Jewish leaders in Ukraine are demanding authorities protect an old Jewish cemetery near Kiev .
Aleksandr Feldman, a parliament member and president of the Jewish Foundation of Ukraine, and Rabbi Moshe Azman Reuveni, one of Ukraine’s chief rabbis, sent a letter to Khodorov village authorities demanding they revoke a permit to a private company to build on the territory of the old Jewish cemetery and protect the local bay coastline.
Local Jewish residents told JTA that the erosion of the Kiev reservoir’s coastline could be damaging the old Jewish cemetery near the Khodorov village. Damage has been caused also by buildings being constructed on cemetery land. Uncovered burial plots can be seen on the bay coast and destroyed headstones litter the beach.
A local gardening company has proposed a project to fortify the bay’s coastline.
In August, a study established that the caving in of the cemetery’s graves, located near the bay’s coastline, could produce a sanitary-epidemiological threat.
Much of the cemetery was destroyed by the Nazis, but more than 20 tombstones remain that date from the 1800s and the early 1900s.
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