Residents of the Ukrainian city of Rivne have commemorated the victims of one the largest-scale killings in the history of the Holocaust, which took place at the Sosesnki woods near the city seventy-five years ago. Over the course of November 6 and 7, a mere two days, 17,5 thousand Jews were murdered in this locale.

A plain stone memorial erected in the woods, noting that 17,5 thousand peaceful citizens were executed here, was only erected in 1967. And the new memorial, explictly stressing that the victims were almost exclusively Jewish, was only raised in independent Ukraine.

The commemoration ceremony was attended by members of the Rivne charity foundation “Chesed Osher” headed by Gennadiy Frayerman, representatives of the Polish, Armenian, Azerbaijani and German cultural societies, school children and representatives of the Rivne City Hall, including the mayor and the chief of the Regional Office for Cultural Affairs.