Israeli President Herzog will visit Ukraine October 5-7 to mark the 80th anniversary of Babyn Yar massacre, at the invitation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
It will be Herzog’s first state visit of his presidency.
The Israeli president will speak at an official international ceremony marking 80 years since the Babi Yar Massacre and inaugurating the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kiev, alongside President Zelensky and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier.
During his visit, Herzog will also meet President Zelensky and Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, deliver an address before the Verkhovna Rada (the Ukrainian Parliament), and meet representatives of the Ukrainian Jewish community.
“It is imperative to keep speaking about this horrific event and learn its lessons. The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is an important site for the commemoration of this painful memory and for the declaration that we must continue making together: never again,’’ said President Herzog ahead of his visit.
The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is being built in order to immortalize the stories of the 2.5 million Jews of Eastern Europe, including 1.5 million in Ukraine alone, murdered and buried in mass graves near their homes during the Holocaust.
Over the past year, a number of memorials have been erected at the site of the Holocaust-era massacre as part of the establishment of an innovative and expansive museum complex across the whole of the Babi Yar area. The establishment of the new center is being guided by public figures and leaders from around the world, chiefly Natan Sharansky, the chairman of the board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
Babi Yar, known as the “Holocaust of the Bullets”, began on the eve of Yom Kippur on Sept. 29-30, 1941. In just two days, the Nazis murdered nearly all the Jews in a ravine near Kiev: 33,771 people. The killing was carried out by SS troops along with local collaborators.During the German occupation of Ukraine (1941-43), nearly 100,000 victims were murdered and buried at Babi Yar, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jewish, but also included opponents of the regime, the mentally ill and Roma people, making it the largest mass grave in Europe.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky marked the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre by laying flowers at the monument of the victims.
