The architecture of memory: Dnipro’s Holocaust Museum and the struggle against forgetting
By Matthew Parish
Wednesday 28 October 2026
There are places in Ukraine where the past refuses to remain in the past. In the great industrial city of Dnipro, whose broad avenues, imposing buildings and restless river suggest an urban civilisation preoccupied with commerce, military affairs and the practical necessities of survival, there stands an institution devoted to a very different purpose. The Museum of Jewish Memory and the Holocaust in Ukraine is not merely a collection of historical artefacts, nor simply a monument to the dead. It is an attempt to reconstruct a civilisation that was systematically destroyed, to explain how such destruction became possible and to remind successive generations that the apparent permanence of civilised life is one of humanity’s most dangerous illusions.
The museum occupies part of the extraordinary Menorah Centre, a complex of seven towers whose architectural design recalls the seven-branched Jewish candelabrum. Opened in October 2012, the complex represents one of the most ambitious expressions of Jewish cultural revival in post-Soviet Europe, while the museum itself was developed through the efforts of the local Jewish community, historians, cultural specialists and the Ukrainian Institute for Holocaust Studies, known as Tkuma. The institution owes much to the leadership of Rabbi Shmuel Kaminezki and the financial support of prominent members of Dnipro’s Jewish community, including Hennadii Boholiubov and Ihor Kolomoiskyi. Its creation was an assertion that Jewish history in Ukraine, so often marginalised, distorted or suppressed, must be restored to its proper place in the country’s collective consciousness.
To understand the significance of this endeavour, one must remember that Jewish civilisation in Ukraine was once amongst the most intellectually, commercially and spiritually productive in Europe. For centuries Jewish communities inhabited Ukrainian towns and cities, developing distinctive traditions of religious scholarship, commerce, literature, music and philosophical enquiry. Jewish life was not an incidental feature of the Ukrainian landscape but one of its constitutive elements, influencing the social and intellectual development of regions stretching from Galicia and Volhynia to the great commercial centres of the Dnipro basin. The disappearance of much of this world during the Holocaust was therefore not merely the murder of millions of individuals, although that was its central horror. It was the destruction of a substantial part of Europe’s cultural inheritance.
This is why the museum’s decision to begin its historical narrative with Jewish life before the Holocaust is so important. Its exhibitions include Torah scrolls, ritual objects, religious artefacts, domestic furnishings and reconstructions of ordinary Jewish occupations, including a shoemaker’s workshop and a photographic studio recalling the city when it was known as Katerynoslav. The presentation encompasses the development of Hasidism, Jewish agricultural communities, political movements and the sometimes contradictory experiences of Jews under imperial and Soviet rule. These exhibits serve a purpose more profound than antiquarian curiosity. They remind the visitor that the victims of the Holocaust were not born victims, and that their identities cannot be reduced to the circumstances of their deaths.
There is a philosophical distinction here of considerable importance. When we remember an atrocity exclusively through the suffering it inflicted, we risk allowing the perpetrators to determine the historical identities of their victims. A murdered child becomes a statistic, a destroyed family becomes an archival photograph and an extinguished community becomes a geographical reference in a catalogue of atrocities. The Dnipro museum endeavours to reverse this process by reconstructing the world that existed before its destruction. In doing so it restores a measure of individuality, dignity and humanity to those whom the Nazis sought not merely to murder but to erase from history altogether.
The history of the Holocaust in Dnipro itself is especially harrowing. Before the Second World War, the city, then called Dnipropetrovsk, possessed one of Ukraine’s largest Jewish communities, numbering approximately 89,000 people in the 1939 census. Many managed to flee eastwards before German troops occupied the city on 25 August 1941, but tens of thousands remained behind. On 13 October 1941, the German occupation authorities assembled Jewish residents near the principal department store in the city centre, ostensibly as part of a process of relocation. Families were brought together, their possessions confiscated and their fate determined by a bureaucratic machinery that treated the systematic murder of civilians as an administrative undertaking.
Over the following two days, German killing units, assisted by auxiliary police, murdered thousands of Jews in the ravines around the botanical gardens and the old Jewish cemetery. Estimates of the number killed during the massacres of 13–14 October vary, commonly ranging from approximately 10,000 to 13,000 people. Further executions followed during the German occupation, which lasted until October 1943. The precision of the figures matters to historians, but their unavoidable imprecision also reflects the nature of the crime: a deliberate attempt to destroy human beings so completely that even the reconstruction of their identities and numbers would become difficult.
The Holocaust in Ukraine differed in important respects from its better-known manifestations in occupied Poland and Western Europe. Much of the killing was undertaken not through deportation to distant extermination camps but through mass shootings close to the victims’ homes, in forests, ravines, cemeteries and fields. The phenomenon has become known as the Holocaust by bullets, an expression that captures the appalling intimacy of the murders. In Dnipro, as in Babyn Yar near Kyiv and countless other locations, the machinery of genocide operated within walking distance of ordinary urban life. Streets that had witnessed generations of commercial exchanges, friendships, marriages and childhood games became the pathways along which civilians were marched towards their deaths.
The geographical proximity of these crimes presents a particularly difficult moral question. How can a society continue functioning while entire communities are being murdered in its immediate vicinity? The answer lies partly in the coercive power of totalitarian institutions, partly in the deliberate cultivation of hatred and partly in the susceptibility of ordinary people to the rationalisations of authority. Murder on such a scale required not only fanatical ideologues but administrators, transport organisers, policemen and individuals willing to surrender their moral judgement to the demands of an occupying regime. The Holocaust reveals the terrifying possibility that the institutions of modern civilisation can be turned against the very people they were supposedly established to protect.
It would nevertheless be historically dishonest to describe the relationships between Ukrainians and Jews during this period exclusively through the language of collective victimhood or universal solidarity. Some local people collaborated with the German authorities and participated in persecution, denunciation and murder. Others concealed Jewish neighbours, supplied food, forged documents or risked the lives of their own families to rescue those marked for extermination. Both histories belong to Ukraine, and neither can legitimately be suppressed in the service of a comforting national mythology. The museum’s commitment to examining difficult aspects of Ukrainian-Jewish relations is consequently one of its greatest intellectual strengths, because reconciliation founded upon historical evasion is inherently unstable.
There is an equally important story concerning the way the Soviet Union subsequently remembered the Holocaust. Soviet commemorative practice frequently submerged the specifically Jewish identity of the murdered within the broader category of peaceful Soviet citizens killed by fascism. In Dnipro, a memorial at the site of the October 1941 massacres bore precisely this kind of generalised inscription, while informal Jewish commemorations continued for decades without official recognition of the victims’ distinctive identity. The ideological purpose was understandable within the Soviet conception of historical unity, but the consequences were morally troubling. A regime that claimed to honour the dead simultaneously denied many of them the recognition of the identity for which they had been murdered.
The restoration of Jewish memory after Ukrainian independence was therefore part of a much larger process of recovering historical truth from the distortions of successive authoritarian systems. Ukrainians themselves experienced the systematic suppression of their history through the concealment of the Holodomor, the persecution of religious institutions and the rewriting of national narratives to suit Soviet political objectives. The Dnipro museum recognises these connections without collapsing distinct historical catastrophes into a single undifferentiated story of suffering. Its exhibitions also address the Armenian genocide, the persecution of Roma, the deportation of Crimean Tatars and other twentieth-century atrocities. The central ethical proposition is that one community’s suffering should enlarge rather than diminish its capacity to understand the suffering of others.
This principle acquires a particularly powerful significance in contemporary Ukraine, where historical remembrance is no longer merely an intellectual exercise. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the country has experienced the renewed destruction of cities, the displacement of civilian populations, the killing of non-combatants and the deliberate targeting of cultural identity. These crimes possess their own historical and legal characteristics, and it would be inappropriate to equate the present conflict simplistically with the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the comparison between different periods of violence raises important questions about the language of dehumanisation, the manipulation of collective memory and the mechanisms through which political authorities persuade populations to accept conduct that would otherwise appear morally intolerable.
Russia’s invocation of supposed denazification as a justification for invading Ukraine adds a particularly grotesque dimension to the contemporary significance of the museum. The existence of a flourishing Jewish community in Dnipro, together with the prominence of its institutions and its contribution to contemporary Ukrainian public life, makes a mockery of attempts to portray modern Ukraine as a country comprehensively defined by Nazi ideology. This does not mean that antisemitism has disappeared from Ukrainian society, any more than it has disappeared from other European societies. It means that Ukraine’s historical complexity cannot reasonably be reduced to the crude stereotypes employed by a government seeking ideological excuses for military aggression.
The museum’s continuing activities during the present war demonstrate that remembrance is not an indulgence reserved for periods of peace. Having reopened to visitors in April 2023, it has continued to provide educational programmes and temporary exhibitions, including projects exploring the experiences of Holocaust survivors and the cultural heritage of Jewish Ukraine. During 2026, the museum has also been developing an exhibition entitled War for Independence: Chronicle of Resilience, intended to preserve evidence and testimony relating to Russia’s contemporary invasion. Such work reflects an understanding that archives must often be assembled while events are still unfolding, before documents disappear, witnesses die and political narratives begin to obscure the historical record.
October 2026 has been especially significant for the institution. The month marks both the eighty-fifth anniversary of the massacres of Dnipro’s Jewish population and the fourteenth anniversary of the museum’s opening. On 13 October, representatives of the Jewish community, local residents and schoolchildren gathered at the memorial in Student Park to commemorate the victims of the killings of 1941. Five days later, the museum opened a photographic exhibition entitled Memory. Monuments. People, examining how local Jewish activists have struggled to preserve remembrance of the Holocaust from the post-war period to the present. These activities illustrate the way collective memory must be continually reconstructed through education, public ritual and scholarship if it is to survive beyond the lives of those who witnessed the original events.
There is something profoundly moving about the inclusion of young people in these commemorative exercises. For the generation now attending Ukrainian schools, the Holocaust belongs to a past that can be understood only through testimony, historical records and the imaginative reconstruction of lives separated from their own by more than eight decades. Yet many of these same children have experienced air raid warnings, displacement, bereavement and the psychological uncertainties of war. Their appreciation of the fragility of peaceful existence may consequently be more immediate than that of children growing up in countries where organised political violence appears to belong permanently to history books. The educational challenge is to transform that experience into historical understanding without allowing contemporary suffering to overwhelm the distinctive experiences of those who came before.
The museum also raises questions about the relationship between remembrance and forgiveness. It is sometimes suggested that historical reconciliation requires societies to forget, or at least to cease reopening, the crimes of earlier generations. This is a superficially attractive proposition, because memory can undoubtedly become a vehicle for inherited hatred when it is manipulated by political movements seeking contemporary enemies. Yet forgetting is no guarantee of reconciliation, and collective amnesia may merely preserve the underlying conditions in which violence can re-emerge. A more defensible approach insists that historical truth is a precondition of moral reconciliation, because forgiveness without an accurate understanding of what occurred risks becoming nothing more than an instruction to the victims to remain silent.
There is, moreover, a danger in treating historical memory exclusively as a catalogue of evil. A society that teaches only the depravity of past generations may inadvertently encourage cynicism about human nature, while one that depicts history as a continuous struggle between virtuous communities and wicked outsiders may cultivate precisely the habits of collective judgment that it ought to resist. The Dnipro museum offers an alternative by recalling not only atrocities but religious traditions, intellectual achievements, acts of rescue, cultural resilience and the restoration of communal life after catastrophe. Its attention to the world after the Holocaust is as important as its reconstruction of the world before it, because survival itself represents a rejection of the Nazi aspiration to eliminate an entire civilisation.
Amongst the museum’s more unusual exhibitions is a collection of historical clocks, dating principally from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, under the title Clocks That Saw the Past. The symbolism is particularly apt. Time is ordinarily imagined as a continuous progression, carrying societies inexorably towards some improved and more enlightened future, but the Holocaust destroyed any confidence that technological and institutional modernity necessarily produces moral progress. The clocks continued measuring the passage of hours while European civilisation descended into organised barbarism, and the passage of time alone has never been sufficient to guarantee that such barbarism will not return.
In this respect, the museum can be understood as an exercise in philosophical resistance to the tyranny of historical inevitability. The victims of the Holocaust were not destined to die, nor was their civilisation destined to disappear. Their destruction resulted from human decisions, political institutions, ideological commitments and moral failures, each of which might in principle have taken a different course. To remember them properly is therefore to acknowledge that history is shaped by human agency and that the future remains vulnerable to the same capacities for cruelty, courage, cowardice and compassion that have always characterised our species.
For Ukraine, this lesson is of particular contemporary importance. The country is fighting not merely to preserve its territorial integrity but also to defend its right to exist as a pluralistic political community whose citizens possess different religious, linguistic and cultural inheritances. Jewish history is inseparable from that larger Ukrainian story, just as the histories of Crimean Tatars, Poles, Armenians and numerous other communities are inseparable from the development of the Ukrainian nation. An independent Ukraine that acknowledges these overlapping histories acquires a richer and more defensible conception of its national identity than one that attempts to construct an artificial uniformity from the selective recollection of the past.
Dnipro’s Holocaust Museum thus performs a function that reaches far beyond the preservation of Jewish memory alone. It challenges the visitor to consider what makes a civilisation worth preserving, how easily apparently secure moral assumptions can collapse and what obligations the living owe to those whose lives were extinguished by systematic persecution. Its message is ultimately neither one of despair nor of facile optimism. It is that civilisation survives only through the conscious effort of people willing to defend its elementary moral foundations, particularly when those foundations are threatened by political authority, collective prejudice or the temptations of indifference.
Outside the museum, Dnipro continues its daily existence as a city living under the shadow of war. Its citizens work, raise children, maintain institutions, care for the wounded and attempt to preserve the ordinary routines that distinguish civilised life from the violence surrounding them. Within the museum, the remnants of another world remind us that such routines are neither trivial nor guaranteed, and that the destruction of civilisation begins long before the first victims are led to their deaths. The enduring significance of this extraordinary institution is that it refuses to permit the dead to become anonymous, the past to become convenient or the responsibilities of the present to be evaded.
The greatest memorial to the victims of the Holocaust is not the construction of ever more elaborate monuments, important though such monuments undoubtedly are. It is the creation of societies in which the dignity of every human being is treated as an obligation rather than a concession, and in which the truth about history is valued more highly than the political advantages of distorting it. In Dnipro, a city that has witnessed some of the most terrible chapters of European history and is now confronting another war, the Museum of Jewish Memory and the Holocaust in Ukraine stands as a testament to that principle. Its most important achievement is not simply that it remembers the dead, but that it asks the living what they intend to do with the knowledge they have inherited.
