One of the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime took place in a ravine just four miles from the center of Kyiv, where, beginning on September 29, 1941, German soldiers killed more than 100,000 people, most of them Jewish. Controversy over how to mark the spot, called Babyn Yar, has raged for decades. But now the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Foundation is planning a $100 million complex, of which a synagogue recently became the first building to open. (There will also be a church and a mosque, as well as museums and a research center.)
The synagogue was designed by Manuel Herz, a Basel-based architect who has designed a hospital in rural Eastern Senegal and a humanitarian who has devoted years to aiding the Sahrawi people of Western Sahara. He is also known for a Jewish center in Mainz, Germany (2010), itself a sort of memorial in that it was built on the site of a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. Herz is fascinated by buildings that move; in 2017 he completed a small apartment building in Zurich whose facades open and close like flower petals.
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