Symposium - Babyn Yar, the Holocaust & Beyond: Architectures of Memory

This half-day Symposium focusing on a multitude of topics relating to Judaism, memorials, and identities.

Category

This half-day Symposium begins with scholarly talks about what happened at Babyn Yar and after the massacres, including the dual functions of Herz’s synagogue and other memorialization of atrocities, the relationship between Jewish identity and the exteriors/interiors of synagogues and museums in Europe; and how public memorials function.

Event Sponsor: John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design, University of Toronto
Promotional Partner: Toronto Holocaust Museum

Architect Manuel Herz was commissioned by the Babyn Yar Memorial Foundation, in late 2020, to propose a design for a synagogue to be built adjacent to the ravine where, between September 1941 and November 1943, German occupiers of Ukraine with the help of collaborators massacred over 100,000 people — most of whom were Jewish. In just 5 months, the building was to be dedicated in April 2021, by Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day). The massacres and the synagogue inspired the Koffler Arts exhibition, The Synagogue at Babyn Yar: Turning the Nightmare of Evil into a Shared Dream of Good.