President Isaac Herzog addressed the international gathering on Wednesday marking 80 years since the Babi Yar massacre in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Sept. 29-30, 1941 – one of the most infamous Nazi mass slaughters of the Holocaust.

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Speaking alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and other leaders, Herzog took part in inaugurating the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.

The BYHMC is being established to commemorate the stories of the 2.5 million Jews of Eastern Europe, including 1.5 million from Ukraine alone, who were murdered and buried in mass graves near their homes by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators.

Nearly 34,000 Jews were killed within 48 hours in Babi Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, when the city was under Nazi occupation in 1941. SS troops carried out the massacre with local collaborators.

In his speech, Herzog recited the Yizkor, the Jewish memorial prayer for the dead: "There is an ancient Jewish prayer called Yizkor. In the Jewish calendar, we usually recite Yizkor – the prayer to elevate the souls of the departed – be they relatives, or people whose deaths had national significance – on the most sacred dates and festivals for our people."

"This past month, we marked several of these occasions. With your permission, as President of the State of Israel, the state of the Jewish People, I would like to recite the Yizkor prayer, for the elevation of the souls of our brothers and sisters. Babies, children, women, men, and the elderly. Shot, massacred, and murdered in cold blood here, a place that became the biggest mass grave on European soil, in the valley of death of Babi Yar. In the most terrible tragedy to befall the Jewish People and the family of humanity, at mankind's darkest hour: the Holocaust. There was nobody to recite the Yizkor prayer for them.

"May God remember the souls of our brethren, Children of Israel, victims of the Holocaust and its heroes, the souls of the six million of Israel who were killed, murdered, suffocated, and buried alive and the holy communities destroyed for the sanctification of the Name. May God remember their binding, with the binding of all of Israel's other martyrs and heroes since time immemorial, and may he bind their souls up in the bond of life. Those gentle and beloved in their lives; in their deaths, not separated. May they rest in peace, and may we say Amen."

Herzog continued: "I come here as the President of the State of Israel, the nation-state of the Jewish People. I come here from Jerusalem, our eternal capital. In the heart of Jerusalem, in the Israeli Parliament – the Knesset – on the government floor is a painting by the painter Joseph Kuzkovsky, who was born in Ukraine and studied art in Kyiv. "Led to the Slaughter – Babi Yar" is its name."

"It shows men, women, and children, walking in silence, in deathly darkness, the jackboots of the Nazi devil and local police officers pointing their weapons at them, setting sharp-fanged dogs on them.

"In the middle of the painting – which nobody who has ever seen it, even once, can ever forget – is a woman, holding in one hand her young daughter, and in the other clutching her baby to her chest. Surrounded by parents and children, brothers and sisters, all together, on their way to their terrifying death. Here, in the heart of darkness.

"Thousands of times have I walked up those stairs, and time and again, I paused and looked at the picture. I felt a pinch in my heart, appalled by the atrocity. I thought about how at the end of that walk, these Jews were stripped naked, thrown into this valley of death, and massacred in a hail of bullets, here at Babi Yar.

"Every time leaders from around the world visited, I showed them this picture and told them the story of the massacre at Babi Yar. A chapter that must be studied till the last generation.

"There was no colder or more awful act of murder, no more murderous representation of the "Holocaust by bullets," than the Baby Yar Massacre.

"There is no escaping the terrible thought that the sun rose over this valley. The birds chirped. The forest was quiet. And the butchers – they butchered.

"For two days, the machine guns of the Nazis' death squads and, alas, also local collaborators mowed down tens of thousands of the Jews of Kyiv and the region. Whole families were erased," Herzog said.

"Let us make no mistake: Even in the present, Holocaust denial is still alive and kicking. Antisemitism still exists. Just in the past day, we all heard of another ugly manifestation of antisemitism at the Auschwitz extermination camp in the form of antisemitic graffiti that disgraces the memory of the people killed at this terrible death camp. We, world leaders, must vigorously condemn the slightest hint of this phenomenon and fight it with all our might," the Israeli president added.

Last year, a number of memorials, including synagogue prayer space, were installed as part of the construction of a massive, innovative museum complex across the whole Babi Yar area. The establishment of the center is being overseen by public figures and leaders from around the world, headed by Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.

"Babi Yar is the biggest mass grave of the Holocaust ... the most quickly filled mass grave," said Sharansky.

"It's hard to breathe at this place – thousands of children took their last breath here," Zelenskyy said. "It's hard to stand here – thousands of bullets knocked people down here in Babi Yar. The earth was trembling from the convulsions of people who were still alive and trying to get out."

"For us Germans, there can only be one response: never again!" Steinmeier said.

The center also revealed the initial 159 names of hundreds of Nazi troops who took part in the massacre.

"Despite confessions, evidence and testimonies being submitted as late as the 1960s by some of the Nazi soldiers who carried out the murders, only a few of those involved ever faced justice for their heinous crimes," it said.

"They were between 20 and 60 years old," the memorial center said. "They were educated and uneducated, they included engineers and teachers, drivers and salespeople. Some were married and some were not. The vast majority of them returned to live a normal life after the war. They testified at trial and were found not guilty, except for very few commanders, not the soldiers who carried out the horrific massacre."

Father Patrick Desbois, head of the center's academic council, said some of the 159 Nazi troops named "were shooters. Others extracted the Jews from their homes. Others took their belongings and their luggage. Others armed the weapons while others were serving sandwiches, tea and vodkas to the shooters. All of them are guilty."

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The three presidents on Wednesday attended the opening of a new memorial – the "Crystal Crying Wall" created by conceptual artist Marina Abramovic. Within six months, the first museum space will be unveiled.

"We are going to give the real faces to the Holocaust, whether it's the faces of the victims, of the executors or those who were helping to save Jews," Sharansky said.

He noted that while some Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi killers, at least 2,600 Ukrainian families were hiding Jews at the risk of their own lives.

"So we are going to recover the names of victims, and we are recovering more and more names of victims, the names of those who were saving Jews and the names of collaborators," he said.

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President Isaac Herzog landed in Kiev on Tuesday for his first visit to the Ukraine as president, at the invitation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

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The president discussed the history of Ukrainain Jewry, saying that "Some of the greatest Jewish figures were born and raised here – religious and spiritual leaders, statesmen, Zionist thinkers and notable cultural heroes."

However, Herzog said, the Jewish people also had a "difficult and painful history" in Ukraine, having been subjected to rioting and pogroms in earlier centuries, as well as the infamous Nazi massacre at Babi (Babyn) Yar.

Herzog thanked Zelensky for making legislation opposing antisemitism a priority and said he hoped the bill would pass soon.

In addition, Herzog noted that Ukraine had elected not to participate in the recent 20^th anniversary event to commemorate the 2001 Durban Conference. Ukraine was one of over 30 nations that agreed to Israel's request to skip the event.

Earlier, Herzog laid a wreath at the Grave of the Unknown Soldier and at a memorial to the victims of the Great Famine.

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The Knesset held a commemoration meeting on Sunday to mark 80 years since the Babi Yar [Babyn Yar] massacre, the symbol of what is known as the "Holocaust of the Bullets," and which began on the eve of Yom Kippur.

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In just two days, the Nazis murdered nearly all the Jews in Kiev: 33,771 people. During the German occupation of Ukraine (1941-43), nearly 100,000 victims were murdered and buried at Babi Yar, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jewish, but also included opponents of the regime, the mentally ill and Roma people, making it the largest mass grave in Europe.

The meeting was attended by Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy; Diaspora Affairs Minister Nachman Shai; chairman of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center Natan Sharansky; Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan; World Zionist Organization and acting Jewish Agency chairman Yaakov Hagoel; and Association of Ukrainian Immigrants in Israel chairman David Levin.

"The massacre at Babi Yar is one of the worst single atrocities humanity has ever known, as more than 33,000 Jews were murdered, shot to death, simply because they were Jews," Levy said.

Sharansky called on the Israeli government and Holocaust institutions that had visited the German extermination camps in Poland to visit Babi Yar.

"There were two methods to the extermination of the Jews," he explained. "Cold-blooded murder with bullets and burial in mass graves throughout Eastern Europe, of which Babi Yar is the symbol, and mass, systematic extermination using gas in camps established by the Nazis in Poland. In order to understand the entire story of the extermination of the Jews in-depth, I call on the Israeli government and anyone who has visited Poland to visit Babi Yar, as well."

Prior to the meeting, Levy presented a medal on behalf of the Knesset to the last survivor of Babi Yar, Michael Sidko, who was just six years old when he witnessed Nazi soldiers murder his infant brother Volodya, his younger sister Clara and his mother, whose screams Sidko heard as she was shot to death in the forest of Babi Yar.

Sidko and his brother Grisha survived the Holocaust, thanks in part to a Polish neighbor who took them home and passed them off as her own sons until the end of the war.

Levy said: "I could not help but be moved and to shed a tear listening to Michael's heartbreaking story, how he saw his dear family taken away from him in front of his own eyes. I salute Michael for his heroism, and I am grateful to him for sharing his story with me, and I was honored to present him with a medal of recognition on behalf of the Knesset, on behalf of Israeli democracy. I reassured Michael that the memory of his family, along with all the victims of Babi Yar and the Holocaust, will be safeguarded forever.

"Michael's story is intertwined with the story of the State of Israel, which arose from the ashes of the Holocaust, in order to stop the shedding of Jewish blood and to build a home for the Jewish people in the land of their ancestors," he continued. "We must maintain the security, and the economic and social strength of the State of Israel, which together are the best guarantees for the future of our country, and for our ability to stand by the vow we made to Michael and all the victims of the Holocaust: Never again."

Sharansky promised Sidko that the names of his mother and siblings would be mentioned at the official ceremony to mark the 80th anniversary of the massacre, due to take place in Kiev on Oct. 6.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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Archive footage and photographs preserve memories of one of the biggest single massacres of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust in a documentary premiered by Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa on Monday.

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"Babi Yar. Context," unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival, tells the story of the mass killing that marked the start of the Holocaust in occupied Soviet Ukraine, as well as surrounding events.

"It is a deep history and we have to know our history, and films must provoke interest in our history," Loznitsa said at the launch.

Nazi German forces shot dead an estimated 34,000 Jewish men, women and children on Sept. 29-30, 1941, in a large ravine known both as Babi Yar and Babyn Yar, on the edge of Kyiv.

The 56-year-old director said he grew up in the city, not far from the site, and found traces of the past as he wandered around as a child.

"I remember the stones which they left ... when they destroyed the Jewish cemetery. The stones were in the bushes," he said. "I asked myself what happened here, what is it?"

But the adults around him were not forthcoming. "They would say, when you will grow up you will know."

"Babi Yar. Context' is Loznitsa's seventh film at the Cannes festival. In 2012, his movie "In the Fog" competed for the Palme d'Or.

In May, Ukraine unveiled a synagogue built of wood and designed to unfold like a pop-up book at a site commemorating the victims of the massacre.

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Ukraine unveiled Friday a synagogue built of wood and designed to unfold like a pop-up book at a site commemorating the victims of one of the single biggest massacres of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust.

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The colorful new synagogue is part of a memorial project for the victims of a massacre where Nazi German forces shot dead an estimated 34,000 Jewish men, women and children on Sept. 29-30, 1941, in the Babi Yar ravine located on the edge of the Ukrainian capital Kiev. 

The opening of the synagogue coincided with Ukraine marking its first Day of Remembrance for Ukrainians who saved Jews during World War II.

"Their feat is an example of humanity and self-sacrifice," President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted in honor of the commemoration. 

The synagogue was designed by Swiss architects. The creators wanted it to remind visitors of a prayer book, a Bible, or the magic of a pop-up book where "new worlds unfold that we could not imagine before. In a sense, the pop-up book can act as a metaphor for the synagogue," they said in a statement on their website.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky, artistic director of the Babi Yar complex, told Reuters that only old oak was used to build the synagogue, collected from all regions of Ukraine.

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The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center has unveiled the very first Jewish prayer space on Thursday.

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The symbolic synagogue structure was opened at a ceremony on Thursday, Holocaust Remembrance Day, which included special prayers led by Ukraine and Kiev Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, alongside nine other rabbis. The event was addressed by Jewish world leaders and other dignitaries. Attendance was limited due to ongoing coronavirus restrictions in Ukraine.

A total of 33,771 Jewish victims were shot at the Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) ravine by the Nazis during just two days, Sept. 29 and 30, 1941.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians, Roma, mentally ill and others were shot thereafter at Babi Yar throughout the Nazi occupation of Kiev. The estimated number of victims murdered there is about 100,000, making it Europe's largest mass grave.

"For many years, [this place] has had no proper stone or memorial," Bleich said. "I find it telling that the first structure of the memorial will be a place for introspection and prayer designed symbolically as a synagogue.

"This will help visitors relate to the mass murder that took place," he explained, "and not forget the spirituality or the origins of those Jews murdered on the eve of Yom Kippur and Yom Kippur itself."

Designed by international architect Manuel Herz – whose previous projects include the Synagogue of Mainz and "Ballet Mécanique" in Zurich – the symbolic synagogue takes its inspiration from 17th- and 18th-century wooden Ukrainian synagogues.

When closed, the building is a flat structure that's manually opened, then unfolds into the three-dimensional space of the synagogue structure. The design also features an interior that references two destroyed 17th- and 18th-century Ukrainian synagogues. It forms part of a planned, wider multifaith space for prayer and reflection, to be completed in due course.

The symbolic synagogue is the first to be completed in the planned memorial complex. A dozen buildings are planned for the complex, including a museum to commemorate the Babi Yar massacre; a museum to commemorate the holocaust of Ukrainian and Eastern European Jewry as a whole; a structure depicting the names of victims; a religious/spiritual center; an educational and scientific research center; a multimedia center; a learning and recreational space for children; and an information and conference center.

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org

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The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center has unveiled its plans for constructing one of the world's largest Holocaust memorial centers. The complex will be built at a 150-hectare site  at Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) and is planned to include a dozen buildings to honor the memory of the 33,771 Jewish victims who were shot at the Babyn Yar ravine by the Nazis from Sept. 29-30, 1941 and the some 100,000 people the Nazis murdered there in total, including Jews, Ukrainians, Roma, and the mentally ill.

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The site will also commemorate the 1.5 million Jews murdered in similar Nazi mass shootings in the Ukraine and the rest of eastern Europe.

In September 2020, Ukrainian Minister of Culture Oleksandr Tkachenko, acting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, signed a memorandum of understanding and cooperation with BYHMC to construct a "fitting memorial" to the horrors perpetrated at Babyn Yar.

"The Babyn Yar Massacre and the Holocaust of the Jews of Ukraine are an important and tragic chapter in the history of our country. The establishment of the Babyn Yar Memorial Center, the construction of which will begin during the 80th year [after] the terrible massacre, is essential for the commemoration of the Holocaust.

"As Europe's largest mass grave, Babyn Yar represents unimaginable destruction. Thanks to these plans, it will become a place of peace, reflection and tranquility," Zelensky said.

To illustrate the need for a commemorative site of this scope, a recent survey conducted in Ukraine showed that 68% of respondents believed that the memory of 20^th-century genocides such as the Holocaust was fading. Only 16% respondents knew that over 1 million Jews had been fatally shot during the Holocaust, not far from where their own homes are now located.

The complex's buildings will include a museum dedicated to the Babyn Yar massacre; a museum to commemorate the Holocaust of Ukrainian and Eastern European Jewry as a whole; a structure bearing victims' names; a religious/spiritual center that includes a synagogue, church and mosque; an educational and scientific research center; a multi-media center; a learning and recreational space for children; and an information and conference center. The first synagogue at the site and an exhibition space are scheduled to be completed this year, ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre this September.

BYHMC Artistic Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky is directing plans for the new museum complex and is consulting with international experts in museum development. The planning team also includes young Ukrainians.

In December 2020, BYHMC presented its plans to Zelensky and Tkachenko. Zelensky instructed Tkachenko to expedite construction of the synagogue and exhibition space by this September.

Former prisoner of Zion and former head of the Jewish Agency Natan Sharansky, who chairs the BYHMC Supervisory Board, called the museum concept "amazing."

Sharansky said that the "museum and educational center will not only both be high quality, but at the same time different from many other Holocaust centers. As such, it will help fill a vacuum in the field of Holocaust studies."

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The two leaders laid wreaths at the menorah monument of the site, where an estimated 33,771 Jews were massacred in September 1941.

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"Babi Yar is endless pain. In this grave, the mass grave here behind me, tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews and many non-Jews were murdered," said Netanyahu. "As prime minister of Israel, I honor their memory and at the same time I say in a clear voice, precisely in this place, that it is our constant duty to stand against murderous ideologies in order to ensure that there will never be another Babi Yar."

Video: PMO

"For humanity, Babi Yar is a warning sign. For Jews, Babi Yar is an eternal imperative. We will always defend ourselves by ourselves against any enemy," he continued.

"The Holocaust is the worst of humanity's horrors. The Holocaust is the greatest of Jewish tragedies, and there have been many tragedies.

"I can see our brothers and sisters 78 years ago on the edge of the killing field. They were standing right here, a very small distance from us – naked, beaten and humiliated. At one point, they understood, and in their eyes was paralyzing horror. Their hearts were torn by evil cruelty. The hand of the murderers reached for the slaughtering knife and as the poet declared, the slaughterer slaughtered," the prime minister said.

Netanyahu thanked Zelensky for "efforts to preserve the memory of the Holocaust."

Without citing anything specific, he told the Ukrainian leader: "You are continuing your efforts in the war against anti-Semitism."

Reprinted with permission from JNS.org.

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