Ukrainian news media are reporting that Kyiv Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky has vetoed a plan by the city council to build a hotel near the Babyn Yar gravesite, where more than 100,000 victims of World War II atrocities are buried.
The president of the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress, Vadym Rabinovych, said he spoke to Chernovetsky about the issue.
Rabynovych told MIG News:
“Today I really had a talk with Chernovetsky about Babi Yar because it is a question of principle for the Jewish community and not only Ukraine. He claimed firmly and definitely that all these publications and rumors [of a hotel being built on Babi Yar] are a deliberate provocation and black PR. Leonid assured me that the issue of constructing any hotel in this historical and sacred place has been axed a long ago.
Rabynovych quoted the mayor as saying: “There is just a provocation. Kyiv city administrationhas nevermade any decisionon hotel construction in the historic places of Kyiv including Baby Yar. Therewill be no hotel in Baby Yar!”
Citing a report in Kreshchatyk newspaper, Korrespondent.net
is also reporting that Chernovetsky vetoed a city council decision
to build a hotel in Kyiv near Babi Yar, where
more than 30,000 Jews were massacred in a two-day period in September 1941.
Khreschatyk, the Kyiv municipal newspaper, said Chernovetsky
made the decision after plans to build a hotel near the Babi
Yar memorial was criticized internationally. Altogether, the Babi Yar ravine is believed to be the gravesite for more than 100,000 World War II
victims killed by Nazi Germany.
Chernovetsky said that the decision of city council did not
provide for allocation of land and no building permits have been approved. It
was approved in connection with preparations for Euro 2012, the soccer
tournament to be co-hosted by Ukraine
and Poland.
Chernovetsky called the media reports “a serious
provocation.”
He said the city council and city administration, which he
chairs, never allocates land for building on national shrines, “which, of
course, applies to Babi Yar memorial,”
Chernovetksy said.
However, other city council members said that Babi Yar was among a number of parks where development
was considered.
The controversy erupted on Sept. 24, days before the 68th anniversary of the
killing of more than 30,000 Jews in late September 1941 at Babi
Yar, a ravine that became choked with the bodies of victims shot
at its edges.
Legislators loyal to Chernovetsky approved a plan last week to build dozens
of hotels in the city over the next decade, including one across the street
from a monument commemorating the victims.
The Simon Wiesenthal
Center in Israel decried the plan, saying it
disrespected the dead and demonstrated Ukrainian authorities’ reluctance to
investigate wartime collaboration with the Nazis.
“The plan to build a hotel on the site of the one of the worst Holocaust
massacres is an example of utter insensitivity to the terrible crimes committed
by the Nazis and their Ukrainian collaborators during World War II,” the Center
said in a statement. “We urge the Ukrainian authorities to take all
necessary measures to prevent the building of such an obviously inappropriate
edifice at Babi Yar.”
More than 33,700 Jews were rounded up and shot at Babi
Yar over 48 hours beginning on Sept. 29, 1941. In the ensuing
months, the ravine was filled with an estimated 100,000 bodies, among them
those of non-Jewish Kiev
residents and Red Army prisoners of the Nazis.
The hotel was to have been built in the middle of the main killing site,
according to Vitaliy Nakhmanovich, a leading Ukrainian Babi Yar scholar.
“You wouldn’t build a hotel in Babi Yar
because you would be afraid that nobody would go there,” Nakhmanovich
said. “But they build for people like themselves.”
Oleksandr Bryhynets, who heads the Kiev city
council’s culture and tourism commission, said the planned three-star, 700-room
hotel would be named Babi Yar. He called the
plan immoral and said he would fight it.
“Such sacred places, which have already become the face of the city …
are no place for hotels,” said Bryhynets, a member of Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko’s faction in the city council. “The authorities have no
morals.”
Lawmaker Viktor Hrinyuk, from Chernovetsky’s faction, said the hotel would
not disturb any remains. He also said the plan was not final and subject to
change.
“We need to start somewhere,” Hrinyuk said, according to his
party’s press service. “When the land is distributed, then we can start
discussions.”
Jewish leaders have expressed concern over what they say are persistent
instances of disrespect for Jewish heritage and of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, which
lost 1.4 million of its 2.4 million Jews during the Holocaust.
The mayor of the western city of Uzhhorod
is under investigation for making what was widely seen as an anti-Semitic
remark referring to a leading politician and presidential hopeful.
Ukraine
is also torn by controversy over the extent of wartime collaboration with the
Nazis.
Jewish leaders also condemned Tuesday’s decision by lawmakers in the western
city of Lviv to
call on President Viktor Yushchenko to secure the release of a Ukrainian-born
man accused by German authorities of involvement in the murder of 27,900 people
at a Nazi death camp. The legislators say they believe 89-year-old John
Demjanjuk, who lived for decades in the United States following the war, is
innocent and that materials incriminating him were fabricated by Soviet
authorities.
