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On Tuesday afternoon Russian missiles, targeting a Kyiv TV tower that killed 5 civilians, also damaged Ukraine’s Holocaust Memorial site, Babyn Yar.
Babyn Yar (also known as Babi Yar) was the site of one of the largest mass killings during the Holocaust, where according to Nazi records, 33,771 Jewish people were lined up and shot over a two-day period in 1941.
Fortunately, the main parts of the memorial site, including the new synagogue, the menorah and the monument honouring the Soviet citizens and prisoners of war who died are unscathed. However, the museum building caught fire and there was damage across the 140-acre site including several trees that sustained fire damage and were uprooted.
Directly after the attack, Ukrainian President Zelensky, who himself lost relatives at the Babyn Yar massacre, tweeted: “What is the point of saying ‘never again’ for 80 years, if the world stays silent when a bomb drops on the same site of Babyn Yar? At least 5 killed. History repeating”.
At the beginning of the Russian violence, President Putin claimed his goal was the “denazification” of Ukraine, and called its leaders “neo-Nazis”. Dadi Dayan, the head of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, states that the claims are “not based on fact, it distorts and trivialises the Holocaust”. Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid has offered Israel’s help to repair the memorial site, which was opened last October by the Ukrainian, Israeli, and German Presidents.
According to the Chair of Babyn Yar’s advisory board, Natan Sharansky, “it is symbolic that Russian President Putin starts attacking Kyiv by bombing the site of the Babyn Yar”. He told the BBC that time and time again, Soviets had tried to wipe out Babyn Yar’s brutal history, in an effort to suppress any mention of the atrocities committed against Jews, “finally we turned it into a big memorial, and that is once again [its] overshadowed by Russian aggression”. During the Soviet-era, after the end of WW2, they tried to flood the site with mud, in 1960 there were plans to build a sports stadium on the site and then they built a simple obelisk memorial for ‘Soviet victims’ without mentioning Jewish victims.
