Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Ukraine Plans Hotel on Site of Notorious Holocaust Massacre

The opening line from Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s most famous poem, “Babi Yar” — “No monument stands over Babi Yar” — may once again be an accurate reflection of reality if Kiev’s municipality carries out its plan to build a hotel on the memorial site of one of the most notorious massacres of Jews during the Holocaust.

On September 29 and 30, 1941, German SS troops, supported by other German units and local collaborators, gathered 33,771 Jewish civilians at the ravine outside Kiev and murdered them with machine guns.

Attempts to commemorate the massacre after the war were thwarted by the Soviet Union.

Yevtushenko, a Russian poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist and film director born July 18, 1933, was politically active during the Khrushchev Thaw. He wrote what would become perhaps his most famous poem, “Babi Yar,” in 1961.

Noting the absence of a memorial in Babi Yar, the poem denounces the Soviet distortion of history concerning the Nazi massacre of Kiev’s Jews as well as anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

Soccer tourism

After the Soviet Union’s collapse, Ukraine set up a monument on the site.

Last week, however, the Kiev municipality approved a plan to build 28 hotels to accommodate the tens of thousands of visitors expected for soccer’s 2012 European Championships. One of these hotels is planned to be set up on the Babi Yar site, now in a residential area of Kiev.

Kiev Mayor Leonid Chernovetskyi has reportedly been interested in turning his city’s remaining green space into real estate and is taking advantage of Euro 2012 to implement his plan, city sources said.

City councilman Sergei Melnik, one of the many who oppose the plan, on Tuesday leaked the details to the media.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.