As reported by Times of Israel and X, Ukranian President Zelensky said that “Uman was brutally bombed where hundreds of thousands of Jews come every year to pray,” referring to the Hasidic pilgrimage site in central Ukraine. “Then Babyn Yar, where hundreds of thousands of Jews were executed.”
And despite reports, the rocket that damaged the Kyiv TV tower did not in fact harm the Babyn Yar memorial, located in an adjacent area, according to a veteran Israeli journalist, Ron Ben Yishai, who toured the site Wednesday and saw no signs of damage. (TOI)
Western media also published the false information and did not thereafter correct the record. See, for instance, this BBC article.
Babyn Yar is a large ravine located in Kyiv, Ukraine, and is the site of a mass grave of victims, mostly Jewish, killed by Nazi SS squads during WWII.
The German army took Kiev on September 19, and special SS squads prepared to carry out Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s orders to exterminate all Jews and Soviet officials found there. Beginning on September 29, more than 30,000 Jews were marched in small groups to the Babyn Yar ravine to the north of the city, ordered to strip naked, and then machine-gunned into the ravine. The massacre ended on September 30, and the dead and wounded alike were covered over with dirt and rock.
Between 1941 and 1943, thousands more Jews, Soviet officials and Russian prisoners of war were executed at the Babyn Yar ravine in a similar manner. As the German armies retreated from the USSR, the Nazis attempted to hide evidence of the massacres by exhuming the bodies and burning them in large pyres. Numerous eyewitnesses and other evidence, however, attest to the atrocities at Babyn Yar, which became a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust. (History)
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