasion of Ukraine in 1941.
“We called law enforcement officers, and later maintenance services in the Shevchenko district to wash away the paint,” Lviv City Council spokesman Roman Dach told the news website Fakty.
In 1939, approximately 110,000 Jews lived in Lviv, where they constituted one-third of the city’s total population, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Nearly all of them were murdered by German soldiers and local collaborators.
Throughout the summer of 1942, 50,000 Jews were sent to Belzec and Janowska, a camp within the city. In September, the remaining Jews were moved into a smaller ghetto, and in November of that year, “unproductive” Jews were either sent to Janowska or other camps to be murdered.
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