Unidentified residents of the Ukrainian city of Rivne have turned an old Jewish cemetery into a bike park with jumps and race tracks. A message about this appeared on the Telegram channel of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine (UJCU).
The place of memory is located right in the center of the city. According to the organization, construction work there is being arbitrarily carried out by local youth. Teenagers tear up the ground and reinforce it with gravestones to build trampolines, and the gravestones are used as a fence for the track.
It is noted that the community has already applied to the regional administration with a request to assign the cemetery the status of a cultural and historical object. The authorities have complied with this request, documents are being prepared. “The assignment of the status will provide tools for protecting the cemetery from constant desecration,” the UJCU said in a statement.
Earlier in Odessa, nationalists persecuted a Jewish restaurant because its owners posted a post in Ukrainian using the Russian keyboard layout. The recording was made according to Ukrainian phonetic norms, but using the Russian alphabet. The radicals promised not to let the institution open after the lockdown. Some of them even threatened to burn down the restaurant, hinting at the need for ethnic cleansing in the region.
