The Media Line: Kyiv Chief Rabbi to TML on Holocaust Remembrance: ‘We Must Not Live Inside It’  

Kyiv Chief Rabbi to TML on Holocaust Remembrance: ‘We Must Not Live Inside It’  

From Kyiv’s wartime reality to buried histories of Babyn Yar, Chief Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch reflects on memory, survival, and the fragile continuity of Jewish life in Ukraine   

By Gabriel Colodro/The Media Line   

For Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch, the chief rabbi of Kyiv and the city’s senior Chabad emissary, Holocaust remembrance is not limited to ceremonies or sirens, but it is something personal. His own family history is part of it, as is life in Kyiv today during the war.  

Speaking with The Media Line on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, Markovitch said he sees it as a responsibility. “This is something I live with,” he said. “Something I feel.”  

His personal connection to the Holocaust begins with his family. Growing up in Israel, his grandmother lived in the same building. “She was in Auschwitz,” he recalled. “I remember the number tattooed on her arm.” As a teenager, he admits, the full weight of that history did not register. “I understood less. I thought less about it, like many young people,” he said, noting that even when he tried to ask, she avoided speaking about her experience.   

What he later came to understand filled in those silences with a far more direct and local history of violence. His grandfather’s family, he said, was not deported but murdered in their own village in Ukraine. “They were burned alive,” he said. “They put them inside a wooden building and burned them.”   

“I am talking about the neighbors,” he said.  

His grandfather was not there when it happened and survived. When he returned and saw the aftermath, he fled. He was later captured and sent to Auschwitz. After the war, he and Markovitch’s grandmother rebuilt their lives and started a new family. That arc, from destruction to continuity, formed the foundation of a worldview that would later guide Markovitch’s own decisions.  

At school, he recalled, the message was clear: “They taught us that we must do everything so that it will not happen again,” he said. That idea stayed with him into adulthood and shaped his military service. “When I enlisted, I thought I need to do everything I can so that it will not happen again, and that we must be strong.” 

More than a decade later, he chose a different path. Rather than remain in Israel, he moved to Ukraine, where Jewish life had once been almost erased. His grandfather, he said, had been the chief rabbi in what is now western Ukraine. “We decided to come back to continue the family tradition,” he said. The decision, he stressed, was deliberate. “It was a very thought-out decision.”   

The Ukraine he encountered was not devoid of Jews, but it was marked by a profound rupture in identity. “Dozens of thousands of Jews lived in Kyiv,” he said, estimating roughly 50,000 today. “But most of them did not know anything about Judaism. Not religion, just basic identity.” The reason, he explained, lies in decades of Soviet policy aimed at erasing Jewish life as a cultural and historical category.   

“The communist period tried to erase everything,” he said. “If we do not support each other and rebuild, then the Nazis won. Because they erased the memory.”  

In Kyiv, he said that work today is not only about religion but about restoring something that was lost.   

That loss also shaped how the Holocaust itself was remembered. At Babyn Yar, one of the largest mass killing sites in Europe, where Nazis and their collaborators shot and killed 33,000 Jews in just two days in September, 1941, the victims were not officially identified as Jews for decades. “They did not say this was a place where Jews were murdered,” Markovitch said. “They said it was a burial place of Soviet citizens.”  

According to him, this was not limited to one site. In many places across Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, mass graves were known, but not described in Jewish terms.  

Even now, people remember what they saw there. He said that when Babyn Yar became a park, children would play in the area and sometimes find bones, without knowing what they were.  

“People tell me that when they were children, they played there,” he said. “They found bones, skulls. They did not understand what it was.”   

Recognition, he said, has evolved slowly and unevenly. For years, official commemorations framed Babyn Yar as a general tragedy affecting Soviet citizens. “Only gradually did it change,” he said, noting that even in relatively recent years, political leaders resisted acknowledging responsibility. “There were cases where they were asked to apologize to the Jewish people, and they refused,” he said.   

That reluctance, he argued, reflects a broader pattern. “I do not hear public figures say, ‘We made a mistake,’” he said. “It is always someone else’s fault.” In recent years, he says, there have been changes. Officials are now more present at commemorations at Babyn Yar.  

The war is still there. People come into Kyiv from other areas, even as the city itself is being hit. “At the beginning of the war, many people left,” he said. “Later, many came to Kyiv from the fighting areas.” He described families arriving from cities such as Mariupol and Kharkiv, often with nothing. “Some people left in slippers,” he said, emphasizing the suddenness of their displacement.   

The reasons many remain in Ukraine are often tied to family and obligation. “There are families where the husband was drafted, or a son was taken to the army,” he said. “They will not leave without him.” For others, particularly older residents, the barrier is psychological as much as practical. “It is easier to stay with something that is not good but familiar than something that might be better but unknown,” he said.  

So the community helps where it can. Synagogues have turned into places where people come for food, medicine, and basic supplies. “We distribute thousands of food packages every month,” he said, describing a system that relies entirely on donations. “When someone gives, we say thank you, because they are literally saving lives.”   

Beyond food assistance, community centers provide daily meals, medical care, and social activities, particularly for the elderly. “They come for a hot meal, and there is also a doctor,” he said, describing an effort to maintain both physical and social stability in a disrupted environment.   

Against this reality, the relationship between present-day war and Holocaust memory is neither straightforward nor constant. “At the beginning, maybe people felt a connection,” he said. “But today, unfortunately, much less.” Instead, he pointed to a different and troubling trend: the persistence and, in some cases, growth of antisemitism.   

“Antisemitism has increased,” he said. “It continues to grow.” He described how narratives circulating globally are absorbed locally, often without distinction between political criticism and broader hostility toward Jews. “They say Israel kills children, that Israel is an apartheid state,” he said. “And from that, they draw conclusions about Jews everywhere.”   

In some cases, those narratives evolve into conspiracy theories. “They say Jews control the world, that Jews are responsible for the war here,” he said, noting the disconnect between perception and reality. “They forget that Jews here are also fighting.”   

He recounted a recent conversation with a Ukrainian official who viewed Israel’s actions against Iran as harmful to Ukraine because they diverted global attention. Markovitch challenged that view directly. “I told him the opposite,” he said. “Iran supports Russia. If Iran is weakened, it helps Ukraine.” The official reconsidered his position. “He said, ‘Now I think you are completely right.’”   

In Ukraine, the dates are not always the same. Jewish communities mark Yom HaShoah, but state ceremonies are usually held at another time of the year, around Babyn Yar, closer to Yom Kippur. “There is no official state event today,” he said.  

Even so, he sees signs of progress, particularly in education. “The Ministry of Education is starting to include what happened to the Jews,” he said. “This is a complete change in approach.” For Markovitch, that shift is essential to ensuring that memory is not only preserved but understood.   

Ultimately, his message for Yom HaShoah resists both simplification and despair. “We must never forget the events that were done to us,” he said. “But we must not live inside it.” The distinction, he suggested, is key to maintaining both memory and forward movement.   

“We have to move forward, to learn from it, so that it will not happen again,” he said.  

For him, it is not only about the past. It is about what people do now.  

In Kyiv, you see it in simple ways. People are still coming into the city from other areas. Some are just trying to go on with daily life. The war is always there. At the same time, the past is not far either. People know the places, they know what happened there.  

For Markovitch, this is just the reality. You move forward because there is no other option. “Everything depends on us,” he said. “On our strength, and on our understanding of what we must do, not to wait for someone else to do it for us.”

Photo credit: Courtesy of Rabbi Markovitch