Rallies Held to Commemorate 35th Anniversary of Massacre at Babi Yar

Prayer services and demonstrations were held here today to commemorate the Sept. 29,1941 massacre of 100,000 Jews by the Nazis in the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev and to express solidarity with Soviet Jews who will conduct memorial services on the site tomorrow in defiance of a ban by the KGB.

The Kaddish, the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, was recited at noon today in front of the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. The service was sponsored by the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. At about the same time, a demonstration was held at the ticket offices of Aeroflot, the Soviet airline, by the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry. Eye-witness accounts of the 1941 massacre were read, the “el moleh” memorial prayer was chanted and the shofar was sounded.

CARTER ISSUES STATEMENT

In Atlanta, meanwhile, Democratic Presidential nominee Jimmy Carter issued a statement on the 35th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. He expressed his “strong hope that Soviet citizens of the Jewish faith will be permitted to memorialize their dead at Babi Yar,” A copy of the statement was sent to Soviet Communist Party Secretary Leonid I. Brezhnev. It was issued in response to a request from Mrs. Esther Polan, president of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Philadelphia, who asked both Carter and President Ford to state their positions on the Soviet ban against Jewish services at Babi Yar.