JERUSALEM: Ukraine President Yushchenko visits Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko on Wednesday (November 14) handed to Israel hundreds of previously classified documents detailing mass grave sites of Jews murdered during the Holocaust in the former Soviet state. During a visit to Jerusalem, Yushchenko gave Israeli President Shimon Peres a box containing documents and maps locating Jewish mass graves and detailing the activities of underground Jewish groups operating in Ukraine in the 1920s. Later in the day, Yushchenko visited Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. He took a tour of the memorial, which also serves as a museum, before he participated in a memorial ceremony where he laid a wreath near a memorial flame. Yushchenko, whose father was a prison labourer in Auschwitz, visited the Jerusalem's Western Wall, one of Judaism's holiest sites earlier in the day. Mass killing of Jews was routine in many towns and villages in Ukraine during World War Two. The Nazis slaughtered more than 33,000 Jews in two days in 1941 at Babiy Yar, a ravine outside Kiev that was one of the first sites of mass wartime killing. Seeking refuge from a long history of anti-Semitism, some one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union have moved to Israel since the fall of Communism in 1990.

ITN Source | November 15, 2007

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