Following extensive surveys into the state of mass grave sites undertaken by Lo Tishkach in the Kyiv region in 2008-09, students belonging to the Ukrainian Union of Jewish Students have now cleaned and restored the mass grave site in Boiarka in Kyiv oblast, replacing the original Soviet marker with one in Ukrainian and Hebrew and which notes the Jewish origin of the victims.
On October 2, 1941, Nazi forces aided by local inhabitants executed 55 Jews from Boiarka and the surrounding villages of Tarasovki and Belogorodki. A monument was established by the Soviet authorities in 1955 but did not mention that the victims of this mass execution were Jews.
The famous Yiddish writer, Shalom Aleichem wrote Tevye the Milkman in Boiarka and the story were based on local characters.
The restoration works, coupled with educational projects on the history of the Holocaust, were supported by the Lo Tishkach Foundation supported by the Genesis Philanthropy Group.
They form part of a three-year project across Ukraine and the Baltic States involving thousands of local Jewish youth.
Over the course of this summer, over 800 Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust mass grave sites have been surveyed and photographed by the Lo Tishkach Foundation in Ukraine, Latvia and Lithuania. A number of other memorialisation and preservation projects are already underway in central Ukraine.
The Lo Tishkach Foundation is committed to preserving the physical record of Jewish communities across Eastern Europe and the memory of the Holocaust. The online database at www.lo-tishkach.org now contains information on over 10,000 sites.
Lo Tishkach was set up in 2006 with support from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and the Conference of European Rabbis. It was created an independent Foundation of Public Utility by royal assent under Belgian law in 2008.
