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UNESCO releases a new list of damaged cultural sites across Ukraine

2022-06-08T18:26:00-04:00

The UN’s official cultural body UNESCO has issued a new report documenting damage to an alarming amount of historic sites, monuments, and structures since the beginning of the Russian Federation’s criminal invasion of Ukraine began in late February.

The organization has verified that 139 sites have suffered damage since that time, a combined total of 62 religious sites, 12 museums, 26 historic buildings, 17 cultural buildings, 15 monuments, and 7 libraries, including the Babyn Yar Holocaust remembrance site in Kyiv, which have come under Russian bombs and artillery shells as the conflict shifts from a three-pronged invasion to a more targeted offensive focused in the eastern Donbas region.

Somewhat remarkably, none of the country’s sites listed on the organization’s official log of protected cultural property have been impacted or targeted by Russian shelling, the latter act being...

Inside Manuel Herz's remarkable Synagogue at Babyn Yar memorial site in Kyiv, Ukraine

2022-03-09T12:12:00-05:00

Last week's bombing of the Babyn Yar memorial site in Kyiv left five dead and drew the ire of the international Jewish community, who joined the official cultural body of the United Nations in condemning what under several legal bodies constitutes a war crime.

The memorial sits atop the approximate location where, in September of 1941, approximately 34,000 Jews were executed in a two-day rampage that in considered one of the most significant events in the Holocaust.

At the center of the memorial is a synagogue designed by architect Manuel Herz which stands as a mechanically-opened "cabinet of wonders" meant to resemble the opening of a children's pop-up book of traditional religious text.

Per the architect: "I wanted to create a project that has a transformative dimension and establishes a new ritual on the site. I strongly believe that a monumental, static approach would be wrong. I n view of the site that is literally and metaphorically drenched with blood, we cannot respond to...

'Barbarism': Russia appears to have targeted Kyiv’s Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial in a potential war crime

2022-03-02T12:43:00-05:00

Russian forces have bombed Babyn Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv where thousands of Jews were executed by Nazis during the Second World War. At least five people were killed and another five were injured in the incident. Located at the site is an artist-conceived memorial to the Holocaust massacre currently under construction. The status of the memorial is currently unclear.

The attack was part of the Russian military’s attempt to disable a nearby central TV tower, killing five in the process. Jewish groups across the world decried the act, stating that it was “an attack on Jews around the world” and citing that such targeting of cultural property is illegal under Article 38 of the Geneva Convention. The Ukraine Ministry of Foreign Affairs called the attack an act of “barbarism.”

Ukraine’s Jewish population is technically among the largest in the world and, in the past, has been used as proxies in the Kremlin’s “Fake News”-fueled disinformation campaign to delegitimize the government by associating it with certain factions that prefer a kind of hard-right ultranationalism.

The monument commemorates a two-day massacre that occurred on the site in September 1941 in which at least 33,700 Jews were murdered by SS men in a gulch north of the city’s center. It already contains a wonderful small synagogue from the Switzerland-based German architect Manuel Her...