Ukraine grave of Rabbi Nachman’s daughter destroyed, desecrated with pig heads

JTA — The grave of a daughter of the Bratslav movement’s founder, Rabbi Nachman, was razed and desecrated this week with pig heads.

The desecration of Sarah’s grave in Kremenchuk, Ukraine is the fifth such act since 2013 and the most serious, the Jewish.ru website reported.

In 2015, the grave from 1831 in the central Ukraine city was set ablaze and defaced with swastikas.

But the latest incident resulted in the destruction of the above-ground parts of the gravesite, the report said. The perpetrators, who have not been identified, placed several severed heads of pig carcasses atop the tombstone that they had razed.

The area of the gravesite of Rabbi Nachman’s daughter was designated in recent years to become a construction site, but the Oholei Tzadikim association, which preserves Jewish heritage sites, helped prevent the project.

Rabbi Nachman’s teachings have inspired hundreds of thousands of followers worldwide. His grave in the Ukrainian city of Uman is among the Hasidic world’s most visited burial sites.

In unrelated incidents this week, a grave at a Jewish cemetery in Greece and a monument for Holocaust victims in Moldova also were vandalized.

In Moldova, a southern neighbor of Ukraine, the names of the Holocaust victims listed on the monument in Cosauti were crossed out.

In Greece, a grave in Ioannina was opened and damaged. There were no hateful messages, Epiruspost reported.