Odessa to receive second Jewish museum

Chabad-affiliated facility will share history of Ukrainian city whose Jewish population was decimated during Holocaust

JTA – Chabad activists in Odessa have announced plans to build a second Jewish museum in the southern Ukrainian city.

Berl Kapulkin, a representative in Odessa of the Chabad movement, was quoted Thursday as telling the news site Odeskaya Zhizni that the new museum is scheduled to open soon on Deribasovskaya Street in the heart of Odessa’s old city.

A working group on setting up Odessa’s Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center was formed six months ago, he said. The new museum’s director will be Pavel Kozlenko, the former head of Odessa’s Holocaust Museum.

“Visitors will be able to look at the world through the eyes of Odessa Jews,” Kozlenko said.

In 1939, approximately 30 percent of Odessa’s 600,000 residents were Jewish, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Black Sea port city served as an important center for European Jewry and Zionist activism, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, but 99,000 Odessan Jews died in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and their Romanian allies.

Today, the city has about 45,000 Jews, according to the European Jewish Congress.

Odessa’s Migdal Jewish Community Center opened a small Jewish museum in 2002. Run from a city-center apartment of roughly 1,700 square feet, the Migdal Jewish museum is headed by historian Mikhail Rashkovetskiy and has some 7,000 items.

The Chabad-led Jewish community of Sevastopol, another Black Sea Ukrainian coastal city, is expected to open a new, three-story synagogue there later this year.