The people of Ukraine will always be united in seeking to prevent any manifestations of racial or national hatred, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sept. 29 in his public address dedicated to the 78th anniversary of the beginning of the Babyn Yar massacre, committed by German Nazis and local collaborators during the World War Two.
On Sept. 29, 1941, all Jews living in German-occupied Kyiv were ordered by Nazi authorities to gather at the city’s present-time Lukianivska Square, bringing their personal belongings with them. They were then led to the nearby Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) ravine. There, 33,771 Jews were murdered on Sept. 29-30 alone.
The Babyn Yar area became the execution place for as many as up to 150,000 people, including civilian Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Romanis, and Ukrainian nationalists between 1941 and 1943. Only 29 persons are known to have escaped the initial two-day massacre.
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In the present time, the ravine doesn’t exist anymore, and a memorial park commemorating the victims is located near the Babyn Yar’s former location.
“Tragic pages of our history are ought to be remembered not only for the sake of honoring the killed but also for drawing conclusions from the past and not allowing for mistakes in the future,” Zelensky said.
“The memory of the Babyn Yar, the Holocaust, is the warning to all mankind on the fact that an ideology of intolerance and violence can bring us back to the frightening past when the most precious thing — the human life — used to become a bargaining chip in the hands of dictators.”
“In the years of war, when everything around seemed to be breathing cruelty and death, the best features of our people — mercifulness, compassion, and self-sacrificed — got revealed. With great thankfulness, were recall the deeds of ordinary people who were risking their lives to save their fellow countrypeople from inevitable death.”
Rabbis Yaakov Dov Bleich (L) and Moshe Reuven Azman attend the commemoration of the 78th anniversary of the Babyn Yar (Babi Yar) tragedy in Kyiv on Sept. 29, 2019. Between 100,000 and 150,000 people were killed in the Babyn Yar ravine in 1941-1943. (Oleg Petrasiuk)
This year’s commemorations, however, triggered a controversy among the country’s Jewish religious community. During the ceremony, Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich, the head of the Association of Jewish Religious Organizations of Ukraine, criticized President Zelensky for not joining the mourning ceremony in the memorial park in Kyiv. Zelensky himself is a non-practicing Jew, and the first Jewish president of Ukraine.
Nonetheless, Moshe Reuven Azman, the chief Rabbi of Ukraine, dismissed Bleich’s criticism towards Zelensky as “inappropriate.”
“The president is not obliged to take account of where and why he can or cannot visit the given place,” Azman said on his official Facebook page. “The president just several weeks ago participated in an official ceremony in the Babyn Yar together with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The president has just returned from an uneasy journey to the United Nations Assembly General in New York City. In the Rosh Hashanah eve, one must be checking own deeds and words in the departing year while saying only good things about the other people and discussing their achievements.”
