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Ukraine hands Israel Holocaust mass grave evidence

14 Nov 2007 17:33:08 GMT
Source: Reuters

JERUSALEM, Nov 14 (Reuters) - Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko handed to Israel on Wednesday 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, Peres's office said in a statement.

Peres welcomed the move and said the documents would "shed light on one of the darkest periods of Jewish history and Ukrainian history". The papers also traced the fate of Jewish activists killed under Soviet rule in the Ukraine.

"We don't deny the past but we are looking to the future and we ask Israel to see us as a faithful partner," Peres's office quoted Yushchenko as saying to Peres.

Yushchenko, whose father was a prison labourer in Auschwitz, also donned a black skull-cap and visited the Western Wall remnant of the ancient Jewish temple during his visit.

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.

Yushchenko also handed over declassified papers about Jewish underground activities in Ukraine during the 1920s. (Reporting by Rebecca Harrison and Ari Rabinovitch; editing by Ralph Boulton)

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Last updated:Wed Nov 14 17:32:29 2007