28^th September 2014
Text of speech delivered by Alex Ryvchin, Public Affairs Director, at the memorial event and monument unveiling in honour of the victims of the Babi Yar Massacre, held on 28 September 2014, in Sydney.

Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry and the co-hosts of this event, Friends of Refugees of Eastern Europe, the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, the Sydney Jewish Museum and the Aus­trali­an Asso­ci­ation of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Des­cend­ants, I want to welcome you here today and to thank you for giving up your time to honour the victims of the Babi Yar Massacre.
I would like to begin by acknow­ledging the tra­di­tion­al cus­todi­ans of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people, and to pay respect to their elders past and present.
I extend a warm welcome to our esteemed guests of honour:

– the Member for Wentworth, the Hon Malcolm Turnbull
– the Member for Sydney and Deputy Leader of the Aus­trali­an Labor Party the, Hon Tanya Plibersek
– the Member for Kingsford Smith, the Hon Matt Thistleth­waite
– Senator for New South Wales, Sam Dastyari
– the Member for Vaucluse, the Hon Gabrielle Upton
– the Member for Coogee, Bruce Notley-Smith, who is also rep­res­ent­ing the Premier of New South Wales
– the Hon Walt Secord MLC, who is also rep­res­ent­ing the leader of the NSW Oppos­i­tion
– the Mayor of Waverley, Sally Betts, and Coun­cil­lors Kay, Clayton, Goltsman, Guttman-Jones and Mouroukas
– City of Sydney Coun­cil­lor Vithoul­kas, rep­res­ent­ing the Lord Mayor Clover Moore

I would also like to welcome the Race Dis­crim­in­a­tion Com­mis­sion­er, Dr Tim Sout­pom­masane. Your presence here today is most fitting and is warmly appre­ci­ated. I also welcome our communal leaders, our Rabbis, war veterans and Holocaust survivors and their des­cend­ants.
You each honour us with your presence.
I am deeply priv­ileged to speak to you on such an important occasion and I do so as the Public Affairs Director of the Executive Council of Aus­trali­an Jewry, as a member of the Russian-Jewish community and, foremost, as an Aus­trali­an Jew born in the city of Kiev, the scene of the Babi Yar Massacre, one of the darkest chapters in the history of our people.
The two words “Babi” and “Yar” simply mean “old woman’s” and “ravine” and was the name given to a great, sprawling area of land on the edge of the city of Kiev. But after September 29^th 1941, the words “Babi Yar” took on a new meaning. There, over two days, the Jews of the city of Kiev were ordered to gather for what they thought would be their deport­a­tion. Then, 33,771 Jews were dis­pos­sessed of their valuables, forced to strip naked, were led into the ravine and meth­od­ic­ally massacred by machine gun fire – murdered by the Nazis and their local col­lab­or­at­ors.
By the end of the war, some 150,000 Jews would lie in that ravine. The victims were simply covered in a layer of soil, in pre­par­a­tion for the next massacre – bodies upon bodies, some not yet dead, merely wounded, slowly suf­foc­at­ing to death. Witnesses reported that, for days after, the earth shifted and heaved. That cursed, sacred place, those two words that still chill and terrify, “Babi Yar”.
Those words would come to represent the slaughter of the Jewish people on an indus­tri­al scale for no com­pre­hens­ible reason. They would come to represent the cheapness of Jewish life and the world’s indif­fer­ence to its loss. They would come to represent every mass grave in every forest and the ravines dotted across Soviet Russia now levelled out by Jewish bones. The millions oblit­er­ated. Lives lost and shattered. The gen­er­a­tions waiting to follow, waiting to be born, blotted out.
Babi Yar would come to represent the bloody pogroms and the daily humi­li­ation and torment inflicted on the Jews of Russia simply because they happened to be Jewish. It would come to represent “Bey Zhidov, spasi Rossiyu” – “kill the Jews and save our Russia”, a national ideology to truly unite the masses. One that ensured that when the moment came, across the Soviet Union, the Nazis could call upon legions of ready, eager col­lab­or­at­ors to dis­pos­sess and gleefully murder their Jewish neigh­bours.
That is what Babi Yar is and that is what we remember here today.
And as the years pass, and with the passing of those who witnessed and exper­i­enced things the scale and horror of which we simply cannot com­pre­hend, we each have a duty to honour the memories of the dead and to preserve their stories. Today, in the very places where these massacres took place, there are attempts to revise or deny the history of the Holocaust. War criminals are being rehab­il­it­ated into great patriots. Inscrip­tions on war memorials are being reworded to remove any reference to the Jewish victims. Even in our country, there are those who seek to trivi­al­ise the Holocaust and debase the sys­tem­at­ic anni­hil­a­tion of a people, an event without precedent or com­par­is­on in its scale and barbarity.
But we can feel some measure of pride and comfort in the knowledge that in our country, we have leaders who, by being here today, demon­strate their com­mit­ment to under­stand­ing the history of the Jewish people and to honouring the memories of the Jewish dead.
So let us now turn to the unveiling of a monument dedicated to the victims of the Babi Yar Massacre that will serve as a permanent reminder of the great tragedy that befell our people and the unique suffering of Soviet Jewry.
But first, I would like to invite two of our honoured guests to say a few words. The Federal Member for Wentworth and the Minister for Com­mu­nic­a­tion, the Hon­our­able Malcolm Turnbull MP, followed by the Federal Member for Sydney, the Deputy Leader of the Oppos­i­tion and Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment, the Hon­our­able Tanya Plibersek.