My guide
for this difficult tour was Idan Peysachovich, a Siberian Jew who made
aliyah in 1992 and now works for the Jewish Agency. Locally, the primary
mission of the Jewish Agency is to strengthen both Jewish identity and build
connectivity to Israel. Within minutes of meeting him, I felt an immediate bond
with Idan, who informed me that the work he does is more than a job but
entirely bound up in his personal life. He comes to his work on behalf of the
Jewish Agency based on the journey he has undertaken as well as a sobering
acknowledgement of the history of Jews in his native region.
As we
walked towards Babi Yar, Idan told me that he is constantly engaged in the task
of looking forward and backwards… at once. The forward glance he
casts is towards the hopeful future he is building in Israel with his young
family and two children who have rock solid Jewish identities. But he is
compelled to look backwards also and contemplate the black pages of the Jewish
experience in Kiev.
While
Jews have been in Kiev since before the 11th century, there has
always been an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in this part of the world, Idan
told me. Russian princes would go through towns and let go of their pent-up
feeling, looting villages and causing pogroms. These early pogroms culminated
in the later pogroms of the 19th and 20th centuries. The
pogroms in Odessa were especially fierce.
This was
Idan’s way of contextualizing Babi
Yar, his way of trying to explain the horror, the inhumanity; the sheer lunacy
that led local Ukrainians to massacre their neighbors with their Nazi invaders
over the course of three winter days more than seventy years ago.
Approaching
the site, Idan wanted to make sure that I, an American Jew, born into the
sanity and safety of the second half of the 20th Century, might come
to understand where anti- Semitism and hatred can go when unchecked, where
people can go when they lose their moral compass and people lose their
bearings.
What
struck me about Babi Yar is that it is a park, a ravine, in the middle of the
city. That surprised me. Babi Yar is a park. It struck me that it could be
Central Park. In the days before the massacre, Jews were told to show up with
their belongings and papers and they did. They showed up, thinking they would
get on a train to another city or be taken to a ship to Palestine or elsewhere.
They had
no idea what awaited them.
Babi Yar – where tens of thousands of Jewish men, women and children
were gunned down -- is a park. There’s an office building to one
side. There are families strolling through it. I took a picture of a man sun
bathing. The dissonance of past and presence overwhelmed me.
Idan told
me that the doomed Jews encountered three rings of processing when they
entered. First there were Ukrainians. Then Ukrainians and German soldiers,
regular soldiers with German Shepherds and then, there were the SS
Einsatzgruppen.
It was
this last group that did the actual shootings into the ravine. Over three days,
34,000 Jews were shot and then thrown into the ravine. Afterwards, the Germans
made the townspeople come and burn the bodies to destroy the evidence and
protect against disease.
Here’s the thing. In the summer of 2013, Babi Yar seems so
normal. I cannot get my head around it. Clearly, at the time of the mass murder
of the Jews, the local people knew what was going on. They heard the shooting
and the screaming even through the Germans played classical music very loudly
and they helped, either in turning in families or in serving as guards or in
simply turning a blind eye and allowing their neighbors to be butchered.
Today,
there is not much to see in Babi Yar, but there is much to feel and to imagine:
the terror of the victims; the cries and pleading and disbelief and desperate
hope for a last-minute miracle; the horror of watching loved ones killed before
your own eyes; the powerlessness of parents to save their children.
So, what
remains of Babi Yar today? There’s a ravine. There’s a menorah and a platform where you can have a memorial ceremony,
as we did. And there are the ghosts of the victims and their descendants, the
millions of unborn Jews whose lives, as well, were taken by the Nazis.
Yet, it
was very moving to be at Babi Yar with the Jewish Agency because thanks to
their efforts, it is possible to stand at the very foot of the ravine and look
forward with hope about Jewish life in Ukraine and the former Soviet Union.
At the
beautiful ceremony I attended, members of the IDF choir sang, Natan Sharansky
and Israel’s Minister of Housing spoke,
and one of the rabbis of the many local, newly-reinvigorated synagogues led the
el maley rachamim prayer and kaddish.
A local
young man also recited the words of a four-year-old survivor of Babi Yar whose
entire family was betrayed by their nanny while he was inexplicably saved.
Among the
songs performed by the IDF choir was Hatikvah.
Awash in
so many dark feelings – sorrow, anger, fear of the
modern-day anti-Semites now possessed with weapons of mass destruction – I tried to retain a sense of hopefulness.
What I
found myself struggling with at Babi Yar was the tension between my fear of
resurgent anti-Semitism (as it gets expressed in countries like Iran who call
for Israel’s annihilation) and a real
deep desire to want to believe – as Anne Frank did -- that
deep down, people are good and moral.
I want to
believe that through building relationships we can build a better, more just
society yet when one goes to a place like Babi Yar, this belief appears naïve. The troubling truth I know is that as Jews, we need to
be vigilant.
Leaving
Babi Yar we went to the community center of the Jewish Agency and met spirited
young people – from their teens to their 30’s – who were part of five
different programs that the Jewish Agency sponsors here and in Ukraine. We
visited a summer camp for 10-14 year olds and an ulpan for anyone who wants to
learn Hebrew.
As I
spoke with the proud and enthusiastic young people I met, that elusive sense of
hope began to assert itself. Here, Jewish identity burns strongly. It gets
expressed through so many ways -- through Taglit/Birthright trips for
college-age and young adults; through Masa/through 10-month internship programs
and so many other means.
Here,
there is a burgeoning Jewish community made up of many communities of many
denominations – Reform, Masorti, Chabad,
Haredi. Here, there are synagogues and minyanim and prayer services and
celebrations: brises, bar mitzvahs and weddings.
It was so
uplifting to hear stories of how young Ukrainian Jews – 70-plus years after Babi Yar – are discovering their Jewish identity and wanting to find
out more. The summer camps of the Jewish Agency really work. A staggering 6,000
young people attended summer camps this summer through Jewish Agency. Through
this experience, they come in contact with their Jewish heritage and were
inspired.
And I was
inspired to find this outpost of Jewish spiritual reawakening in a place that
tried to annihilate Jewish life. No one could have foreseen a flourishing
Jewish community after Babi Yar and yet when the Jewish Agency opened their
first office in Kiev in 1990, they were betting on hope instead of fear.
My trip
to Kiev led me to Israel where I joined hundreds of my colleagues at the
Rabbinical Assembly convention yesterday. One person we met with was Yuli
Edelstein; once a Soviet Refusnik; now Speaker of the Knesset. This represents the miracle of the Jewish
people; the miracle of Israel. This is
the definition of hatikvah.
It is now
erev Shabbat in Jerusalem, the most beautiful and tranquil moment of the week
in the most beautiful city in the world. It has been an eventful and emotional
week. As I look out over the quiet city, I think back to my visit to Babi Yar
and all the people whom I met through the Jewish Agency.
I hear
Idan’s voice and it mingles with
the memory of the IDF Choir singing Hatikva at the site of that terrible
tragedy of our people.
Od lo avda tikvatenu.
We have
not lost our hope.
We will
never lose our hope.
Shabbat
Shalom from Jerusalem.
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