THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS 20 Friday, September 29, 1918 Babbi Yar BORENSTEIN'S TALEISM Machzorim .. . (Copyright 1978, JTA, Inc.) After 37 years, there is still no mention at Babi Yar marking the infamous ravine outside of Kiev as the site of Nazi Germany's mas- sacre of 100,000 Soviet Jews. Though the Soviet authorities have erected a memorial after years of pub- lic debate both within and outside the USSR, the 50- foot-high monument con- sists of 11 bronzed figures including a- Communist guerilla fighter, a Red Army soldier and a sailor shielding an old woman. In- scribed on a plaque are the. words, "Here in 1941-1943 the German Fascist Invad- ers executed over 100,000 citizens of Kiev and pris- oners of war." There is no mention of the Jews and as a Jew I am out- raged. Their deaths have been ignored by the Kremlin, which continues to deny that Jews were the particu- lar prey of a totalitarian re- gime. An all too familiar scenario in Soviet-Jewish history. 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MICHIGAN in State of Unrest By JONATHAN SCHENKER 353-0018 FREE ALTERATIONS 7 NEW Now Open Sunday 12-5 p.m. • t!!! At Babi Yar a newly erected memorial makes no mention of the Jews massacred by a 150-man SS ex- termination team. The plaque on the new monument reads, "Here in 1941-1943 the German facist invaders executed over 100,000 citizens of Kiev and prisoners of war." An eyewitness later re- ported the grim finale of the procession of Jews march- ing out of Kiev to the desol- ate ravine in the Rumbull forest. "They were ordered to de- posit on the ground in a neat pile all the belongings they had brought with them and then, in tight columns of 100 each, were marched to the-ravine . . . One could see well, how at the ravine's edge the columns were stopped, how ,everyone was stripped naked, their clothes piled in orderly bundles. Then they were put in a row at the ends of the ravine and shot in the neck; children were thrown alive into the ravine." The machine guns stopped only long enough for soldiers to shovel sand over each layer of the dead and dying. Thereafter, the - site was routinely used as an exter- mination point of Jews and other Soviet nationalities. By 1943 it is estimated that more than 100,000 Jews died at the hands of the Nazis. At the end of the '40s during Stalin's bloody purge against the Soviet Jews and their culture, when the best represen- tatives of Soviet Jewry were imprisoned and kil- led; when the word Jew disappeared from the everyday vocabulary of the Soviet people, and the concept of the Jewish people too was doomed to disappear, Babi Yar wa's turned into a city dump for refuge and sewage. In 1951 it was decided to raze everything to the ground and establish a sports - complex with a stadium and a swimming pool. Perhaps it was only a gruesome coincidence that 10 years earlier, after the dead had scarcely been hid- den by a-thin layer of earth, the SS too wished to play football on the bones of the Jews. For more than three de- cades, all efforts to build a memorial to the Jewish vic- tims have hinged on the Kremlin's unwillingness to acknowledge their death On March 13,. 1961, the ravine took revenge upon those that ignored its tragic hold. The soil, loosened by a spring flood; came down upon the lower part of the city. The desecrated re- mains of the Jews, which had been hastily burned by retreating Nazis, the ashes, charred bones and skulls, suddenly came to the sur- face and froze on the im- mobile sand and clay river. That same year Soviet poet Yevgeny Yev- tushenko immortalized the symbol of Jewish martyrdom in his poem "Babi Yar," while com- poser Shostakovich used Babi Yar as a theme for his 13th Symphoriy. Both were rebuked by the Kremlin, but the interna- tional cause celebre could not be stopped by the government. In ensuing years Soviet Jews attempting to com- memorate the anniversary date have been jailed by local police. Today, the site according ' to Soviet ideologists is as-much a symbol of "bourgeois Jewish nationalism," as it is for us a symbol of Jewish martyr- dom. The erection of the stone edifice which the gov- ernment had hoped would end all controversy is as much a symbol of anti- Semitism as the ravine it- self. There is still no peace at Babi Yar. After 37 years the dead remain unnamed and rather than answering Yev- tushenko's plea for memorialization, today's monument underscores the fact that the Soviet go-v- ernment continues to oblit- erate any source of Jewish identity, to make the Jews cultural amnesiacs. As Yev- tushenko wrote, "Here all things scream silently and baring my head slowly I feel myself turning gray. And I myself am one massive soundless scream above the 100,000 buried here."