Ukraine Begins Construction of the First Holocaust Museum

Recently Dnipropetrovsk saw the laying of the cornerstone of what will become the first Memorial Museum of Holocaust History in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. It will commemorate the most tragic episode in the history of the Jewish people, who suffered the horrors of Nazi genocide during World War II. The cornerstone laying ceremony, attended by high officials of both Ukraine and Israel, drew great attention of the worldwide Jewish community. As a result, dozens of representatives of public organizations, philanthropists, scholars, along with ghetto and death camps survivors, came to Dnipropetrovsk.

That Dnipropetrovsk has been chosen as the site of the first Holocaust museum in Ukraine is no accident, since only a century ago it was home to a numerous Jewish community that made up almost half of the city’s population. It was also a major religious, business, and cultural center that fell into decline under the Soviets. Meanwhile, in the years of the Nazi occupation thousands of innocent Jews were killed by Nazi firing squads. They were all buried in mass graves on the sites of massacres. Thus, according to Tkuma Scientific and Educational Center director Ihor Shchupak, one of the future museum’s goals will be restoring the historical memory in smallest details.

However, according to him, the Holocaust Museum’s aim will not be only to tell about the death of 1.8 million Ukrainian Jews, but also to show the unique world destroyed by the Nazis.

With this in view, the museum exposition will cover the life and culture of Ukraine’s Jewish communities from the latter half of the eighteenth century. The seven-story building with a total floor space of 4,000 sq. m. will be erected based on architect Oleksandr Dolnyk’s design next to the Golden Rose synagogue renewed a couple of years ago. Together with the synagogue and the Jewish Public Center, the museum will form an original architectural ensemble at the heart of Dnipropetrovsk. The funds for the construction, around $3 million, have been raised by international charitable organizations and the influential and prosperous Jewish community of Dnipropetrovsk. The foreign guests were amazed to see its energy and unity. One of them, former Soviet dissident and now Israeli Minster for Jerusalem and Diaspora Natan Shcharansky, expressed his gratitude to not only Dnipropetrovsk residents but also Ukrainian leadership for “supporting Jewish communities’ free life,” adding, “I see a special significance in the fact that today I represent Israeli government at this unique ceremony. It was here, in Dnipropetrovsk, that many of my wives’ relatives were killed sixty years ago during the Holocaust, my children’s great-grandfathers and grandmothers. Here, and also in Donetsk, Odesa, Kyiv, and Kharkiv, dozens of my own relatives were killed. We the postwar generation grew up playing in the horrible fields of Holocaust oblivious to all this, because the then regime was trying to erase our ties with our history and memory!”

Israeli Ambassador to Ukraine Naomi Ben Ami also spoke about the significance of Ukraine’s first Holocaust Museum. According to her, the future Dnipropetrovsk museum “will promote the development of a society free from prejudice, racism, and anti-Semitism.” “We hope that the Holocaust example will help realize the fallacy and mortal danger of the ideas of Nazism and racial superiority, which promote xenophobia and genocide.”