Adam Pechter,
lives in Princeton and is a board member of NCSJ, an advocacy group on behalf of Jews in the former Soviet Union.

Last month I had the opportunity of serving on a NCSJ delegation to commemorations marking the 65th anniversary of the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar in Kiev, Ukraine.

Babi Yar was a seminal event in the Holocaust. Over two days, Sept. 27-28, 1941, the Nazis, with the help of Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,371 Jews in a ravine on the outskirts of the city. The victims, including thousands of children, were led to the ravine 10 at a time, beaten for sport, stripped naked, and raked by machine gun fire so that they fell one on top of another. A member of our delegation said that between 10-15 percent of the victims actually died from being suffocated by the crushing force of the dead bodies heaped above them.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, the former chief rabbi of Israel and a Holocaust survivor himself who recited prayers at the commemoration, said that Babi Yar’s significance rests in the fact that it was Hitler’s test case for his Final Solution. When the world did not react to Babi Yar, a green light was given to the Nazis that they could go forward with the mass extermination of the Jewish people with the knowledge that no one would lift a finger to stop them.

Under Soviet occupation, there was no mention of Jewish genocide at Babi Yar. The program last month was sponsored and publicized by the Ukrainian government in partnership with the World Holocaust Forum, a foundation financed by prominent Russian Jewish philanthropist Moshe Kantor. Billboards and signs highlighting the commemoration were everywhere. Our four-person delegation met with Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, whose father was a survivor of Auschwitz as a Red Army POW. Also attending were the prime minister and other senior government officials.

Yet for all the publicity surrounding the Babi Yar memorial, we still saw ample evidence of anti-Semitism in Ukraine. Anti-Semitic literature was being sold in Independence Square in Kiev, the symbolic center of the Orange Revolution; a pro-Nazi group handed out anti-Semitic fliers at the main Babi Yar event; a swastika graffito could be seen as we entered the walkway to the Jewish Babi Yar memorial. When we met with government officials, the conversation frequently turned to MAUP, the leading private university in Ukraine that bestowed an honorary degree on David Duke in September 2005. The ceremony at the Jewish memorial at the ravine was not attended by senior Ukrainian government officials, who chose instead to come to the Soviet monument in a park nearby. One senior Israeli official attributed this to “internal political realities.”

We went to Babi Yar to commemorate and honor the memory of those massacred 65 years ago. There are concrete signs that Ukraine is making progress in addressing its Jewish past, but much more needs to be done.