Click/register to join us on September 29, 2025 at 3 p.m. for
Antisemitism: From Babi Yar to Our Backyards
A joint JHSSWF and JRCA presentarion at Nina Iser Jewish Cultural Center.
On September 29 and September 30 in 1941 in Nazi-occupied Kiev in the ravine on the outskirts of the then city, 33,771 women, children and men were brutally slaughtered by bullets.
Why? For just being Jews.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, which fell on October 1 that year.
By whom? Mostly, by Western Ukrainian Jews, who either volunteered of were drafted, and were, of course, supervised by their Nazi commandos.
The largest massacre of Jews to-date, the event went largely unnoticed and unprotested by the then existing traditional media of the world, despite extreme humanitarian crisis it was, deliberate brutality of the execution, which included tossing babies into the ravine and burying them alive, and chasing survivors, especially children, who managed to crawl out, as if it was sport.
A concentration and extermination camp was built there after, and over 100,000 lives, Jewish and non-Jewish, were taken on its premises until liberation of Kiev in 1944 by the Soviet Army.
Soviet Union, pretty much, denied both Nazi and collaborators’ atrocities targeting Jews. Babi Yar Monument was erected in 1976. Although depicting some civilians, its manufacture and installation took part during a vicious anti-Israel campaign by the Soviets and Jews who attended risked arrests and deportation to Siberia.