President Vladimir Putin has inaugurated on Tuesday a monument dedicated to Jewish heroes of resistance in Nazi concentration camps and ghettos during World War II.
Putin opened construction of the monument at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in January 2018.
Members of the Jewish resistance “are victims, prisoners of concentration camps,” Putin said at the event. “But they are without a doubt also winners.”
Businessman Viktor Vekselberg, who chairs the museum’s board of trustees and attended the event alongside senior Russian Jewish figures, said the monument’s opening held personal significance for him.
Sixteen members of his family were among the estimated 10,000 Jews held in the ghetto of Drohobych, where he was born 12 years after the end of the war, Vekselberg told Interfax.
“The monument we’re opening today is an important symbol of an unforgettable and painful wound, a great memory and a symbol of the fact that we must do everything to prevent the slightest hint of a possible repeat,” he was quoted as saying.