For the occassion of the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is proud to announce the publication of two new books and a special edition.
How Beautiful Are Your Dwelling Places, Jacob
512 pages in 2 volumes
183 color and and 95 b/w drawings and watercolors, photographs, and plans
Published by Park Books, 2021
Design: Kai Udema
Price: 48 EUR
Link
How Beautiful Are Your Dwelling Places, Jacob Special Edition
2 volumes in a scale-model pop-up book case
Published by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, 2021
Design: Kai Udema
Price: 250 USD
Link
On September 29 and 30, 1941, more than 33,000 Jewish men, women, and children were murdered in Babyn Yar, a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev. This event constituted one of the largest single massacres perpetrated by German troops against Jews during World War II. In commemoration, and as an affirmation of a Jewish future, a synagogue designed in the shape of an oversized Jewish prayer book was inaugurated on the same site in May 2021 by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. When opened, the book building’s inner space and its furnishings unfold. This impressive movable structure was conceived by architect Manuel Herz and is decorated with murals by Ukrainian artist Galina Andrusenko in the erased local tradition of wooden painted synagogues.
The Babyn Yar synagogue’s design is rooted in a meditation on Judaism’s 3000-year-old history. The leitmotif of this consideration, undertaken by historian Robert Jan van Pelt and artist Mark Podwal, is the concept of Jewish Space understood in its territorial, architectural, psychological, theological, intellectual dimensions. It traverses a historical landscape that includes great heights of spiritual aspiration and profound depths of despair, caused by antisemitism and the persecution, massacres, and genocide that resulted from it.
The first volume of this lavishly illustrated and thought-provoking book, An Atlas of Jewish Space, offers 134 brief and engaging texts by Robert Jan van Pelt, each of which is illuminated with a drawing by Mark Podwal. The second volume, A Synagogue for Babyn Yar, documents the new building through photographs by celebrated architectural photographer Iwan Baan, as well as through plans and model photos. The images are supplemented with texts by Manuel Herz, Galina Andrusenko, Jean-Louis Cohen, and Marina Otero Verzier and Nick Axel.
A special edition of How Beautiful Are Your Dwelling Places, Jacob was produced by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. The special edition is a specially crafted pop-up box that holds the book’s two volumes within a scale model of the Babyn Yar synagogue.
Babyn Yar: Past, Present, Future
388 pages
391 color and b/w photographs, drawings, documents, maps, and visualizations
Published by Spector Books, 2021
Design: Larissa Kasper, Rosario Florio, Samuel Bänziger
Price: €42
Link
Babyn Yar: Past, Present, Future collects together the research and memorialization efforts of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center since its founding in 2016. An international non-governmental organization, the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is dedicated to acquiring, studying, disseminating, and preserving the history of Babyn Yar, a ravine in Kyiv where in the last two days of September in 1941, occupying Nazi forces shot 33,771 Jews in what is known today as the “Holocaust by bullets,” and where over the following two years nearly 70,000 more people were killed.
Edited by Nick Axel and Nicholas Korody, the book includes a historical overview of these events together with archival imagery collected by the foundation and other organizations in Ukraine and beyond. It showcases groundbreaking research produced by Maksym Rokmaniko and the Center for Spatial Technologies, a group of architectural researchers who have employed innovative forensic technologies to reconstruct and spatialize the history of Babyn Yar.
Alongside the history of the site during the Second World War, the book details the broader history of the Holocaust in Ukraine as well as the ravine itself—from its geological origins to the turbulent decades of the Soviet period, when memory of the mass murder of Kyivan Jews was largely obscured by official state narratives.
Babyn Yar: Past, Present, Future also features contemporary photographs of the site, which today comprises a public park, nature reserve, metro station, TV tower, Ukraine’s largest psychiatric hospital, and more. It showcases the work planned, designed, and built by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in its new approach to reviving memory in twenty-first century, including artistic and architectural interventions by Marina Abramović, Maksym Demydenko and Denis Shibanov, Manuel Herz, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, Anna Kamyshan, Oleh Shovenko, and sub.
