- September 29, 2026
- 8:37 pm
- World News
A ceremony marking the 85th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy was held in Jerusalem. Ukrainian diplomat Gennadiy Breskalenko reminded of the people who, during the Nazi occupation, hid Jews, provided them with documents, and helped them escape from the ghetto. Among the participants of the commemorative event were Dani Dayan, Natan Sharansky, and representatives of Ukrainian expatriates in Israel.
Author: Elena Gunko
On September 29, 2026, a ceremony was held at the Yad Vashem memorial complex in Jerusalem to commemorate the victims of Babi Yar and the Jewish communities of Ukraine destroyed during the Holocaust.
The event was reported by the Ukrainian embassy in Israel, which published the list of participants and the speech of the deputy head of the diplomatic mission, Gennadiy Breskalenko.
At the center of his address were the people who saved Jews during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine. Those who opened the doors of their homes, provided food, helped with documents, and risked the lives of their families.
More than 2,700 Ukrainians were later awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel. However, as the diplomat emphasized, these people did not know that their actions would one day be recognized with awards. They did not even know if they would survive.
Dani Dayan, Natan Sharansky, and the Ukrainian diplomatic mission
The ceremony was attended by the chairman of the Yad Vashem Directorate Dani Dayan, deputy head of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission Gennadiy Breskalenko, Israeli statesman and public figure Natan Sharansky, and the head of the All-Israeli Association of Ukrainian Expatriates Larisa Levkovskaya. Representatives of the public were also present.
Natan Sharansky, a native of Donetsk, a former Soviet political prisoner, later became an Israeli minister and head of the Jewish Agency “Sokhnut.” Today he also chairs the supervisory board of the Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
Therefore, his participation in the Jerusalem ceremony is not only related to his Ukrainian origin. He has been involved for many years in the project of preserving the memory of Babi Yar and restoring the names of the destroyed Jews.
Recently, NANews reported on his work in Kyiv: 29 thousand returned names and almost 10 million documents — why Natan Sharansky continues to travel to Ukraine during the war.
For Israel, this is also the story of families of Ukrainian origin. Kyiv, Odessa, Kharkiv, Chernivtsi, Dnipro, and many small Ukrainian towns were part of the large Jewish world destroyed by the Nazis. The descendants of its residents now live in Jerusalem, Haifa, Tel Aviv, and other Israeli cities.
“Babi Yar is also a symbol of human choice”
Gennadiy Breskalenko’s speech became the central part of the message published by the Ukrainian embassy.
“Babi Yar is not only a symbol of death. It is also a symbol of human choice. At a time when the Nazi regime turned the murder of people based on origin into state policy, there were those who refused to submit to evil,” said the diplomat.
He reminded that Ukrainians, risking their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, hid Jews, supplied them with food and documents, and helped them escape from the ghetto and occupied territories.
Such rescue often continued for weeks and months. It is one thing to pass food. Quite another to shelter a person in your home, for the discovery of whom the Nazis could destroy the entire family.
Breskalenko emphasized that along with the memory of the victims, the names of the rescuers must be mentioned.
“The Righteous did not know how their actions would end. They had no guarantees that they would survive. They acted not for a reward, but because they considered the life of another person valuable.”
Ukraine, he added, highly values the recognition of their feat by the State of Israel and the preservation of the memory of these people in Yad Vashem.
More than 2,700 Ukrainian Righteous. What lies behind this number
Righteous Among the Nations is an honorary title awarded by the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem to non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust, endangering their own lives, freedom, or safety, and without pursuing selfish goals.
To be awarded the title, a family story of a noble deed is not enough. A special commission studies the testimonies of the rescued, archival documents, and other evidence. The award can be given posthumously, in which case it is received by the rescuer’s relatives.
In Breskalenko’s address, the number was mentioned — more than 2,700 Ukrainians.
There are more precise data. According to the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ report from May 14, 2026, at that time, Yad Vashem officially recognized 2,713 Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations. The work to establish new names continues.
But the number of officially recognized people is not equal to the total number of rescuers. Some stories remained without witnesses. Documents were lost, families perished, and after the war, not every rescued person could find the person to whom they owed their life.
This topic also has its own commemorative date. In 2021, the Verkhovna Rada established May 14 as the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians who saved Jews during World War II.
In Israel, such stories are especially well known to the families of Holocaust survivors. In Ukraine, historians, Jewish communities, relatives of the rescued and rescuers continue to restore them.
NANews — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency has already reported on this in a separate article: “On May 14, Ukraine celebrates the Day of Remembrance of Ukrainians who saved Jews during World War II”.
What happened at Yad Vashem: the ceremony program
The preliminary program of the organizers was significantly broader than the report published by the embassy.
The event was held in the Edmund J. Safra Lecture Hall. The gathering of participants was scheduled for 12:15, with the main part starting at 13:00.
The program included a lecture by Masha Pollak Rosenberg from the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem. Her topic was the reaction of the surrounding people to the destruction of the Jews of Kyiv in the fall of 1941.
This is one of the most complex questions in the history of the Holocaust. What happened outside the shooting site? Who helped the persecuted, who collaborated with the occupiers, who took advantage of the disappearance of neighbors? People’s behavior was different, and researchers continue to restore these circumstances through documents and testimonies.
In the foyer of the hall, the organizers provided a memorial installation “Traces of Absence” — עקבות של היעדר, dedicated to the 85th anniversary of the tragedy.
The program’s host was a representative of Yad Vashem, Orly Nir, and the musical part was to be performed by violinist Sanya Kreuter.
The main language of the event was Hebrew. For Russian-speaking participants, the organizers provided simultaneous translation through headphones.
The preliminary invitation also included the Ukrainian ambassador Yevhen Korniychuk and Israeli minister Zeev Elkin. However, the final embassy report names Gennadiy Breskalenko as the representative of the Ukrainian diplomatic mission who spoke. Elkin’s presence is not separately confirmed in the published report.
Earlier, we published a detailed program of the event: “85 years of the Babi Yar tragedy: Yad Vashem on September 29 will unite the memory of Israel, Ukraine, and Ukrainian expatriates”.
Why September 29: 33,771 killed in two days
To understand the significance of the ceremony, one must return to the events of September 1941.
On September 19, German troops occupied Kyiv. Before the war, approximately 160,000 Jews lived in the city. About 100,000 managed to leave before the Nazis arrived, the rest found themselves under occupation.
On September 28, announcements were posted around Kyiv, ordering Jews to report the next day to a specific location with documents, money, valuables, and warm clothes. Failure to comply with the order was threatened with execution.
People gathered, thinking they would be relocated. Instead, the columns were directed to the Babi Yar ravine, forced to undress, and led in small groups to the site of mass murder.
On September 29–30, 1941, German SS and police units, with the participation of auxiliary forces, shot 33,771 Jews.
The number is preserved in the operational reports of the Nazi Einsatzgruppen — special units engaged in mass killings in the occupied territories.
For the Israeli reader, there is another important calendar detail: the mass shootings began on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement — one of the main days of the Jewish religious calendar.
But Babi Yar did not end on September 30.
Until 1943, the Nazis continued to kill Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, psychiatric hospital patients, underground fighters, and members of other persecuted groups there.
According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the total number of those killed in Babi Yar during the German occupation is estimated at about 100,000 people.
It is important not to confuse the two numbers here. 33,771 are the Jews destroyed on September 29–30, 1941. About 100,000 is the estimate of all Babi Yar victims during the occupation period.
After the war, Soviet authorities avoided separately designating the Jewish identity of the main victims of the September shootings for decades, using the general formula of Soviet citizens killed.
In 1966, the first independent public commemorative events were held in Kyiv, and in September 1991, a Menorah monument was erected in Babi Yar.
We have detailed the history of resistance to Soviet silence in the article “A shameful gathering of Jewish and Ukrainian nationalists”: how the first rally in Babi Yar took place in 1966.
While the dead were being remembered in Jerusalem, events were taking place in Kyiv
The 85th anniversary of the tragedy was marked not only in Israel.
The National Historical and Memorial Reserve “Babi Yar” in Kyiv, together with Ukrainian and international partners, prepared a commemorative, research, and cultural program.
On September 29, the opening of the exhibition “Invisible. Past and Present of the Roma,” dedicated in part to the genocide of the Roma population, was planned. In the evening, an interfaith prayer in memory of the victims of Babi Yar was scheduled.
A separate part of the anniversary program was the presentation of a new Ukrainian edition of Anatoly Kuznetsov’s documentary novel “Babi Yar.” The book, written by a person who survived the German occupation of Kyiv as a child, was censored during Soviet times. The author later had to smuggle the full text out of the USSR.
More about the history of the book — in our article about the new Ukrainian edition of “Babi Yar”.
In Kyiv, the 11th International March of Remembrance was also organized. Its participants walk part of the route that Jews were led to the execution site in September 1941.
This event was previously reported by Elena Gunko in the publication “85 years later, the same road: the 11th March of Remembrance of Babi Yar will take place in Kyiv”.
Another place associated with the current anniversary is the symbolic synagogue “A Place for Reflection.” It is located in Babi Yar near the Menorah monument and unfolds like a large wooden book. Inside, the image of destroyed Eastern European synagogues is reproduced, and the ceiling is decorated with an image of the starry sky over Kyiv on September 29, 1941.
Access inside is usually possible only on certain days. For the 85th anniversary of the tragedy, access to the memorial was provided in a special visiting program.
All this is happening during the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine. Kyiv marks the anniversary after new attacks on residential buildings, medical facilities, and scientific objects. Yet, the commemorative events were not canceled.
Zelensky visited Babi Yar: together with the president, ministers, rabbis, and foreign diplomats honored the memory of the dead
On September 29, 2026, on the 85th anniversary of the tragedy, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky personally visited Babi Yar in Kyiv. He placed a memorial candle near the Menorah memorial sign, erected in 1991 in memory of the Jews destroyed by the Nazis.
Together with the president, the ceremony was attended by Deputy Prime Minister for Humanitarian Policy and Minister of Culture of Ukraine Tatyana Berezhnaya, Minister of Foreign Affairs Andriy Sibiga, Chairman of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience Viktor Yelensky, rabbis, ambassadors of foreign states, representatives of international missions, and Jewish organizations.
Representatives of Jewish communities recited a memorial prayer. Zelensky addressed those present, reminding them that Babi Yar shows to what extent human life can be devalued. The president linked historical memory with what is happening today in Ukraine.
He emphasized that the value of human life is especially acutely felt during the ongoing Russian war, aimed not only against the Ukrainian state but primarily against people and society.
Zelensky also stated the need to remember such tragedies so that the crimes committed do not go unpunished.
Separately, the president thanked foreign diplomats for being present in Babi Yar at such a difficult time for Ukraine.
“I want to thank you for being with us here on such a date,” he said, addressing representatives of foreign states.
One story for two countries — and work that continues
The ceremony in Jerusalem showed that the history of Babi Yar remains part of the shared heritage of Israel and Ukraine.
At Yad Vashem, they preserve the testimonies of the rescued, establish the names of the Righteous Among the Nations, and study Holocaust documents. In Kyiv, they continue to restore the lists of the dead, digitize archives, publish eyewitness testimonies, and develop the memorial space.
In October 2026, the National Reserve “Babi Yar” also planned to launch a pilot version of a digital archive in collaboration with research partners. The program includes new historical publications, discussions, and projects dedicated to preserving memory in wartime conditions.
But at the ceremony on September 29, Gennadiy Breskalenko spoke primarily about the people whose actions rarely became known immediately.
They did not know that one day the State of Israel would appear, which would preserve their names. They did not expect medals or public recognition. And, of course, they could not imagine that 85 years later, in Jerusalem, a Ukrainian diplomat would be talking about their actions alongside the leadership of Israel’s main Holocaust memorial.
More than 2,700 such stories have already received official recognition.
The work to establish the rest continues.