It was erected as a monument to around 15,000 Jews murdered in a ravine a few miles outside Ukraine’s second-largest city Kharkiv by Nazi occupying forces during the Second World War. But in March last year Drobytsky Yar became an unexpected symbol of the current war when it was struck and damaged by artillery fire.

When a photograph of it appeared on social media, Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba immediately lashed out at Russia, asking: “Why does Russia keep attacking Holocaust memorials in Ukraine? I expect Israel to strongly condemn this barbarism.”

Last week the JC became the first newspaper to reach the scene which has been off-limits to the media because, apparently, it lies close to sensitive Ukrainian military positions. Not even the city’s rabbi, Rabbi Moshe Moskovitz, has been able to get permission to visit.

We got there by arriving impromptu at a checkpoint and spotting the gaunt branches of the monument in the distance. A soldier agreed to walk with us to it, along paths he said had been checked for any unexploded ordnance.We could see that two of the six arms of the blackened menorah-shaped monument have been lopped off by the missile or missiles, making it appear even more gaunt.

The menorah was represented with six arms to symbolise the six million Holocaust victims.

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Debris at the foot of the memorial after the missile strike

During the JC’s short visit we saw twisted a rocket or missile casing alongside the shrapnel-pockmarked monument. It was impossible for us to determine whether it was a Russian or Ukrainian strike, though the United Jewish Community of Ukraine issued a statement blaming Russian artillery. There is no evidence the strike intentionally targeted the monument.

The massacre scene was marked in the days of the USSR, but the Soviet regime failed to refer to the victims as Jews, just calling them “Soviet citizens” — similarly to the way Kyiv’s Babyn Yar victims were described during the communist era.

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Babyn Yar menorah (Getty Images)

Jewish groups convinced the post-Soviet government of newly independent Ukraine to build a proper monument at Drobytsky Yar and to describe its victims more correctly.
In front of the 20-metre-high monument we found, undamaged, the marble plaque unveiled in 2002.

It is inscribed in Latin, Ukrainian and Hebrew letters: “At this place, the dead teach the living.” Wehrmacht troops occupied Kharkiv on 24 October, 1941. The Nazis removed Jews and Roma to a ghetto on the eastern outskirts of the city, and its inhabitants were later driven in groups of up to 300 to Drobytsky Yar and shot there.

To save bullets, historians say, children were thrown into pits alive. In total, between 16,000 and 19,000 people were killed.

Rabbi Moskovitz, for more than three decades the doyen of the Kharkiv Jewish community, told the JC he was recently shown another gruesome scene: workers had found human remains, with Jewish items, in a cellar as they were digging foundations for a new building inside what had been the ghetto.

The rabbi believes the Nazis must have shot and dumped Jews there or left them to die.

Their remains have been reburied with full Jewish rites at Drobytsky Yar.

Inside the city itself, the Jewish community has placed a plaque on a building that used to house two synagogues.

The Nazis locked around 400 Jews inside, and all of them died of hunger or illness, says Rabbi Moskovitz.