“I even ‘quarreled’ with the President of Israel”: Yosif Zisels – about his deceased brother, Babi Yar, Rivlin, and Russian narratives

In December, Yosif Zisels will turn 80 years old. A Soviet dissident, former political prisoner, and one of the most well-known representatives of Jewish public life in Ukraine, he could talk about Babyn Yar in the language of documents, organizations, and many years of public debates. But the extensive interview with Natalia Lebed for LB.ua on September 29, 2026 begins not with that.

Author: Elena Gunko

It begins with a five-year-old boy.

His name was also Yosif.

This was Zisels’ older brother — his father’s son from his first marriage. When in 1941, his father was mobilized as a railway worker, his wife and young son remained in Chișinău. When the Germans came, they tried to flee. They failed. The woman and child were killed because they were Jewish.

At that time, the father did not even know what had happened to his family.

And when after the war he had another son, the boy was given the name of the deceased brother — Yosif.

From this point, Zisels begins his conversation about the Holocaust, Babyn Yar, Soviet anti-Semitism, and why, eight decades later, he still has to argue with people who, in his opinion, replace documents with convenient political formulas.

For the Israeli reader, it is important to understand who Yosif Zisels is. Today he is the Executive Co-President of the Association of Jewish Organizations and Communities of Ukraine (VAAD of Ukraine) and the Executive Vice-President of the Congress of National Communities of Ukraine. Zisels is a Soviet dissident and former political prisoner; in the late 1970s and 1980s, he was twice sentenced to imprisonment for anti-Soviet and human rights activities. In 1988, he created one of the first independent Jewish organizations in Ukraine in Chernivtsi, and in 1989, he participated in the creation of the VAAD of Ukraine and became one of its leaders.

For decades, Zisels has been involved in Jewish public life, the protection of national minority rights, the memory of the Holocaust, and Ukrainian-Jewish dialogue. Therefore, his words about Babyn Yar are not the commentary of an outside historian, but the position of a person who himself participated in the formation of the modern Jewish public infrastructure of Ukraine and has been involved in debates about the Holocaust, Soviet memory policy, and Ukraine’s relations with Israel for decades.

The five-year-old Yosif, whose name he never forgot

The Zisels family came from Bessarabian Jews — from the territory of today’s Moldova. Relatives also lived in Khotyn and Kolomyia. Therefore, as far as he knows, there were no relatives directly among those shot in Babyn Yar.

But the Holocaust was present in the family not as a chapter in a textbook.

It was at home.

“In his first marriage, my father had a son — my older brother, who was killed along with his mother, my father’s first wife. They were killed because they were Jewish.”

Zisels himself was born after the war, in 1946, in Tashkent. His mother evacuated there, fleeing from the Nazis. His father survived the war thanks to mobilization on the railway.

And yet, he says, even as a child, he constantly heard conversations about what is today called the Holocaust. The word itself was almost not used in its current common usage, but the stories were there.

There was also Babyn Yar.

It was talked about in the Jewish community, despite the fact that the Soviet state did not encourage a separate conversation specifically about the Jewish tragedy.

Zisels formulates it quite simply: “I grew up with this memory”.

For the Israeli reader, it is probably especially easy to understand the difference between official memory and family memory. In Israel, the Holocaust has been present for decades in the school curriculum, national ceremonies, Yad Vashem, and Yom HaShoah. A Soviet Jew could live quite differently: the state spoke of “Soviet citizens killed by fascists,” while at home they knew why exactly the grandmother, child, neighbors, or an entire Jewish street were killed.

For Zisels, these two memories — home and state — did not coincide from childhood.

He personally knew people who came out of Babyn Yar alive

There is another detail in the interview that makes his story stop being the conversation of a person who studied history in hindsight.

Zisels personally knew Dina Pronicheva and Vasily Mikhailovsky.

Pronicheva is one of the most famous survivors of the mass murder in Babyn Yar. She managed to get out from under the bodies of those shot. Vasily Mikhailovsky, born as Caesar Katz, also survived Babyn Yar.

According to the data provided by LB.ua, 28 people managed to escape after the mass shootings.

Zisels says briefly:

“I knew both of them — Pronicheva and Mikhailovsky.”

And here the interview unexpectedly turns in another direction — to Steven Spielberg.

In the 1990s, the team of the project he created to collect testimonies of Holocaust survivors worked directly in the office of Zisels’ organization in Kyiv. A large room there was given to people who recorded video interviews with Jews from Ukraine and Moldova who survived the Holocaust, witnesses, and Righteous Among the Nations.

This is the project that later became the huge archive of the USC Shoah Foundation — tens of thousands of video testimonies from around the world.

For Israel, Spielberg’s name is usually primarily associated with “Schindler’s List.” Zisels corrects the usual sequence: collecting testimonies was not some random postscript to the film. Working with the stories of survivors became a separate large project, and the Ukrainian part of this archive was created, among other things, literally next to him.

His employees helped the film crews. Among them, Zisels recalls the cameraman Sergey Bordenyuk, who later headed the National Union of Cinematographers of Ukraine.

It turns out to be a strange distance: little boy Zisels grows up among the stories of people who survived the war, then personally meets those who survived Babyn Yar, and decades later his office becomes one of the places where this memory is translated into a video archive for future generations.

“Through Babyn Yar, I even ‘quarreled’ with the President of Israel”

But the most politically sharp part of the interview begins with a completely different memory.

Zisels recounts that once, because of Babyn Yar, he effectively entered into a public dispute with the President of Israel.

The matter concerns Reuven Rivlin, who held the post of President of Israel from 2014 to 2021. On September 27, 2016, Rivlin spoke in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine at a special session for the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy.

In his speech, he also spoke about the participation of Ukrainians in the killings of Jews.

Zisels heard this differently than the Ukrainian deputies sitting in the hall.

“Our parliamentarians remained silent, but I could not let it pass.”

And then he speaks even more harshly.

According to Zisels, when it comes specifically to the mass murder on September 29–30, 1941, among those who directly led and carried out the shootings, there were no Ukrainians.

“On these two days, when the main shootings took place, that is, September 29–30, there was not a single Ukrainian there. Not one!”

This is one of the central thoughts of the entire interview, and Zisels returns to it several times.

He emphasizes: it is not about trying to claim that collaborationism did not exist at all. He directly says that people later went to serve in the German police and that collaborators were in many occupied countries.

But he demands to separate the events of the first two days of Babyn Yar from the subsequent two years of occupation.

According to his version, the direct organizers and executors are known by name: Sonderkommando 4A of Einsatzgruppe C, German units, and military police that cordoned off the area.

Zisels is almost irritated by the very fact of the ongoing dispute:

“All the executors of the shootings are known. Archives are open and documents are published.”

Why he does not say “Ukrainian policemen”

Zisels also has another formulation that will surely cause debates, but for understanding his position, it cannot be omitted.

He objects to the automatic use of the words “Ukrainian collaborators” and “Ukrainian policemen” in relation to all local residents who served the occupation administration.

His logic is this: independent Ukrainian statehood did not exist at that time, people in the occupied territory before the war were citizens of the USSR, and their ethnic origin was often not established.

Therefore, Zisels believes it is more correct to speak of Soviet citizens who went to serve the occupiers, rather than automatically recording each such person as Ukrainian.

For the Israeli reader, one clarification is important here. The word “policeman” in the post-Soviet space is not just a designation of a police officer. It is a historically very charged term for a local auxiliary police officer during the German occupation and almost always a synonym for a collaborator.

Zisels argues precisely with the national labeling of this word.

Moreover, he does not speak about this academically at all.

He is convinced that Russian propaganda has been turning individual cases of collaboration into a simple scheme for decades: Ukrainians allegedly were collective participants in the extermination of Jews.

And that is why, for him, the dispute over words is not a trifle.

“Do not invent anything”

One of the most characteristic parts of the interview is not about the nationality of the murderers at all. It is about how Zisels proposes to work with history.

The journalist asks him: could Soviet underground fighters, who blew up buildings in German-occupied Kyiv, have inadvertently provoked the mass murder? Could someone have suggested Babyn Yar itself as a convenient place to the Germans?

Zisels dismisses the very habit of constructing a beautiful version where documents can be opened.

The Germans, he says, had maps. The maps showed cemeteries and a huge ravine. They prepared operations methodically.

There are also old Kyiv legends about Babyn Yar: that in the 19th century merchants were robbed there, that during the Holodomor bodies of dead people were brought or dumped there.

Zisels does not start proving that this never happened.

On the contrary:

check.

Archives. Testimonies. Documents.

Do not repeat a story just because it sounds beautiful and has been rewritten many times.

“We have an enemy who constantly throws in various harmful narratives. And many use them uncritically.”

NANews has already written about this problem in the material for the 85th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy: the further the event is from us in time, the easier it is to replace the real document with a convenient modern interpretation.

33,771 — the number recorded by the murderers themselves

When the conversation turns to the number of victims, Zisels again prefers the archive to the legend.

Before the war in Kyiv, according to him, about 120,000 Jews lived. Some were evacuated, some were mobilized or worked in enterprises.

And the number of those destroyed on September 29–30 is known especially accurately.

33,771 people.

This number was preserved in German reports.

For the entire period of Nazi occupation of Kyiv, Zisels considers the estimate of approximately up to 70,000 destroyed Jews to be correct and refers to the works of Ukrainian Holocaust researchers — Vitaly Nakhmanovich, Anatoly Podolsky, and Felix Levitas.

But he also draws attention to another thing: reducing Babyn Yar exclusively to the two September days also simplifies history.

The shootings continued until 1943.

Why does everyone remember only two days?

Zisels’ answer is not at all solemn:

it’s easier for people.

“Two days — simple. Two years — already too much.”

A very human and unpleasant remark. Memory loves a date. History rarely fits into it.

The USSR wanted to talk about the crime of the Nazis — but without a separate Jewish tragedy

Zisels grew up already in the Soviet Union, which itself decided which Babyn Yar was allowed to be remembered.

According to his explanation, two needs of Soviet ideology collided here.

On the one hand, it was beneficial to show another crime of the Nazis.

On the other hand, it was extremely undesirable to admit that one ethnic group was exterminated precisely because they were Jewish.

Therefore, the killed Jews turned into “Soviet citizens” in the official formula.

Not quite a lie.

But far from the whole truth.

Zisels connects this with a broader history of Soviet attitudes towards Jews and says that the USSR inherited anti-Semitism from the Russian Empire.

At the same time, he makes an important distinction: in the 1920s, everyday anti-Semitism did not disappear, but state policy was different for some time. Anti-Semitic agitation could even be prosecuted criminally.

And Zisels considers 1939 and Stalin’s alliance with Hitler to be the turning point.

He speaks sharply, in his manner — Stalin wanted to “fraternize” with a person in whom he saw a kindred political nature.

After the Soviet-German rapprochement, Zisels claims, anti-Semitic materials reappeared in the Soviet press.

And then the war ended — and anti-Semitism did not disappear.

“Cosmopolitans” meant — Jews

For Israelis of the older generation who came from the USSR, there is hardly anything that needs to be explained here. For the rest, it is useful to decipher the word that Zisels uses further: “cosmopolitans”.

In late Stalinist USSR, there was a state campaign against so-called “rootless cosmopolitanism.” Formally, it was about insufficient Soviet patriotism.

In practice, Zisels says, it very often referred to Jews.

Then there was the “Doctors’ Plot” — mainly Jewish doctors were accused of conspiring against the Soviet leadership. There were repressions against Jewish writers and intellectuals.

Zisels is convinced: anti-Semitism, which intensified before World War II, in various forms reached the very end of the USSR’s existence.

And he utters a phrase characteristic of the entire interview:

“It’s generally bad to live long — you remember everything.”

There is quite a lot of personal in it. Zisels did not study the late USSR through documentary series. For anti-Soviet activities, he was imprisoned twice in high-security and strict-regime camps, and in 1987 he refused amnesty because the condition was a de facto renunciation of political activity.

That is, the conversation about what the Soviet state concealed is not a historical theory for him either.

The history of 1940, which Zisels suggests discussing in school

Another episode of the interview is almost certainly little known to a significant part of the readers.

Zisels reminds of the documents of 1940, when proposals were received from Germany and Vienna to accept the Jewish population of Germany and occupied Poland and settle them on Soviet territory — among the options were the Jewish Autonomous Region and Western Ukraine.

The Soviet side did not accept this proposal.

Zisels draws his own, very harsh conclusion from this: the Soviet authorities could have saved part of the European Jews even before the Nazis transitioned to total extermination, but did not do so.

And he believes that this should be discussed starting from school.

At the same time, he unexpectedly praises the modern Ukrainian education system:

“I don’t know another country in Europe where the Holocaust would be studied so thoroughly.”

This is also an important part of his position. He does not try to replace Russian glorification of the USSR with Ukrainian self-idealization. For him, the entire logic of the conversation is built differently: document — then conclusion.

“We grew up on this story”

When it comes to Anatoly Kuznetsov and his documentary novel “Babi Yar”, Zisels speaks almost like a person reminded of a book from his youth.

“We grew up on this story.”

He remembers the 1966 publication — already crippled by Soviet censorship, where mentions of the Jewish component of the tragedy were reduced.

Before Kuznetsov, he reminds, there were poems by Boris Slutsky, Margarita Aliger, the famous poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. But it was Kuznetsov’s book that became cult for his generation.

In September 2026, a new Ukrainian edition of “Babi Yar” was just released in Kyiv, and the history of Soviet censorship there is especially indicative: Kuznetsov eventually fled the USSR and took materials that later allowed the full author’s text to be restored.

In the interview, Zisels recalls all this not for a literary reference.

For him, Kuznetsov is an example of how one state first does not allow a crime to be properly told, and then subsequent generations are forced to literally restore what was cut out.

Loznitsa: “I read the script, and I really didn’t like it”

The conversation then moves almost to the present.

Zisels talks about director Sergei Loznitsa — the author of the film “Babi Yar. Context”.

Once, the relationship between them was completely different.

According to Zisels, it was he who interested Loznitsa in the topic of Maidan, after which the director made a film about the events of 2013–2014.

But even earlier, Loznitsa showed him the concept of a film about Babi Yar.

Zisels read the script.

And he sharply disliked how the topic of Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust was presented there.

He expressed his remarks to the director and initially thought that Loznitsa heard them.

Then, Zisels says, Russian businessman Mikhail Fridman joined the project.

“Fridman came, gave Loznitsa a lot of money, and he still made this film.”

According to Zisels, the final film once again reproduced the narrative he had been arguing against for many years: Ukrainians are presented as participants in the murder of Jews in Babi Yar.

This statement and further assessments of the film in the interview belong to Zisels himself. He directly links the artistic interpretation of Babi Yar with a broader struggle over who and with whose money will tell this story.

“They sit in Kyiv and wait”

And here the interview finally moves into 2026.

Zisels has been in conflict for many years with the Russian-origin project of the Holocaust Memorial Center “Babi Yar”, which was funded, among others, by Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, and Pavel Fuks.

The artistic director of the center was Russian director Ilya Khrzhanovsky.

Zisels calls Khrzhanovsky only a “pawn” and claims that much greater political influence stood behind the entire structure.

He links the project with Vladislav Surkov, a former high-ranking Kremlin official, and through him — with Putin. This is precisely Zisels’ assessment and statement, as outlined in his interview with LB.ua.

After the Russian full-scale invasion, Fridman, Khan, and Fuks left the supervisory board of the memorial center. Khrzhanovsky remained the artistic director until 2023.

But Zisels believes that the story did not end there.

“The fund remained, and it is here.”

According to him, people associated with it are in Kyiv and are waiting for the outcome of the war to, in the event of a favorable outcome for Russia, once again promote the previous version of the Babi Yar story.

Hence the headline of the LB.ua interview — about Russian “memorialists” who, in Zisels’ words, “sit in Kyiv and wait to see how the war ends”.

This is one of his most serious grievances.

Because it’s no longer about a monument.

It’s about who will explain to new generations what happened in Ukraine before the war.

Why the dispute with Rivlin did not end for him in 2016

If you read the interview from beginning to end, it becomes clearer why Zisels still remembers the speech of the President of Israel in the Verkhovna Rada ten years later.

This is not a story about a personal grievance against Reuven Rivlin.

And not an attempt to prove that there was no betrayal, collaboration, or anti-Semitism in the occupied territory of Ukraine.

Zisels himself speaks quite directly about such people and such phenomena.

His dispute is different.

He demands not to transfer the actions of specific people to an entire nation. Not to mix two days of September 1941 with two years of occupation. Not to determine a person’s origin automatically by the territory where they lived. Not to repeat a politically convenient formula just because it has become familiar.

For the Israeli reader, this is a particularly sensitive topic. Israeli memory of the Holocaust naturally focuses primarily on the Jews who perished and those who helped the killers or, conversely, saved people. The Ukrainian conversation, after decades of Soviet and now Russian interpretation, adds another question: where is the line between recognizing real collaboration and placing collective responsibility on Ukrainians in general.

Zisels takes a very definite position in this dispute.

And he speaks about it not from the sidelines.

His brother was killed at the age of five.

He himself grew up among people who talked about the Holocaust even before the word appeared in the Soviet public language.

He knew two survivors from Babi Yar.

In his office, testimonies were recorded for Spielberg’s archive.

For fighting the Soviet system, he was imprisoned in camps.

He argued with the President of Israel.

Argued with directors, officials, memorial organizers.

And, judging by this interview, he does not intend to stop.

NANews — Israel News | Nikk.Agency has already reported how on September 29, 2026, Yad Vashem commemorated the victims of Babi Yar and how the same tragedy today remains part of the memory of both Israel and Ukraine.

But Zisels’ story adds to the official ceremonies what ceremonies almost never have.

Family memory.

Irritation.

Very old scores with the Soviet state.

And almost physical distrust of overly simple answers.

At the end of the interview, he is asked what can counteract another rewriting of history.

Zisels responds without a new recipe:

culture, education, science.

Nothing better, he says, humanity has yet come up with.

Source: a large interview with Yosif Zisels by journalist Natalia Lebed, LB.ua, September 29, 2026.