LVIV, Ukraine — Police say a World War II Jewish burial site has been vandalized in western Ukraine.
Petro Yezhor, police spokesman for the city of Rivne, said several people broke a memorial plaque and street lamps Wednesday evening at a site commemorating the killing of 17,500 Jews during the Holocaust.
Yezhor said Thursday that the perpetrators used the metal parts from the broken street lamps to compose insulting phrases and lay them out on the site. Police in the city, about 350 kilometers west of Kiev, are investigating.
The Jewish community leader in Rivne, Hennady Frayerman, called the incident "horrific."
Some 1.4 million of Soviet Ukraine's 2.4 million Jews were executed or starved to death or died of disease during World War II.
(AP)
