Alexander Levin, president of the World Forum for Russian-Speaking Jews and head of the Jewish community in Kiev, on Sunday presented a model of the new memorial site to be built on the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev, where nearly 50,000 Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
Levin was speaking at a gala event to mark a Jewish Agency gathering in Kiev. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Leonid Kozhara, Israeli Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver and Jewish Agency Chairman Natan Sharansky were in attendance.
According to Levin, the purpose of the new memorial site is to allow visitors from around the world to connect to the horror of 70 years ago in an emotional and experiential way. The site will display remnants of victims' clothes and personal belongings, documents from Nazi archives, a 3-D movie, and interviews with survivors. Another element of the site will be a Jewish synagogue that will symbolize Jewish revival in a place where the Nazis tried to eliminate every Jewish trace.
Construction at the site will begin in coming months and is expected to take two and a half years. The project will be funded by Alexander Levin and Vadim Rabinovich, another Ukrainian Jewish philanthropist. Keren Hayesod (the United Israel Appeal) is also expected to raise funds for the memorial center.
Babi Yar is a ravine northwest of Kiev, where the Nazis murdered about 100,000 people, almost half of them Jews, starting on Sept. 29, 1941. Nearly 34,000 Jews were massacred at Babi Yar between Sept. 29 and 30 in what has been described as the largest mass murder of the Holocaust in such a short span of time. Over the following year, 15,000 more Jews who were caught in the city and its environs were brought to Babi Yar and killed.
In his speech, Levin called on all European heads of state, and especially the Ukrainian president, to serve on the board of directors of the new memorial.
"This was not just a tragedy of the Jewish people, but a European and worldwide tragedy, and the site will commemorate not just the tragedy of the Jewish people but the tragedy of other nations that were cruelly murdered by the Nazis on Ukrainian soil," he said.
In a 2012 essay in the Wilson Quarterly, Margaret Paxson describes the site, which has suffered from many years of neglect. The ravine has been leveled and turned into a public park, which she said was strewn with trash.
"Not long ago, on a silver-gray December day, I found myself in what is now the expansive public park called Babi Yar. There were rows of leafless trees along an all e, pathways that led to forest, others to open spaces. Women walked by with prams. Evidently, the park had been used for carousing: Refuse was everywhere. Here and there stood official memorials, garish and unsolemn, for those killed at Babi Yar -- 'To the children,' 'To the citizens of Kiev.'
"One, a monument to Soviet citizens and POWs, had cast in bronze horror-images of people falling and dying. There were also makeshift shrines: a cross with a plastic bouquet of roses, an unadorned wooden cross. A crow flew by. For decades, Soviet authorities suppressed mention of the particular crimes against Jews; the main memorial that does focus on Jewish victims -- a large metal menorah constructed by Jewish groups in 1991 -- was littered with frozen sputum. As I stood near the menorah, the silence of the place was shattered by cacophonous barking: A group of dogs encircled another dog, and attacked it."
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