Disorienting: that’s what it was like to hear early reports of Russian troops stationed on Ukrainian borders in mid-January. I was 13 when Euromaidan started, when my parents first explained Donbas and my teachers began asking me about Crimea — honestly, I didn’t know what to say then. Watching this wave of news happen again today prompted my search for a person whose work felt… Ukrainian. I came to find Manuel Herz’s Babyn Yar Synagogue, a project that captures the overwhelming intensity of death, of fear, of the Holocaust, of Ukraine, of religion and ritual and sacrifice and memory. The story of Babyn Yar is a study of the attitude our society maintains towards crimes against humanity as we watch them happen before us. Babyn Yar’s past was not defined by the people whose lives it now buries; instead, it was narrated by Soviet efforts to erase evidence that the massacre ever happened. But when we close the door on exploring painful histories, we rob people of their right to answer a profoundly human question: “where did my family go?”
When I first began writing this article, I knew my motivation would inevitably draw from my family’s own history — more precisely, from a lack thereof. Learning about the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and the space that Judaism held in these regions makes me confront the heartbreaking thought that I have lost roots in my family’s story, that this fractured past is both profoundly mine and somehow unknown to me. My parents and I came to the U.S. from Ukraine with the help of a Jewish refugee resettlement program, and yet I did not grow up having any meaningful understanding of what religion carries with it: this is what it means to come from a history where religious practice, openness, and community is a privilege afforded to few.
For 80 years, nothing stood on the site of the Babyn Yar Memorial. When Ukraine gained independence from the USSR in 1991, officials erected a Menorah monument nearby the grounds. Manuel Herz’s Babyn Yar Synagogue was the first building to be constructed on a land that had been barren of its own beauty and truth for decades. It is extraordinary to think that a synagogue was chosen to break the agonizingly silent legacy Babyn Yar held for so long. It is also what connects me to Herz’s project the most: this idea that life perseveres, that in coming to appreciate the complexities of our pasts, we build resilience.
The war in Ukraine began a week after I interviewed Manuel. It has made writing this article very painful and confusing for me because I am writing about a land and people that is once again contested, once again fighting to maintain their permanency in our shared human history. It is a privilege to write about Manuel’s architectural work, and when we spoke, he was humored by my confession that I couldn’t even believe he agreed to speak to me, that I was scared to not do justice to the synagogue he built. I wanted to write this article for my family, for our journey, and for a more nuanced understanding of what Judaism can be and signify. And most importantly, I want to write this for the people of Ukraine — my heart aches every time I think about a culture and a people I was raised to love so much and so deeply. Ukraine’s multifaceted existence in Eastern Europe has been challenged, misunderstood, and disparaged since its people’s beginnings.
On September 19th, 1941, German forces occupied the city of Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine, and set off explosives that tore through the region and ravaged civilian homes. To this day, the German encirclement of Kyiv during the Battle of Kyiv is considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare. So when a public notice was released on September 26th, 1941, urging all Kyivan Jews to gather at Babyn Yar for deportation, it is understandable why people trusted it. Nazi soldiers expected about 5,000 Jews to meet at Babyn Yar but were met with over 30,000 lives. Families were hopeful for their own resettlement, giving up luggage and valuables nearby an evacuee railway station; the moment seemed to make sense, they were finally running to safety. Instead, in the next 36 hours, SS officers and Soviet allies murdered about 35,000 Jews in the outskirts of Babyn Yar, a place whose name translates to “Grandmother’s Ravine” and was once home to several of the city’s Jewish cemeteries. The first two nights at Babyn Yar witnessed one of the largest single massacres in Holocaust history. In the months that followed, more than 100,000 civilians were murdered on the site, including Jewish people, Roma people, prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and people receiving treatment at the Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital. Prisoners of the Syrets Concentration Camp were forced to conceal the atrocities at Babyn Yar — this is why most of the massacre’s victims remain nameless. Of the lives lost, robbed, and buried at Babyn Yar, only 28,000 have been identified to this day.
The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is an international non-profit that seeks to transform Babyn Yar from a symbol of devastation to one of thoughtful remembrance. Its founding members are prominent public figures, philanthropists, and politicians, including Natan Sharansky, a political prisoner of the former Soviet Union and head of The Jewish Agency from 2009-2018, Irina Bokova, the former Director-General of UNESCO, and Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1998-2005, among many others. In late October 2020, they commissioned architect Manuel Herz to create the first building to appear on the historical site: a house of prayer.
“We find ourselves on a ground that has seen more killing and more death than almost any other place on this planet in such a short and intense time. How do you operate there? How do you act as an architect there?” Herz’s questions are among the many ethical conundrums his team grappled with as they immortalized Babyn Yar’s undeniably spiritual nature. “It was a huge honor for the Memorial Center’s team to say ‘okay, we’re going completely out of the way of what is usually seen as commemorative architecture.’ Because we know the genre of commemorative architecture, it’s usually lots of concrete, lots of dark spaces and material and maybe an inscription that tells you, ‘This is how you should feel when you read this inscription.’ This is the genre or repertoire of commemorative architecture and to go completely out of that direction and make a huge paradigm shift took courage from Babyn Yar’s Memorial team, especially in this location that is really one of the epicenters of 20th century European history… If you screw up at Babyn Yar, then you really screw up.”
While Manuel Herz’s architectural vision for Babyn Yar was profoundly unconventional, he had made it work before. In 2010, Herz constructed the New Synagogue of Mainz in Mainz, Germany, on a street renamed Synagogenplatz. The shape of the building aims to physically evoke the word Kedushah, the Hebrew word for holiness. On the inside of the New Synagogue of Mainz, surfaces are shaped by densely packed Hebrew letters, some of which convey the piyyutim, or religious poetry, of Mainz’s 10th and 11th century rabbis themselves. Maybe Herz’s design inspired both anger and hope, but by questioning architectural conventions, he established himself as someone willing to pursue powerful, awe-inspiring visions.
For Babyn Yar, Herz took a different approach: “You can’t match the monumentality of a crime with the monumentality of the architecture. I wanted to do something that is much more open and open to interpretation, and so I proposed something that, for one, was transformative in its architecture: the Babyn Yar Synagogue literally opens, it opens like a book. And also I wanted it to steer to a very different kind of monumentality, which is not about heaviness and monolithic quality, but about something else, something more fragile: wood. I wanted to use wood because it’s maybe the most fragile material, you need to treat it every day or it breaks apart. I thought that this was a much more intelligent and beautiful way of confronting this past because we need to take care of it every day, both the synagogue and the history. And this is what remembrance really is.”
The Babyn Yar Synagogue must be manually unfolded with the help of a motor, which encourages the opening process as an act of transformational storytelling in its own way. When unfolded, the synagogue is about 1000 square feet in dimension, standing 36 feet high. All the oak wood used in Herz’s design is over 100 years old and was sourced from Ukraine, an intentional artistic choice made to unify time before the massacre with our understanding of it in the present day. In its entirety, the synagogue’s structure is informed by ritual: during religious services, a congregation may come together to read a variety of texts — including the Siddur or the Torah — as a way of connecting in thought, spirit, and practice. Opening a book creates space for communities to see experiences they may share as Jews, parents, children, friends, or just as people. And for Herz, the idea of a “pop-up” book incorporates something more imaginative and magical to the synagogue, something that inspires wonder and hope in the people who read or live it. Books are the underpinnings of Judaism, a religion and culture that historically grew within diaspora; the Babyn Yar Synagogue, too, is like a book for the “People of the Book.”
Inside the synagogue, the elements of traditional Jewish prayer are honored in an utterly tender way. A wooden platform secures the bimah, a platform from which the Torah is read, and the women’s gallery as they are physically lowered down while the synagogue is opened. The building is completely open to the outside on two sides, and a column standing at the very front stabilizes these edges. Importantly, the central column was designed with a specific pattern of rounded edges to mimic tzitzit, the ritually-knotted tassels worn by observant Jewish men. When a person walks up to the synagogue, they can immediately see the Aron HaKodesh, an ark typically containing sacred Torah scrolls, illuminated by the ner tamid, a source of eternal light in a synagogue. The Babyn Yar Synagogue surrounds visitors with some familiar and some more surprising prayers adorned on its walls: among the unexpected blessings is one for turning a nightmare into a good dream. For Manuel Herz, these details are evidence of a deep desire to work respectfully and compassionately with Babyn Yar, to create architecture that “barely touches the ground.”
The richness of Herz’s designs reference a long tradition of intricately ornamented wooden synagogues that existed in western Ukraine and southern Poland from the 16th to 18th centuries. The Great Synagogue in Brody, the Wołpa Synagogue, and the Zabłudów Synagogue are all stunningly beautiful examples of the unique visual culture that emerged in the Pale of Settlement, a partitioned region including Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova that were permanent homes for Jewish people in the Russian Empire. The historic Gwoździec Synagogue of present-day western Ukraine informed Herz’s decision to also ornament the ceiling of the Babyn Yar Synagogue. When you visit Herz’s synagogue, look up: above, you will see an array of flowers imposed on a vibrant blue sky. The flowers represent stars, and their organization on the ceiling recreates the precise constellation of stars on the first night of the Babyn Yar massacre.
“It’s exactly the star constellation that was in the night sky over Kyiv on the night the massacre started on September 29, 1941, because it’s the last thing one may say the Jewish people saw before they were shot, and it anchors the building very precisely into one geographic location, one day in history,” Herz explained of the decision to pay such exhaustive attention to the ceiling’s design. “There’s this uncanny relationship or coexistence between beauty and death, especially in religion… how out of death, new beauty can emerge. And I thought that to start with a synagogue at Babyn Yar is something very beautiful because we start with life, in a way, instead of starting with death. We’re bringing back Jewish life to a place where it was eradicated 80 years ago. I wanted to design a building that does not only look back, but also looks forward; it’s not only dealing with topics of destruction and killing and the sorrow of this destruction, but it also acknowledges the beauty of life, that there’s something incredibly beautiful about us being here and what we can do and create on this planet.”
Manuel Herz and his team of architects, builders, and designers constructed the Babyn Yar Synagogue in just over half a year, an experience he called the “formula 1 race of architecture.” It was first unveiled for Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, in April 2021, and fully completed in time for the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre in September 2021.
Outside of the Babyn Yar Synagogue, Manuel’s brilliance as an architect is immortalized by many other projects. Last spring, he saw the design for his Tambacounda Hospital finally come to a close. Tambacounda Hospital is the only major hospital in a region of eastern Senegal — it includes a new maternity and pediatric clinic that services about 20,000 people year round. In 2017, he designed a new social housing and nursery in Lyon, France, named Sur ses Épaules, or “On Their Shoulders.” During the 2020 restoration of the Central Park Theater in Chicago, he collaborated with the Central Park Theater Restoration Committee and Future Firm to create an installation called Traces of Past Futures, a recreation of the domestic spaces that once existed next to the theater. Herz’s book, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara, examines the urban implications of refugee housing as “political projects,” drawing evidence from the Sahrawi refugee camps established in Algeria during the Western Sahara War. Based in Basel, Switzerland, Manuel Herz’s deeply enthralling and intentional architecture has been acquired into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and featured in galleries worldwide.
Today, Manuel Herz and his team are working on projects of various scales, including a housing project in Germany with space for 200 families, a kindergarten, and other living areas. When asked about the inspiration behind his architectural style, Herz admitted the following, “There are so many reasons why we do what we do. I can say that I want to do architecture that doesn’t repeat itself, where I can use the architectural discipline also to learn. If I became an expert in something, whether it be synagogues or elementary schools, I think that would be stupid. Yes, I have worked on synagogues before, I have built one before, and yes, I am Jewish, but I’m not a Jewish architect, if that makes sense. I don’t want to have the label as the Jewish architect in the sense that I don’t specialize in sacred architecture or in architecture that is only significant in religious or sacred places. To me, an architect is maybe one of the last generalists who brings different disciplines together and connects them. So for this reason, I am really interested in migration, uprootedness, diaspora, all these themes that cut across any one sphere of interest into somewhere very political and contemporary and urgent. And, of course, I have certain personal preferences and fascinations and I like a certain kind of playfulness… there’s enough seriousness in our world and enough pseudo-seriousness, we don’t need to add to it. Making people smile is not the worst thing I can do.”
The Babyn Yar Memorial and Synagogue is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since speaking with Manuel, the war in Ukraine has revived profoundly painful memories for those who remember efforts made by the Soviet Union to forget and erase evidence of Babyn Yar. On Tuesday, March 1, 2022, a Russian missile hit a broadcast tower and sports center near the memorial site, killing five people. Manuel does not know the state of the Babyn Yar Synagogue today, as it is too dangerous to go on site. In a statement published on Forward.com on March 2, Manuel wrote the following, “What is the point of commemorating history, if the lessons to be learned are forgotten and ignored so easily? It leaves me speechless, numb and powerless. I pray for the people of Kiev, and of Ukraine, that the savagery of the war ends as fast as possible, and I hope that the synagogue can eventually regain its community, so that the lessons of fragility are not drowned out by the cruel noise of the war.”
