Babi Yar Commemoration - 09.27.2006

65th Anniversary Remembrance of the Babi Yar Tragedy

Oct. 16	Moscow Times	At Babi Yar, signs of progress, signs of problems
Sep. 28	JTA	Commemoration aimed at teaching young Ukrainians
Sep. 27	JTA	Babi Yar massacre marked
Sep. 26	AFP	Ukraine prepares to remember Babi Yar
Sep. 25	forUM	Ukraine launches systemic researches of tragedy in Babiy Yar
Sep. 21	Israel News Ag'cy	International Holocaust Memorial for Nazi Babi Yar Ukraine Massacre
Sep. 18	Associated Press	Hundreds commemorate victims of Nazi massacres in Ukraine
Sep. 18	The White House	Pres. Bush Announces U.S. Delegation to Commemoration

(l.-r.) Moldovan Jewish community representative;  NCSJ Vice President Sasha Smukler; NCSJ Board of  Governors member Adam Pechter; NCSJ Executive  Director Mark Levin; Moldovan Jewish community  representative; NCSJ Chairman Dr. Robert Meth;  Zvi Magen and Mala Tabory, NATIV	(l.-r.) unidentified; Stephen E. Herbits, World  Jewish Congress Secretary General; NCSJ  Executive Director Mark Levin; NCSJ  Chairman Dr. Robert Meth
(l.-r.) NCSJ Chairman Dr. Robert Meth; Stephen E.  Herbits, World Jewish Congress Secretary  General; NCSJ Executive Director Mark Levin	(on stage) Viktor Yushchenko, President of Ukraine

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Moscow Times - 10.16.2006

At Babi Yar, signs of progress, signs of problems

Op-Ed

Adam Pechter, lives in Princeton and is a board member of NCSJ, an advocacy group on behalf of Jews in the former Soviet Union.

Last month I had the opportunity of serving on a NCSJ delegation to commemorations marking the 65th anniversary of the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar in Kiev, Ukraine.

Babi Yar was a seminal event in the Holocaust. Over two days, Sept. 27-28, 1941, the Nazis, with the help of Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,371 Jews in a ravine on the outskirts of the city. The victims, including thousands of children, were led to the ravine 10 at a time, beaten for sport, stripped naked, and raked by machine gun fire so that they fell one on top of another. A member of our delegation said that between 10-15 percent of the victims actually died from being suffocated by the crushing force of the dead bodies heaped above them.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel and a Holocaust survivor himself who recited prayers at the commemoration, said that Babi Yar’s significance rests in the fact that it was Hitler’s test case for his Final Solution. When the world did not react to Babi Yar, a green light was given to the Nazis that they could go forward with the mass extermination of the Jewish people with the knowledge that no one would lift a finger to stop them.

Under Soviet occupation, there was no mention of Jewish genocide at Babi Yar. The program last month was sponsored and publicized by the Ukrainian government in partnership with the World Holocaust Forum, a foundation financed by prominent Russian Jewish philanthropist Moshe Kantor. Billboards and signs highlighting the commemoration were everywhere. Our four-person delegation met with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, whose father was a survivor of Auschwitz as a Red Army POW. Also attending were the prime minister and other senior government officials.

Yet for all the publicity surrounding the Babi Yar memorial, we still saw ample evidence of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Anti-Semitic literature was being sold in Independence Square in Kiev, the symbolic center of the Orange Revolution; a pro-Nazi group handed out anti-Semitic fliers at the main Babi Yar event; a swastika graffito could be seen as we entered the walkway to the Jewish Babi Yar memorial. When we met with government officials, the conversation frequently turned to MAUP, the leading private university in Ukraine that bestowed an honorary degree on David Duke in September 2005. The ceremony at the Jewish memorial at the ravine was not attended by senior Ukrainian government officials, who chose instead to come to the Soviet monument in a park nearby. One senior Israeli official attributed this to “internal political realities.”

We went to Babi Yar to commemorate and honor the memory of those massacred 65 years ago. There are concrete signs that Ukraine is making progress in addressing its Jewish past, but much more needs to be done.

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JTA: Global Jewish News - 09.28.2006

Commemoration of wartime killings aimed at teaching young Ukrainians

By Vladimir Matveyev

KIEV, Ukraine (JTA) — Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev, symbolizes one of the worst massacres to take place during World War II. 

But some young Ukrainians have never heard about the tragedy. 

"I know nothing about that ravine. Probably some people were killed there but I'm not sure who, by whom and when," said Anna, 21, when asked this week near the site where some 33,000 were killed between Sept. 29-30, 1941 -- and an estimated 100,000 were shot and their bodies burnt during the 1941-1943 Nazi occupation of Ukraine. 

This week's high-profile commemoration in Kiev, marking the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy, was aimed at educating young Ukrainians like Anna. 

At the invitation of Ukrainian President Viktor Yuschenko, international leaders and Jewish officials and activists from 41 countries attended Tuesday and Wednesday's events, which included an exhibition, a memorial ceremony at the site and a conference titled "Let My People Live." 

At these events, Yuschenko was joined by Israeli President Moshe Katsav and his Croatian and Montenegrin counterparts, as well as rabbis and Christian clerics, senior government delegations from Europe and North America, and members of the Ukrainian political elite. 

Most speakers at the ceremony and the conference spoke about how to turn the memory of Babi Yar into an educational lesson. 

"The Holocaust and Babi Yar killings wounded our nations. Babi Yar should be that injection preventing aggressive bloody xenophobia," Yuschenko said Tuesday at the opening ceremony of the exhibition. 

And speaking at the conference on Wednesday he added: "I clearly and straightforwardly promise that there will never be ethnic intolerance and religious hatred in Ukraine. Like all Ukrainians, I refuse to accept and tolerate the slightest manifestation of xenophobia and anti-Semitism." 

Moshe Katsav also said people must never forget the Holocaust. 

"We must pass on the memory of the Holocaust to the young for the sake of posterity and to preserve kindness and human values," said Katsav. 

On Wednesday, Yuschenko, joined by Ukrainian officials and the leaders of foreign delegations, placed candles at the memorial. This was followed by prayers conducted by Christian clerics and Jewish rabbis. 

Hundreds of mourners -- many of them Jews from around the world -- watched, some holding red and white carnations. Others carried small stones, which Jews traditionally leave at gravesites. 

This week's events in Kiev are the brainchild of Russian Jewish leader and business magnate Vyacheslav "Moshe" Kantor. 

Kantor said the idea came to him a few years ago when on a visit to Kiev he noticed young boys playing soccer near the site of the Babi Yar massacre. 

"Most people today simply don't know what happened there," said Kantor, who is the founder of the World Holocaust Forum, the president of the Russian Jewish Congress and the chairman of the Board of Governors of the European Jewish Congress. 

Kantor and other organizers are hoping the widely covered events will help to overcome that ignorance, which is a legacy of the Soviet era, when any references to the specific Jewish tragedy of the Holocaust were avoided. 

In the years since Ukrainian independence in 1991, no major government-sponsored events have ever taken place at Babi Yar -- with the exception of a few state visits to Kiev by Israeli and U.S. leaders. 

Even the main events this week took place at a monument to all of Babi Yar's victims and not near the Jewish one -- a 10-foot menorah that Jewish groups erected at Babi Yar in 1991. 

Some Ukrainian officials who attended the ceremony said tributes to victims of Babi Yar should take place regularly to educate Ukrainians, especially the younger generation. 

"We must regularly commemorate the Babi Yar victims because people must remember this tragedy," Alexander Moroz, the speaker of the Ukrainian Parliament, told JTA "This is a grave for the victims of different nationalities, but only Jews were killed only because they were Jews." 

Thousands of Soviet prisoners of war, members of the Ukrainian national resistance movement, Communists, gypsies and mentally disabled persons were also killed at Babi Yar. 

Others said it was hard for Ukrainians to remember the killings apart from another catastrophe for Ukraine, a Soviet-induced famine, known as the Holodomor, that took millions of lives in 1932-1933. 

Babi Yar "is our tribute to the tragedy suffered by people in Ukraine. I personally do not separate the Holocaust" from the famine. "It doesn't matter how many people were killed because even one man is important for us," Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine's minister of interior affairs, told JTA. 

Responding to the concern that after independence Ukraine failed to remember and teach about the tragedy, Yuschenko announced a decision to turn the area into a state historical and cultural reserve. 

Some Jewish and non-Jewish activists have long pressed for the designation. 

"Babi Yar will get the status of a reserve and a museum to the Babi Yar victims will be build there," Yuschenko told JTA. "At the same time, a memorial to the Holodomor victims will be built at another place in Kiev." 

Four years ago, a protest staged by a group of Jewish and non-Jewish activists led the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee to scrap its plan for a Jewish community center that was to be built near Babi Yar with funds raised with North American federations. 

Those who objected to that plan have this year staged another protest campaign against a plan by a Ukrainian business magnate and Jewish leader, Vadim Rabinovich, to build a museum, a synagogue and a yeshiva at Babi Yar. 

That group, known as the Babi Yar Public Committee, believes that perpetuating the memory of the victims should become a government concern and not a private or sectarian initiative that may undermine the importance of the tragedy for the entire nation. 

"If Ukrainians are the united nation, they must have a common memory and a common memorial," said Vitaly Nakhmanovich, secretary of the Babi Yar Public Committee. 

Tatiana Zelenskaya, 24 agrees: 

"Babi Yar is our one common pain," she said. "This is a symbol of the tragedy of the whole Ukrainian people: Ukrainians, Jews, Russians and others." 

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JTA: Global Jewish News - 09.27.2006

Babi Yar massacre marked

(JTA) — Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko opened an exhibition in Kiev commemorating the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. 

Tuesday’s opening launched two days of events commemorating the estimated 33,000 Jews killed along the ravine’s edge on Sept. 29-30, 1941. “Time can heal wounds, but it should not erase them from our memories,” Yushchenko said at the opening of the exhibition at Kiev’s Ukranian House. 

He added that remembering the wartime tragedy was the only way to ensure that it never happens again. Yushchenko and his Israeli counterpart, Moshe Katsav, were joined at the ceremony by the presidents of Croatia and Montenegro, as well as government delegations from several countries, Ukrainian officials, rabbis and representatives of local and international Jewish groups. 

The commemorative events involving some 1,000 guests from 41 countries continued Wednesday with a ceremony at the ravine, followed by an international conference. 

The events were organized by the Ukrainian government, the World Holocaust Forum, the Babi Yar Foundation and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. 

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Agence France Presse - 09.26.2006

Ukraine prepares to remember Babi Yar

President Katsav will attend commemoration of anniversary of a massacre at Babi Yar, where Nazis killed 34,000 Jews in two days

(AFP) - Ukraine will commemorate Wednesday the anniversary of a massacre at Babi Yar, a grassy ravine in Kiev where Nazi forces killed 34,000 Jews in two days 65 years ago. 

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, whose father was imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII, will host Israeli President Moshe Katsav, as well as his Croatian and Montenegrin counterparts. 

Thirty foreign delegations, including from Moscow and Washington, are expected to attend the event and an exhibition about the tragedy that is set to open on Tuesday. 

The commemoration ceremonies are to start by the monument to the memory of the victims of the Babi Yar (Woman's Ravine) massacres on Wednesday - to be followed later in the day by an international forum entitled "Let My People Go." 

The forum on xenophobia and anti-Semitism is being organized jointly by Ukrainian authorities, the World Holocaust Forum and the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial. 

"The Holocaust didn't come out of nowhere, it formed gradually. It's only by examining closely the microbes called anti-Semitism that we can understand where they come from," said Moshe Kantor of the European Jewish Congress. 

Brutal execution

The massacres at Babi Yar were on a scale that defies comprehension. 

Nearly 34,000 Jews, many of them elderly, women and children, were forced to gather at Babi Yar by German troops just days after the Nazi invasion. They were shot along the ravine's edge on September 29 and 30, 1941. 

Some 800,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in the war. Around 180,000 Jews live today in Ukraine. 

The ravine continued to be used for executions and up to 60,000 more people - Jews, resistance fighters and Soviet prisoners of war - were killed there until 1943. 

Before retreating from the advancing Red Army in 1943, Nazi troops exhumed and burned the corpses at Babi Yar in a last-ditch bid to hide the atrocities committed there. 

But the secrets of Babi Yar became part of the accusations against senior Nazi officials at the Nuremberg trials and a monument was erected in Soviet times to the memory of the victims. 

Soviet authorities, however, sought to play down the sensitive Jewish component of the history of Babi Yar. Anniversary gatherings were banned at the site and there was an attempt to build a stadium there in the 1960s. 

In 1991, the Jewish community erected a menorah-shaped sculpture nearby.

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forUM - 09.25.2006

Ukraine launches systemic researches of tragedy in Babiy Yar

Moscow, July 26 (forUM) - About one thousand foreign guests from 41 countries, including four Presidents, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, Israeli President Moshe Katsav, Croatian President Stjepan Mesic and Montenegrin President Filip Vujanovic, will take part in the International Forum "Let My People Live!" and events, timed to the 65th anniversary of the tragedy in Babiy Yar. 

As presidential adviser for humanitarian affairs Markian Lubkivskyi told a Monday news briefing, a working group would be shortly formed in Ukraine of famous historians, politologists, sociologists to study the tragedy of Babiy Yar from the aspect of anti-Semitism and xenophobia. It will be not only implementation of relevant instructions by the President, but will also allow contributing to strengthening interethnic peace and concord in Ukraine. 

As Lubkivskyi added, under the President's instruction a state historical - cultural reserve "Babiy Yar" would be created in Kyiv, Cabinet's press office reported. 

The Ukrainian initiative is a unique one, as the tragedy of Babiy Yar, as the Jewish topic in general, were prohibited and concealed in the totalitarian Soviet Union, he noted. However, these topics have practically not been studied in independent Ukraine. 

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Israel News Agency - 09.21.2006

International Holocaust Memorial for Nazi Babi Yar Ukraine Massacre 

By Jeremy Wimpfheimer and Daniel Epstein

Kiev - For two days in late September, a quiet ravine deep within the forests outside of Kiev, Ukraine, will become the site of an international memorial event for one of the bloodiest massacres of the Nazi Holocaust. 

Called Babi Yar, the site was witness to the murder of more than 33,000 Jews over the course of a five day period in the fall of 1941. While the event is well documented by Holocaust historians and remembered by the families of its victims, the Babi Yar massacre has become part of the "hidden Holocaust," according to Moshe Kantor, organizer of the memorial ceremonies that will include the participation of dignitaries from more than 40 nations.

"Most people today simply do not know what happened there," says Kantor, President of the Russian Jewish Congress and Chairman of the Board of Governors of the European Jewish Congress. "Most troubling is the fact that much of the world was tolerant of the Nazi crimes that took place at Babi Yar and that tragic permissiveness allowed more than 6,000 similar slaughters to take place over the coming years - and all this before the ‘official’ death camps were even built."

More than 40 nations, including Russia, the US and Israel have confirmed the attendance of high level government officials. Ukrainian President Viktor Yushenko will be joined by Heads of State from Croatia, Bosnia and Slovenia. "This is a moment of truth for governments to determine what is their official position when it comes to issues of anti-Semitism and xenophobia," says Kantor.

Kantor founded and leads the World Holocaust Forum (www.worldholocaustforum.org), which is coordinating the memorial, an organization dedicated to preserving the memory of the Holocaust and educating the world about its important lessons for all humanity. He believes the world today faces a critical danger if it forgets the dangers posed by hatred. 

In a rare interview which, ironically, took place five years virtually to the minute after the Twin Towers were brought down during the September 11th 9/11 terror attacks in North America, World Holocaust Forum Chairman Viatcheslav (Moshe) Kantor, warned sharply about the dangers of intolerance. 

"Anti-Semitism and xenophobia come in cycles. Some periods have more, some have less," commented Kantor from Geneva. "But the world was absolutely tolerant of the events at Babi Yar, and this single event became a defining moment in the way the Nazi Holocaust progressed from that point onward. World apathy enabled the Nazis to move forward in their slaughter of six million European Jews."

Kantor points to disturbing expressions of hatred hatred directed toward Jews in many cities around the world. These range from recent acts of violence against Jews in Russia to the call by Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an Iran conference to deny the Holocaust. Kantor says, "Anti-Semitism on the social level is growing around the globe. Now more than ever, the symbolism and warning of Babi Yar must ring loudly, and we are ensuring that the terrible events of the past are a lesson to modern society about the frightening dangers of intolerance." 

Kantor commented that "President Yushchenko has a full understanding of the World Holocaust Forum’s goals and motivations, why we are having this commemoration ceremony in Kiev and what the final result should be.” “Russia once again is facing a moment of truth," commented Kantor, referencing Russia’s decision to send a senior delegation to the events. "President Putin said in his speech at the 60th anniversary commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz that he was ashamed of the anti-Semitism and xenophobia that had surfaced in Russia. Once a country declares that it should take meaningful lessons away from the Holocaust, its people can start to improve their attitude towards racial intolerance."

According to event organizers, two days of commemorations on Sept. 26th and 27th, will include a series of Holocaust exhibits, lectures and concerts to be highlighted by a somber march of participants from central Kiev to the Babi Yar site, retracing the steps of the thousands of Jews who walked a similar path to their deaths 65 years ago. It will be an emotionally charged walk on Wednesday afternoon from central Kiev to the Babi Yar killing fields.

Focused on developing original educational initiatives to better inform people about the realities of the Holocaust, the World Holocaust Forum has created a European Holocaust Education program that will train teachers to relate to Nazi crimes against the Jews to better foster tolerance between religions and nationalities. 

Over the years, criticism has been leveled at several Eastern European governments as well as Russia that these countries are not doing enough to actively combat anti-Semitism. Ukraine was one of the countries mentioned. In July, the menorah-shaped Holocaust memorial at Babi Yar, erected 15 years ago by the Jewish community, was badly vandalized.

"Currently, Babi Yar is a place where kids play soccer. The games needs to stop," observed Kantor.

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Associated Press - 09.18.2006

Kyiv Post

Hundreds commemorate victims of Nazi massacres in Ukraine

KYIV (AP) - About 300 people paid tribute Monday to the victims of a Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews at the Babi Yar ravine ahead of the 65th anniversary of the tragedy.

Survivors, Ukrainian and Israeli officials and soldiers bowed their heads during a moment of silence and laid flowers at a monument to the dead near central Kyiv, near the ravine where the killings took place.

The massacre began in late September 1941 when Nazi forces occupying Kyiv marched Jews to the brink of the steep Babi Yar ravine and shot them. The massacre lasted days and more than 33,700 Ukrainian Jews were killed.

The Babi Yar massacre followed weeks of grenade attacks against German troops staged by Soviet resistance groups. Nazis accused Jews of carrying out the attacks.

Altogether, Nazis executed more than 100,000 people at Babi Yar, including thousands of Red Army prisoners of war and resistance fighters.

"I came here to honor the thousands of Jews executed and tortured to death in Ukraine," said 73-year-old Jewish retiree Roman Levith. "It is painful for me to talk about it. I am a child of the Holocaust".

Ukraine is home to 100,000 Jews, who have called on the government to do more to discourage any manifestations of anti-Semitism in the country.

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