(AP) – Hundreds of Jews lit candles and prayed Oct. 9 near the Babi Yar ravine where the Nazis killed tens of thousands of Ukrainian Jews during World War II, and Jewish leaders expressed concern over recent anti-Semitic acts in the former Soviet republic.
The commemoration at the edge of the ravine followed 10 days after an official ceremony marking 64 years since the massacre, which began on Sept. 29, 1941, when Nazi forces occupying Kyiv marched local Jews to the brink of the ravine and shot them.
“The official commemoration looks like a political rally, so we Jews alone gather here separately for years,” said Ukraine’s chief rabbi, Yakov Blaikh, standing near a modest sculpture of a menorah near the edge of the ravine – a mile from the huge Soviet-era monument to Babi Yar victims that is the site of annual official ceremonies.
Leaning against a crutch on the brink of the ravine, Leya Osadcha, 79, lit candles in memory of 16 relatives who died here. She said she watched from behind some trees as the Nazis gunned their victims down.
“My mother sent me, then a 15-year old girl, to a nearby village to trade clothes for some food. When I came back, our neighbors told me Nazi forces occupying Kyiv ordered people to gather and bring their warm clothes and valuables – as if they were to be deported,” Osadcha said. “I ran to catch up with my family but I was too late. So I survived.”
Debora Averbukh, 85, said she had been a student at the time and had been evacuated to Tashkent, far to the east in Soviet Central Asia. She received a letter from a Kyiv neighbor saying that her parents and aunt had been killed.
It was the most dreadful, painful day in my life,” Averbukh said.
More than 33,700 Jews were killed over just a few days at Babi Yar, and within months the toll is believed to have reached more than 100,000, including thousands of Red Army prisoners of war and resistance fighters.
Decades later, Blaikh criticized today’s Ukrainian authorities for doing too little to combat anti-Semitism.
“I won’t keep silence, I won’t let people forget, as rabbi, Jew and a man who believes in democracy, freedom of speech and religion,” Blaikh said.
Last month, a rabbi and his son were beaten in Kyiv in an attack police called hooliganism, meaning that they do not consider it to have motivated by anti-Semitism.
During the summer, skinheads in Kyiv severely beat a Jewish student who was taken, in a coma, to a Tel Aviv hospital for brain surgery. Police said that attack was also hooliganism.
Vandalism at Jewish sites occurs often in Ukraine, now home to some 100,000 Jews. Hundreds of thousands have been killed in pogroms over the centuries, and millions died during the Holocaust.
