The Babyn Yar Commemorative Project

What You Need To Know:

✅ “The goal is this area will become an acropolis – a site of memory. The people who are visiting will remember and recognize what happened there;”
✅ 75 years later, Babyn Yar is considered a recreational area, with little order to it.
✅ To mark the 75th anniversary of the tragedy, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter together with the World Jewish Congress organized a commemorative project in Kyiv;
✅ “If you have the recognition of what happened and you can honor that community that is no longer with us and remember, that is a really important process.”

“The goal is this area will become an acropolis – a site of memory. The people who are visiting will remember and recognize what happened there,” says Natalia Feduschak, Communications Officer at the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter. The area she refers to is Babyn Yar, the site of the two-day massacre where 34,000 Kyivan Jews lost their lives on September 28-29, 1941. 75 years later, the ravine in Kyiv is considered a recreational area, with little order to it. “The further we get from these events, the less people know and the less they remember.”

To mark the 75th anniversary of the tragedy, the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter together with the World Jewish Congress organized a commemorative project in Kyiv. Activities include a public symposium, and international landscape competition, a youth conference, and a concert. “If you have the recognition of what happened and you can honor that community that is no longer with us and remember, that is a really important process,” says Feduschak.

The Ukrainian government has committed $1 million, and there is growing recognition of the importance of acknowledging Babyn Yar, says Feduschak. In the last decade, there has been a greater awareness of what happened to Ukraine’s Jewish population. “We have the past, we have the honoring of the past and were also looking towards the future.”

Hromadske's Josh Kovensky spoke to Natalia Feduschak, Communications Officer at the Ukrainian-Jewish Encounter on September 24th, 2016 in Kyiv.