Kiev mayor vetoes plans for hotel on massacre site

Plans to build a hotel for football fans on the site of the Babi Yar massacre in 1941 have been overruled by Kiev’s mayor. The approval of plans to construct the building near Ukraine’s Babi Yar monument, where 34,000 Jews were killed in 1941, had received widespread criticism, and at a meeting in New York last week, leaders of the World Jewish Congress asked Ukraine’s President Viktor Yushchenko to intercede on the matter.

Ukraine will co-host the 2012 European soccer championship, and there is a shortage of hotel beds in the capital Kiev. However, the decision to build the hotel was overruled by city mayor Leonid Chernovetsky. On Tuesday, President Yushchenko addressed the nation on the occasion of the 68th anniversary of the tragedy and pledged to prevent any impiety to the Babi Yar victims. He also promised “a proper protection of this burial site.”

The Israeli government welcomed the news. Yad Vashem chairman Avner Shalev told the AFP news agency: “Babi Yar is a memorial site not only for Jews but for the whole of Europe... It would have been inconceivable to turn it into a commercial center.”

The hotel was due to be built right on the main site of the massacre. On 29 and 30 September 1941, the Nazis shot 34,000 Jews and later filled the Babi Yar ravine with an estimated 100,000 bodies, including Soviet prisoners of war.