Revisiting Rabin’s ancestral home in Ukraine – 20 years after the assassination
Limmud FSU founder located the birthplace of late prime minister's father, even though the Rabin family thought it impossible.
A memorial tablet carrying the bronze image of Nechemia Rabin flanked by his two children, Yitzhak and Rachel. (photo credit:Courtesy)
SYDOROVYCHI, Ukraine - Four days ago, on November 4, exactly on the 20th anniversary of the assassination of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, an unusual event took place in the village of Sydorovychi in the province of Ivankiv, Western Ukraine, not far from the Polish border and just 50 kilometers from the town of Chernobyl. Surrounded by a small group of rather bemused villagers in this rural and isolated hamlet deep in the black chernozem soil of Ukraine, on a bleak and chilly autumnal day, a group of Rabin family friends, together with Eitan Haber, the late prime minister’s head of bureau and spokesman, and activists from the Limmud FSU (former Soviet Union) educational movement, gathered together in the local community center of the small hamlet. The occasion was the unveiling of a memorial tablet carrying the bronze image of Nechemia Rabin flanked by his two children, Yitzhak and Rachel. The bas-relief sculpture was commissioned by a Ukrainian artist who based the work on an iconic photograph in the Rabin Center in Tel Aviv.