By Canaan Lidor
President Volodymyr Zelensky awarded a medal of honor on Aug. 27 to Natan Sharansky in Kiev for his efforts to help Ukraine and preserve the memory of the Holocaust there.
Sharansky, a human rights activist and former Prisoner of Zion, received the 3rd class Order of Merit of Ukraine medal for his work, including as the chairman of the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center.
“There is a great deal of work being done in the archives even during the war. Thousands of names have already been restored — under constant shelling,” Sharansky told staff at the memorial center during a talk with them on his visit to Ukraine.
“Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression and Israel’s war against terrorist organizations are different, but we are fighting the same axis of evil.
“Ukraine and Israel are fighting for the future of the entire free world,” Sharansky said.
Sharansky, who met Zelensky on Aug. 25, according to Sharansky’s office, has received the Order of Merit medal once before, in 2022, for his work to help Ukraine internationally.
A former Israeli deputy prime minister and a longtime statesman, Sharansky is also chair of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
Sharansky was born in 1948 in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, which pro-Russian separatists took control of in 2014.
His incarceration in the USSR in 1977 for Zionist activism became a symbol for human rights activists who rallied across the world for his freedom. Sharansky was not released until 1986 after a long struggle.
The Babyn Yar Memorial Center was established in 2016 to build a Holocaust museum in Kiev.
The center’s “Names” project has led to the identification of thousands of victims whose fates had been previously unknown.
Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian) is a ravine on Kiev’s outskirts where German troops and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police murdered at least 33,000 Jews on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in the two-day largest massacre of the Holocaust.
The horror at Babi Yar was brought to the attention of the West by poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko.
In 1956, the late Rabbi Samuel Adelman of BMH was part of the first delegation to Soviet Jewry after the Holocaust.
Rabbi Adelman frequently cited Yevtushenko from the pulpit, amidst many other consciousness-raising activities about the plight of Soviet Jewry. He founded the Colorado Committee of Concern, lead by Lillian Hoffman after Rabbi Adelman’s untimely death in 1966 at age 50.
