28 September 2006
Israeli President Katsav visit the
Babi Yar exhibition in Kiev
photo: reuters
Ukrainian and foreign dignitaries have honored the victims of the 1941 Babi Yar massacre by Nazi occupiers. At a ceremony in Kiev on Wednesday led by Ukraine's president Viktor Yushchenko and attended by delegations from 40 countries, including Israel's president Moshe Katsav, hundreds of mourners, many of them Jews who had traveled from around the world, watched, clutching their own offerings of red and white carnations. Moshe Kantor, founder of the World Holocaust Forum, which is organizing the events, said that the world's silence after Babi Yar emboldened the Nazis. "Babi Yar was the turning point," he said. The commemoration was followed by a forum on xenophobia and anti-Semitism. President Yushchenko also opened an exhibition about the massacre, and described the Holocaust as a "deep wound" for all nations. "Time can heal wounds, but it should not erase them from our memories," Yushchenko said.
The Babi Yar massacre began on 29 September 1941, when Nazi forces who had just occupied Ukraine's capital Kiev ordered its Jewish residents to gather at a ravine. Many believed they would be evacuated. But, the Nazis instead began two days of executions, killing an estimated 33,000 Jews and throwing their bodies into a large pit. Over the following two years, the Nazis killed tens of thousands of other people at the site, including Jews, Roma and prisoners of war. Historians believes as many as 100,000 people were murdered. Nazi forces exhumed and burned many of the bodies in 1943 before retreating from Ukraine as the Soviet army approached.
The commemorations come as Ukraine's Jewish community worries about the sale of anti-Semitic books and newspapers in the capital and a series of attacks on Jews near a synagogue last year. Before World War II, about 175,000 of Kiev's 875,000 citizens were Jewish. Today, official figures say there are 103,000 Jews in all of Ukraine, although the Jewish community claims that the number is several times higher.
Read remarks of WJC Secretary General, Stephen E. Herbits at the commemoration
