Grapevine October 3, 2021: October 6 – a significant date

• Author: GREER FAY CASHMAN
• Published date: 02 October 2021
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Today, there are several Jewish monuments on the site where close to 34,000 men, women and children were murdered. But in 1961, 20 years after this horrendous crime against humanity, the famous Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko brought this brutal murder to the attention of the world with his "Babi Yar" poem, the opening lines of which are:

No monument stands over Babi Yar,

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A drop sheer as a crude gravestone.

I am afraid.

Today, I am as old in years

As all the Jewish People.

Now I seem to be a Jew.

Throughout the poem, which sweeps through the ages, the writer identifies with Jewish suffering and persecution and with some of the better-known Jews who were victims of antisemitic persecution. It took another 30 years after Yevtushenko wrote his poem for Ukraine to hold a state commemorative event for the victims of the massacre.

While President Isaac Herzog, Chairman of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Natan Sharansky and Counstruction and Housing Minister Ze'ev Elkin are in Ukraine on October 6 for the 80th anniversary commemoration of the Babi Yar massacre, Egyptians will commemorate what they call the October War and Israelis who remember the Gregorian calendar date call the Yom Kippur War. Egyptians and some Israelis will also commemorate the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, the first leader of an Arab country with the courage and the vision to make peace with Israel. True, it has been a cold peace, but one that has been honorably upheld by each of Sadat's successors.

On a completely different note, the famed Moulin Rouge opened in Paris on October 6, 1889. Four years later, on October 6, 1903, the High Court of Australia held its inaugural session. Five years after that on October 6, 1908, Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, and on October 6, 1927, the first movie with a soundtrack – The Jazz Singer, starring Jewish singer Al Jolson – was released in the US.

On October 6, 1943, Heinrich Himmler called for the speeding up of the final solution to the Jewish problem. On October 6, 1951, Joseph Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union had an atomic bomb, and a year later on October 6, Agatha Christie's long-running play The Mousetrap, which is still going strong, premiered in London. On October 6, 1972, the Sinn Fein office in Dublin was closed down by Irish prime minister Jack...