Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

October 10, 2016

A Ukrainian Clergyman Reflects on Babi Yar

The Nazis destroyed Jews physically, and the Communists obliterated their memory.

September 29 and 30 marked the 75th anniversary of the massacres of Babi Yar, during which the Nazis, with help from local auxiliaries, slaughtered the entire Jewish population of Kiev, numbering some 33,000 souls. Subsequently, German forces used the site to murder Jews from elsewhere, Ukrainian nationalist and Communist leaders, Soviet prisoners of war, and Roma. At a ceremony commemorating the massacres, the Ukrainian bishop Borys Gudziak addressed the Ukrainian parliament on the need to prevent hatred from ever again becoming “a guiding spirit for politics”:

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