“Those are deplorable comparisons,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, told Israel National News after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy likened the war in Ukraine to the Holocaust in a speech to Israel’s Knesset. “We have to make a very clear distinction between the past and the present.”
Dayan was careful about what he was not saying. Yad Vashem, he noted, had condemned the Russian invasion and was “very worried about civilian casualties in different cities across Ukraine.” But that did not mean history could be bent to fit. He called Zelenskyy’s words “a kind of Holocaust distortion that we cannot condone.”
The history he cited
Dayan pointed to Babi Yar, the Kyiv ravine where almost 34,000 Jews were killed in less than 48 hours. He had been in Kyiv a few months earlier for the 80th anniversary of the massacre. There, he said, he told his Ukrainian hosts that Yad Vashem was satisfied Ukraine, unlike the Soviet Union, acknowledged the Jewishness of the victims. What he could not accept was a country that did not look at its past “with open eyes” and admit that many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazis.
He drew a line between more than 2,500 Ukrainians recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations and the many more who, in his words, “were collaborators with the Nazi extermination machine.” At Babi Yar, he said, “the Nazis pulled the trigger but the Ukrainians facilitated” the gathering of the Jews and their transport to the site. “Ukraine’s history regarding the Holocaust and other atrocities towards Jews is far from being positive.”
The interviewer asked whether Zelenskyy deserved leniency, given that he spoke from a bunker in wartime and is himself Jewish. Dayan did not budge. “This was the completely wrong context,” he said. “Our task is to safeguard historical accuracy.”
Why it was the Knesset
Zelenskyy first wanted his online speech broadcast to Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian ambassador came to Dayan’s office and asked to hold it there, not in the Knesset. Dayan said he turned the request down. He thought the Knesset was the right place to address the Israeli public, spoke to Knesset Speaker Mickey Levy, and told the ambassador to make the request there.
He was glad of it afterwards. Had Zelenskyy made those comparisons at Yad Vashem, Dayan said, “we would have been forced to react immediately on camera and that would be an embarrassing situation both for President Zelenskyy and for us.”
Sources
Sources
- Yad Vashem chair: ‘Comparing Ukraine to the Holocaust is deplorable’
- Ukraine conflict: Yad Vashem condemns Holocaust comparisons
