In a speech to Ukraine's Jewish Community, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu talked about faith and said:
"I am very moved to be back here with my wife, Sara. It is especially moving to be here and visit Babi Yar again, to understand the amazing path we took from that valley of death to the zenith of all nations. Today, Israel is a world power, a rising world power.
Our people were almost completely eradicated. We were massacred without mercy. And today our people live in a strong, robust, advanced and prosperous nation—first and foremost thanks to the strength of our faith. Without faith, nothing matters. Without faith, we would not have been able to create the miracle that is the rebirth of Israel in its homeland. It is a faith that has been passed from generation to generation, even in our most difficult hours.
There were people in the valley of death who whispered 'Hear, O Israel,' and Jews who wished for the renaissance of Israel. We have heard these stories also about other places during the Holocaust. It is possible that they only said the words of the prayers but did not believe that their prayers would be realized, but they were thanks to faith.
We are imbued with faith, that very same faith, that same sense of mission. This sense of mission in its modern expression is the rebirth of the Hebrew language and the rise of the national movement. They both would have been impossible were it not for what happened here on Ukrainian soil, because so many of our writers, like Bialik or Tchernichovsky, and so many of our great philosophers, like Ahad Ha’Am and Jabotinsky, came from here. In fact, Ukrainian Jewry gave birth to some of our greatest geniuses, and they were all suffused in our heritage. They were familiar with Jewish tradition, they did not shun it. Of course, they wanted to seize the future and build a country, but they did not shut the door to the past. On the contrary, they sanctified Israel’s holiness; they embraced Israel’s holiness; and they learned about Israel’s holiness. These things grew largely in Ukrainian soil."