Ukraine’s president and government officials joined Jews in marking 66 years since the Babi Yar massacre.
President Viktor Yushchenko, Cabinet of Ministers representatives and other officials joined Holocaust survivors in a wreath-laying ceremony in Kiev Sept. 29, the date of the anniversary, and observed a moment of silence to honor the Babi Yar victims. Yushchenko also paid tribute to the members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed in Babi Yar.
More than 33,700 Ukranian Jews were killed at Babi Yar in 1941, when occupying Nazi troops forced local Jews to the edge of the ravine and shot them. The Nazis murdered an additional 10,000 Red Army prisoners of war, resistance fighters and gypsies there.
In another memorial ceremony, about 300 people, including the chief rabbis of Ukraine, leaders of Israeli and Jewish organizations and diplomats, gathered Sept. 23 at a 10-foot menorah that Jewish groups erected at Babi Yar in 1991.
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