Kiev, Ukraine:Last week(Wednesday), a Jewish delegation appealed to the Ukrainian Government requesting an order of the immediate termination of all construction work over the mass grave in Odessa, The site is known as a burial location of about 26,000 Jewish victims who were annihilated and buried there during the Holocaust. Excavation on the spot has revealed fragments of human bones and personal belongings. The reaction of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE) is “intermingled feelings of disgust and shame”.

The Jewish community of Odessa reported that the current diggings on the area serving a mass grave of some 26,000 Jews are designated to prepare the ground for the construction of a huge shopping mall.

“The initiating stages of the digging have produced bones and children’s toys”, testified Rabbi Abraham Wolf, the Chief Rabbi of Odessa and South Ukraine. Rabbi Wolf added that the workers removed the entire collections of body remnants and personal items to an unknown place, rendering it impossible to retrieve them. Rabbi Wolf, however, refrained from mentioning the name of the construction company, wishing that a solution is found to bring an end to the shameful proceedings.

The victims buried in the mass grave were annihilated in the autumn of 1941; a short time after the German forces invaded the U.S.S.R. The mass grave located on a vacant plot not far from the centre of the city was marked by a few gravestones, although the spot was never defined officially as a graveyard.

“It is difficult to describe how it looks – hundreds of hundreds of fragments of skeletons, bones of hands and legs and sculls”, said Rabbi Wolf.

Together with some other Jewish leaders, Rabbi Wolf sent a letter of appeal to the Prime Minister of Ukraine, Mrs. Julia Tymoshenko asking for her intervention that would put an end to the digging. Rabbi Wolf added that this measure was taken after futile attempts of other officials to prevent further digging.

“Construction on any site that results in findings of body remnants is a desecration of the sanctity and an offense to the memory of the dead”, the letter read.

The appeal of Rabbi Wolf was joined by Jewish bodies and organizations from all parts of Europe.

The Rabbinical Centre of Europe (RCE), the supreme rabbinical body encompassing Rabbis and Jewish communities from all over Europe, claimed that this was not the first time similar offenses have been reported from Ukraine. “The Centre is waging an ongoing battle against Jewish cemetery desecrations, although it is always astonishing to encounter this attitude of disdain towards the memory of the murdered victims”.

The letter dispatched by the scholarly, Rabbi Abraham Yaffe Schlesinger, presidency member of the RCE and chairman of the Cemetery Department of the Centre, states that “It is shocking to witness how the Ukrainian nation ‘dances on the blood’ of the Jews on the area that over 25,000 of their national kinsmen had perished”.

In addition, the RCE professed that this particular case, at which, despite the fact that initial digging produced parts of bodies and personal belongings, construction work proceeded as normal, the Center feels a mixture of repulsion and shame”.

The Ukrainian government refused to issue an immediate response.

According to historical records some 2.4 million Jews were killed in Ukraine. Their bodies were buried in all parts of the country in improvised mass graves, many of which were not signposted at all.

Jewish cemeteries and burial sites are not regarded with respect, to say the least, in the former U.S.S.R. Jewish graves are demolished in all parts of Ukraine and in its neighbor, Belarus.

Earlier this year, in the spring, a construction company was reported to have been digging on an area that serves as a Jewish cemetery in Vinnitsa, Ukraine to set the ground for construction of a planned apartment building. In order to put an end to this, the local Jewish community, with the assistance of the Rabbinical Center of Europe was compelled to conduct a long and strenuous struggle.