President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded a medal of honor on Thursday to Natan Sharansky in Kiyv for his efforts to help Ukraine and preserve the memory of the Holocaust there.
Sharansky, a human rights activist and former Prisoner of Zion, received the 3rd class Order of Merit of Ukraine medal for his work, including as the chairman of the supervisory board of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, that institution said.
“There is a great deal of work being done in the archives even during the war. Thousands of names have already been restored—under constant shelling,” Sharansky told staff at the memorial center during a talk with them on his visit to Ukraine, a spokesperson for the institution said. “Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression and Israel’s war against terrorist organizations are different, but we are fighting the same axis of evil. Ukraine and Israel are fighting for the future of the entire free world,” Sharansky continued.
Sharansky, who met Zelenskyy on Aug. 25, according to Sharansky’s office, has received the Order of Merit medal once before, in 2022, for his work to help Ukraine internationally.
A former Israeli deputy prime minister and a longtime statesman, Sharansky is also chairman of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP).
Sharansky was born in 1948 in Donetsk, eastern Ukraine, which pro-Russian separatists took control of in 2014. His incarceration in the USSR in 1977 for Zionist activism became a symbol for human rights activists who rallied across the world for his freedom. Sharansky was released in 1986.
The Babyn Yar Memorial Center was established in 2016 to build a Holocaust museum in Kyiv. The center’s Names project has led to the identification of thousands of victims whose fates had been previously unknown.
Babyn Yar (“Babi Yar” in Russian) is a ravine on Kyiv’s outskirts where German troops and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police murdered at least 33,000 Jews on Sept. 29 and 30, 1941, in one of the largest massacres of the Holocaust.
