AURORA, ILLINOIS – FEBRUARY 16: Crime scene tape surrounds the Shetland Business Park following yesterday’s shooting at the Henry Pratt Company on February 16, 2019 in Aurora, Illinois. Five people were killed and 5 police officers wounded by a former employee armed with a handgun. The gunman, who was killed by police, has been identified as Gary Martin. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images) (JTA) — In three separate incidents this week, swastikas were painted on two monuments for Holocaust victims in Ukraine, and another one in Russia.
At the former concentration camp Bogdanovka, in southern Ukraine, a note with three swastikas was addressed to three prominent Jews: Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky, former politician Yevhen Chervonenko and Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee.
“Come to your senses, please stop, because the sale of Ukrainian land will quickly lead you to the Holocaust,” the note said.
Additional swastikas were etched and painted on the marble monument commemorating the murder of 54,000 Jews there during the Holocaust, Dolinsky wrote Tuesday on Facebook.
The same day, another incident was documented near Kirovgrad, some 100 miles north of Bogdanovka, were swastikas were spray-painted on a slab of marble commemorating the mass shooting of thousands of Jews in 1942. They wrote “Death to the kikes” at the foot of the monument.
Police are looking for the perpetrators of both incidents, the Ukrainian National Police wrote in a statement.
In Russia, police arrested a 30-year-old man for painting a cross and pouring yellow paint on a monument for Holocaust victims in Aksay, a village outside the city of Rostov-on-Don near the border with Ukraine. The man had a dispute with an employer and vented his frustration by destroying the monument, the news site Volga Kaspiy reported Friday.
The report did not say whether the employer was Jewish.
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