Video: Babyn Yar Memorial: Is Consensus Possible? Panel discussion
A transcript of this discussion is available here.
On 7 July 2020, the Ukrainian Institute London, in cooperation with the Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, hosted a panel discussion on the current debate in Ukraine about a privately-funded project launched in 2016, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacres, to build a major Holocaust memorial, museum, research, and educational center at Babyn Yar. It is at Babyn Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kyiv, that nearly 34,000 Kyiv Jews were massacred on 29-30 September 1941, the largest single German shooting massacre during World War II. Babyn Yar has become a central symbol of the Holocaust, in particular, of what has come to be called the “Holocaust by Bullets”—the mass shootings of Jews in Eastern Europe that began before the better known, bureaucratically processed death camps, such as Auschwitz. Thousands of POWs, Roma/Sinti people and other groups also were murdered at Babyn Yar during the German occupation.
Participants representing differing points of views on the panel were:
Dr. Karel Berkhoff, Senior Researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, former chief historian and chair of the Scientific Council at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre (BYHMC);
Yaakov Dov Bleich, Chief Rabbi of Ukraine and member of the Supervisory Board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre (BYHMC);
Yana Barinova, former Chief Operation Officer at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Centre (BYHMC), advisor for Humanities and Culture for Vitali Klitschko, the Mayor of Kyiv;
Anton Drobovych, Director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory;
Ruslan Kavatsiuk, Deputy BYHMC CEO for Science and Education;
The event was moderated by Marina Pesenti, Director of the Ukrainian Institute London.
