Daily Alert Archives

Babi Yar: The Story of a Lost Universe

(Israel Hayom) Rona Tausinger - On September 28, 1941, nine days after the Germans conquered Kiev, the Nazis ordered every Jew in the city to convene with their belongings and documents near the cemetery at the edge of Babi Yar. Any Jew who refused would be killed, the announcement read. The following day 33,771 Jews arrived and were shot en masse over two days. Throughout that year an additional 15,000 were killed in a similar fashion. It is a known fact that Ukrainians took part in the massacre. Now a massive Holocaust center is set to be built in Babi Yar to commemorate events that happened 80 years ago. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the advisory committee for the center establishment fund, says: "Babi Yar for me was a symbol not only for the Holocaust but also for the great efforts the Soviet regime went to in order to erase its memory. To erase the Jewish identity of the place." The museum's artistic director, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, told Israel Hayom, "Before the Second World War, every fourth family in Kiev was Jewish. Imagine how much knowledge, tradition, smells, lessons, books, cultures - disappeared from the mental and emotional picture of the era. The story of Babi Yar is not just about the murder of Jews by Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators, this is a story about a whole universe that was destroyed." The online museum will be up by 2021. The physical museum will open in 2026.
2020-08-06 00:00:00
Full Article