World Jewish Congress CEO Robert Singer on Tuesday received the mayor of the Ukrainian capital Kiev to discuss upcoming projects with him, including the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre of Jews in September 1941.
Babi Yar is a ravine in Kiev and the site of several massacres carried out by German forces and local collaborators during their campaign against the Soviet Union. The most notorious and of these massacres took place on 29 and 30 September 1941 when 33,771 Ukrainian Jews were killed.
Klitschko said he was determined to make the upcoming memorial a success. He noted that whilst many American cities had Holocaust museums, there was not a single one in Ukraine, where around 900,000 Jews were murdered in the Shoah.
Klitschko, a former professional boxer who was elected mayor of Kiev in 2014, said he had the ambition to build something on the scale of other Holocaust museums for the Ukrainian capital.
WJC CEO Robert Singer said the World Jewish Congress was supportive of the plans. Singer also thanked Klitschko for being one of the few Ukrainian leaders who publicly condemned the recent public burning of an Israeli flag.
