Ukraine: Zelensky marks 85 years since Babyn Yar massacre alongside victims’ families
“We must remember the terrible things that happened here many years ago, and now they are happening again, this time at the hands of the Russians.”
Ukrainian President Zelensky attended a ceremony at Babyn Yar on Tuesday to remember the Jews murdered there 85 years ago. Among the mourners was Rebbetzin Devorah Leah Levenhartz, a Chabad emissary in Kyiv whose great-grandmother was killed at the site.
On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazi German forces and their auxiliaries murdered 33,771 Jews at Babyn Yar, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Thousands of others were killed there during the occupation.
The ceremony took place as Kyiv faced continuing Russian missile and drone attacks. Zelensky drew a connection between remembrance and the present war, saying, according to an account of the event: “We must remember the terrible things that happened here many years ago, and now they are happening again, this time at the hands of the Russians.” Recent strikes on the capital have killed civilians and damaged buildings.
Representatives of about 50 countries attended, along with Ukrainian rabbis and Jewish community leaders. Prayers for the victims included Psalms and the Kaddish.
For Levenhartz, the anniversary was personal. Her great-grandmother, Sonia Posner, was murdered at Babyn Yar. Levenhartz said her family had recently found testimony at Yad Vashem identifying Posner and learned that she had lived near a place where Levenhartz and her husband, Rabbi Motti Levenhartz, later lived while serving Kyiv’s Jewish community.
“We were unable to find a photograph of her,” Levenhartz said. She described the discovery of her great-grandmother’s details as “almost impossible to comprehend.”
The ceremony also came days after a Russian drone strike in Kyiv killed Israeli child Daniel Umansky. According to the account of the event, Zelensky received an update from the Federation of Jewish Communities of Ukraine on arrangements to bring the child’s body to Israel for burial.
Levenhartz said filling Kyiv’s synagogues and sustaining Jewish life were, for her, the most meaningful ways to honor those murdered at Babyn Yar.