KIEV, Ukraine - Jewish groups have condemned a plan to build a hotel at Babi Yar, the site of the Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews.
Lawmakers said Thursday that Kiev’s city council approved a plan last week to build dozens of hotels over the next decade, including a three-star hotel on what a Babi Yar scholar said was a killing field.
More than 33,700 Jews were rounded up and shot at the edge of Kiev’s Babi Yar ravine over two days in late Sept. 1941.
In the ensuing months, the sprawling 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 Simon Wiesenthal Center in Israel says the hotel plan showed “utter insensitivity” to the memory of the dead.
