The DAAR Charitable Foundation is a organization focused on improving the lives of children, supporting the arts and remembering the past in Ukraine. 


  About DAARRememberingHelping ChildrenSupporting ArtContactSigmaBleyzer

 

In June 2002, members of the DAAR Foundation met with the Head of the Kharkiv Regional State Administration in Ukraine. They visited the construction site of the Drobizky Yar Memorial.

There, on the outskirts of Kharkiv, from December 1941 to January 1942, Nazis violently shot, stabbed and buried alive over 30,000 citizens, mostly women, children and the elderly. In one massacre, Germans annihilated the whole Jewish population of Kharkiv as part of the Holocaust.The DAAR Foundation donated a sizeable amount to help in finishthe Memorial. In addition, a number of fundraising events have raised even greater amounts to finish the monument to those lost in the Holocaust.
Today Drobizky Yar has become part of history along with Buchenwald, Oswenzim, Babiy Yar, and the Genocide of the Jewish people in Europe.

The DAAR foundation is also very active in funding and organizing the Holocaust museums in Ukraine. Past support has included education campaigns, training in the United States for the curators of the museums in Ukraine and traveling programs focusing on both the Holocaust as well as the Ukrainian Holodomor (see below). Other programs include training projects which provide educators from around the country access to artifacts and materials through the Kharkiv Holocaust Museum, provision of books   and materials to the Kyiv Mohila academy and sponsorship of the Kharkiv Municipal Board's House for War and Labor Veterans.

The Ukrainian famine (1932-1933) or Holodomor was one of the largest national catastrophes of the Ukrainian nation in modern history with direct loss of human life in the range of millions (estimates vary). While the famine in Ukraine was a part of a wider famine that also affected other regions of the USSR, the term Holodomor is specifically applied to the events that took place in territories populated by the ethnic Ukrainians.
Holodomor Memorial, Kyiv, Ukraine
Most modern scholars agree that the famine was caused by the policies of the government of the Soviet Union under Stalin, rather than by natural reasons, and the Holodomor is sometimes referred to as the Ukrainian Genocide,implying that the Holodomor was engineered by the Soviets to specifically target the Ukrainian people in order to destroy the Ukrainian nation as a political factor and social entity. While historians continue to disagree whether the policies that led to Holodomor fall under the legal definition of Genocide, numerous governments have officially recognized the Holodomor as such. (courtesy Wikipedia)