Babi Yar Park Records

Babi Yar Park in Denver, Colorado was dedicated on October 2, 1983 to memorialize the September 1941 massacre of the Jews that remained in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, at a ravine called Babi Yar. The leaders of the Colorado Committee of Concern for Soviet Jewry, Rabbi Raymond Zwerin and Lillian Hoffman, asked Denver Mayor McNichols if he would name a street Babi Yar. McNichols suggested that an undeveloped Denver-owned 27-acre site could be developed and named Babi Yar Park. Helen Ginsburg, a Denver sculptor, agreed to chair a committee for the purpose of developing the park site. In April of 1971, a committee was organized to raise funds to develop the park and create a sculpture. The committee hired Lawrence Halprin Associates, an internationally known landscape architecture firm who had designed Denver’s Skyline Park, to design the park. The Babi Yar Park Foundation was formed under the leadership of Helen Ginsburg. In 1985, leading Holocaust scholar Eli Wiesel attended a service at the park and in a second event, a survivor of the massacre visited the park and noted how similar the park was to the Babi Yar ravine. In 2005, Larry Mizel agreed to allow the Mizel Museum to take over stewardship and the Foundation was dissolved and merged into the Mizel Museum’s program. Alan Golin Gass, a Denver architect, and other Foundation members continued to be active in the Babi Yar planning process. The artist-architect team of Kryzsztof Wodiczko and Julian Bonder was hired to create a Memorial to Victims of World Terrorism at Babi Yar Park.