(JTA) — For the third time in recent months, swastikas were discovered on the Babi Yar memorial monument for Holocaust victims in Kiev.
The latest incident was discovered on Jan. 30 by employees of the National Historical Memorial Site in Babi Yar, where Nazi troops killed more than 33,000 Jews in 1941.
The swastikas were daubed on a monument shaped like a menorah that stands at the entrance to the site, the news website evreiskiy.kiev.ua reported.
The incident closely follows commemorations in Ukraine and across the world on Jan. 27, International Holocaust Memorial Day, which this year attracted considerable media attention because it was the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
Similar graffiti was found in Babi Yar in November and October, directly after the annual commemoration of the massacre there.
The incident in Ukraine comes amid a spate of anti-Semitic vandalism in Europe last week that included incidents in the former Nazi camp of Mauthausen in Austria and the fence of a Jewish cemetery in Poland.
A fourth incident in France was reported on Sunday on the website of the Israel-based Coordination Forum for Countering Anti-Semitism. On Jan. 29, a privately owned automobile in Paris was vandalized with “Jews to the oven” painted in white and a Star of David painted on its hood. The report did not say who owns the car.
Also in France, on Jan. 30, anti-Semitic graffiti was sprayed on the walls of a Catholic private school in Nancy, in the country’s northeast. The mayor of Nancy said that a swastika, Stars of David and the word “Jew” were sprayed on the school’s fence, the news website ici-c-nancy.fr reported.
