President of the State of Israel Isaac Herzog in Kyiv, Ukraine, October 5, 2021

i24 News – Israel’s President Isaac Herzog delivered a speech from Ukraine on Wednesday, commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre.

The president delivered his address at the in-progress Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial, which is expected to be one of the world’s largest Holocaust commemorations upon it’s completion.

In his speech, Herzog delivered remarks honoring the victims of Babi Yar.

“Three terrible crimes occurred in this terrible valley. The first was the massacre, the obliteration of mankind, followed by the second and the third — concealment and oblivion, erasing the evidence and erasing the memory.”

“Of most of those murdered in Babi Yar, no trace remains. No name, no memory.”

“It is time to remember, and this is why we are all here today,” he declared.

He called the memorial “an important chapter in the common history of Ukraine and Israel — Ukraine and the Jewish people.”

The president said that that center would play a role in educating future generations and combating Holocaust denial, along with antisemitism.

Herzog then referenced the graffiti recently discovered on the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where antisemitic slogans were written in both English and German.

The president praised the center for its work in discovering new names of hundreds of Babi Yar victims.

Herzog also called on states to remember and commemorate the Holocaust.

Earlier, Herzog met with Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and the two leaders “talked at length about the matter of the State of Israel’s captured and missing [citizens] in the Gaza Strip and other places,” according to The Times of Israel.

Prior to his arrival in Ukraine for a series of ceremonial events, Herzog’s office issued a statement to “never forget the terrible massacre at Babi Yar, in which 33,000 Jews were massacred, shot dead into pits, naked, in the terrible cold — men, children, the elderly and women.”