Babi Yar may be the world’s deepest whodunit: Who killed some 34,000 Jews in just 48 hours on September 29 and 30, 1941, in this unexceptional park 15 minutes from downtown Kyiv? And who proceeded to murder a total of 100,000 people in this leafy spot, not only Jews, but Roma, Communists and psychiatric patients,…
(JTA) — Before murdering tens of thousands of Jews at Babi Yar near Kiev, Nazi troops dumped at the killing site dozens of Jewish headstones they had stolen from Jewish cemetery, researchers in Ukraine discovered. “The tombstones were removed from a local Jewish cemetery during the Holocaust and thrown into the same ravines where over…
Nazi forces in the Soviet Union committed the Babi Yar massacre 75 years ago, over two days, on September 28 and 29. But like most of the world’s news media, the Forverts published news of the Babi Yar massacre only in 1943, when Kiev, the neighboring city, was liberated by the Red Army. A feature…
We stand at the edge and watch a family play with a remote-controlled toy car by a playground that’s inside the ravine. A girl tosses a ball in the air as she walks past a monumental menorah and asks her grandmother, “What’s with the celebration?” as she takes note of the flowers and wreaths placed…
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre, widely considered one of the worst atrocities committed during the Holocaust. Between September 29 and September 30, 1941, SS officers murdered 33,771 Jewish civilians by gunfire at Babi Yar, a ravine located in the outskirts of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev. Those who were not…
The role of Holocaust education in a country where almost 1 million Jews were slaughtered is a complicated thing when the country in question is in the throes of shaping a fresh national identity and national memory for itself from very raw emotional material; even more so when it’s locked at the same time in…
This year’s commemoration of the Babi Yar massacre—the Nazis’ mass shooting of more than 33,000 Jews at a ravine in northwest Kiev 75 years ago—comes at a critical time: as Ukraine continues to resist Russia’s military threats and violations of its territorial sovereignty. Russia, in turn, has often justified itself and sought to delegitimize the…
For the third time in recent months, Nazi swastikas were discovered on the Babi Yar memorial monument for Holocaust victims in Kiev. The latest incident was discovered Jan. 30 by employees of the National Historical Memorial Site in Babi Yar, where Nazi troops killed more than 33,000 Jews in 1941. The swastikas were daubed on…
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