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The Babi Yar Massacre and Problems with Commemoration of the Holocaust in Modern Ukraine

Mon, December 17, 10:30am to 12:00pm, Seaport Hotel & World Trade Center, Harborview 1 Ballroom

Abstract

The Babi Yar Ravine in Kiev, as one of the largest Holocaust sites in the Soviet Union, became a symbol of the Holocaust. Under communism the Soviet authorities suppressed public attempts to commemorate the Holocaust in Kyiv. Many years after the Babi Yar massacre they did not allow any monuments to be built there. After the collapse of communism, the ban on the Holocaust topic was lifted in independent Ukraine and thirty monuments were erected in Babi Yar.

However sharp debates continue until the present in Ukraine about how the Babi Yar tragedy should be remembered and commemorated. Some refuse to recognize Babi Yar as a Holocaust site even though the vast majority of the Nazi victims at Babi Yar were Jews. There is opposition from Ukrainian nationalist circles to the creation of a Holocaust museum in Babi Yar. As a founding member of the Scientific Council of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center (BYHMC) in Kyiv, Ukraine, I participated last summer in public debates about the future museum in Babi Yar and wrote part of the historical narrative for the museum.

Ukrainian nationalists refuse to recognize Babi Yar as a Holocaust site, because this may highlight the collaboration of the Organization of the Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) with the Nazis during the Holocaust. When the President of Israel Reuven Rivlin mentioned in his speech to the Ukrainian Parliament on 27 September 2016 the well-documented participation of members of the OUN in the Holocaust of Jews in Ukraine, there was a political uproar. The deputies of various fractions of the Ukrainian Parliament insisted that they were insulted by Rivlin’s speech and demanded that the President of Israel apologize because he “spit on the soul of the Ukrainian people” and he “mocked Ukraine’s national heroes.”

The public debates about Babi Yar show that Ukrainian society is not yet ready for an objective discussion of the collaboration and participation of Ukrainian nationalists in the Holocaust. Some Ukrainian historians and public figures are attempting to revised history by diminishing the meaning of Babi Yar as a symbol of the Holocaust and represent it instead as a place of universal suffering.

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