The Ravine of Memory: Babyn Yar Between the Holocaust and the Great Patriotic War, with Shay Pilnik

Please register for this free online program.

Babyn Yar, or Babi Yar, is the ravine on the northwestern outskirts of Kyiv, where the Nazis and their collaborators murdered and buried over 100,000 primarily Jewish victims in 1941. Professor Shay Plinik will lead a dark journey through the story of the ravine’s forgetting and remembrance in Soviet literature and culture—in Russian as well as in Yiddish. He will introduce the work of both non-Jewish and Jewish artists who protested Moscow’s attempt to banish the memory of the atrocity to forgotten history. These poets and writers worked to prevent the second murder of the Jews of Kyiv– not the one perpetrated by the Nazis, but rather, the murder of their memory committed by the Soviet government between the late 1940s and the early 1970s.

The grandson of Holocaust survivors who immigrated to Israel from the USSR about a decade after the founding of the Jewish State, Shay Pilnik is the Director of the Emil A. and Jenny Fish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Yeshiva University. He was previously the Executive Director of the Nathan and Esther Pelz Holocaust Education Resource Center in Milwaukee. Dr. Pilnik earned his BA at Hebrew University of Jerusalem; his MA in Jewish Studies from McGill University; and his PhD from the Jewish Theological Seminary.