Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center

Between 1941 and 1943, the Nazis shot between 70,000 and 100,000 people at Babyn Yar, including almost the entire Jewish population of Kyiv, making it a significant point on the devastating map of the Holocaust. In order to acquire, study and disseminate knowledge about this tragedy, an international foundation was established to support the creation of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. This non-governmental organization is building the first modern Holocaust museum in Eastern Europe, establishing a center for the study of the tragedy, in which large-scale scientific and educational activities will be carried out. The Memorial Center will bring together a museum, research institutes, a library, an archive and an online multimedia platform. First the Center’s focus is the development of online projects dedicated to biographies of victims of the Babyn Yar tragedy, creation of a visual archive, and the comprehensive study of the distant and recent past of this territory. In undertaking these activities, the Memorial Center maintains an open dialogue with Ukrainian society and pays special attention to the public discussion of the tragedy and the formation of a humanistic moral judgment on it. The nucleus of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center will be the Museum, the construction of which will begin in the near future. At the end of 2020, the concept of the future museum was presented. During 2021, the detailed architectural concept design was developed. The opening of the museum was planned in 2025/26. However, in connection with the Russian military aggression against Ukraine, BYHMC postponed all offline projects, including the construction of memorial objects in Babyn Yar. The focus is now on online initiatives related to preventing and combating all forms of genocide, protecting human and civil rights and preserving the memory of the victims of Russian-Ukrainian war. On 25 October, 2022 during a meeting with the President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the Members of BYHMC Supervisory Board, the Head of State noted, that it is extremely important now to pay even more attention to the protection of historical memory and informing about the conclusions humanity has drawn from the large-scale tragedies of the 20th century. That is why the project of BYHMC has to be implemented after the end of the war in Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center has been actively working in the 3 following areas: humanitarian aid to the Holocaust survivors, righteous and Ukrainian people, war projects and Holocaust projects. Concerning the humanitarian aid and social assistance, BYHMC created a coordination team to help the Righteous and the Holocaust survivors. 40 people have been evacuated to safe places and more than 80 families receive support. Furthermore BYHMC purchased medicines for 1400 people, provided 540 people with medical assistance, delivered 16000 food sets in 87 localities (within the Susidy program) and redirected part of the BYHMC funding for purchasing 7 armored ambulances. The Viсtor Pinchuk Foundation, with the support of BYHMC, provided 8 front-line medical institutions with transport incubators with ventilators. BYHMC also purchased protective membranes to preserve cultural monuments in Kyiv and cooperated with the Department of Cultural Heritage Protection. 

The archive is an open storage structure where linked data tools are used, and digitization is not selective, but covers the whole set of documents. The goal is to collect the largest database of Holocaust related documents and to expand this to other Eastern European countries. The digital library contains only reliable sources of information. Available in the library are more than 4 000 paper books, of which more than a hundred are rare and old, about 250 digital and electronic editions, 8 000 photographs from different times, including hundreds previously unseen, video evidence, drawings, audio recordings, databases of full-text scientific publications and much more. Different media are grouped into thematic collections to ensure a comprehensive historical narrative. 

BYHMC now continues to develop partnership agreements in different areas of cooperation. Already developed are: a Partnership Memorandum with the State Archives Service of Ukraine regarding archives digitalization, a Memorandum of Understanding and Cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy of Ukraine, a cooperation agreement with Yad Vashem within the project Names, a cooperation agreement with the Federal Archives of Germany (Bundesarchiv), a Partnership Memorandum with the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine regarding informing about the Holocaust in Ukraine and Europe and a cooperation agreement with Yahad - In Unum concerning the investigation of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.