Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan is in Kiev attending the official memorial ceremony marking 80 years since the Babi Yar massacre.
He addressed participants of an academic conference, entitled “The Mass Shootings During the Holocaust as a Criminal Process” coinciding with the commemorative event.
Dayan remarked, “We welcome Ukraine’s process in joining the family of democratic nations, a process that must include an uncompromising look and complete acceptance of all the painful facts of the past. It is extremely important to memorialize the Jewish victims of the Nazis. Nevertheless, it is also necessary to recognize and teach about the role of local collaborators in Babi Yar as well as in other places during the Holocaust.”
Yad Vashem has marked the anniversary of the massacre by uploading a new online exhibit featuring photographs of Jews murdered in Babi Yar, which the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre has collected over the years. “This moving exhibit serves as an eternal remembrance and silent testimony to the persecution of the Jewish people, and specifically the Jewish community of Ukraine,” Dayan said. “During the fateful massacre between 29-30 September 1941, 33,771 Jews were brutally murdered, whole families destroyed in matter of hours or days, sometimes four generations, at Babi Yar. In many instances, these images are all that remain to remember their very existence.”