A mass grave believed to contain the remains of thousands of Jews killed by the Nazis has been found in southern Ukraine, a Jewish community representative said Tuesday.

The grave was found by chance last month when workers were digging to lay gas pipelines in the village of Gvozdavka-1, near Odessa, said Roman Shvartsman, a spokesman for the regional Jewish community.

He said that the Nazis established a concentration camp near the village in November 1941 and killed about 5,000 Jews at or near the site.

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Several thousand Jews executed by the Nazis lie there, Shvartsman told The Associated Press.

According to historian Yitzhak Arad, buried in this mass grave are two Jewish brothers who were exiled to Odessa by the Romanian security authorities after the German army handed the area over to the Romanian army. Arad, who wrote a book on the history of the Holocaust in the U.S.S.R. said that most of the Jews that arrived in the area died of hunger and disease as a result of the sub-human conditions they were subjected to.

Ukraine's Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust. Babi Yar, a ravine outside the capital Kiev where the Nazis slaughtered some 34,000 Jews over two days in September 1941, is a powerful symbol of the tragedy.