DNEPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — Straddling two blocks, a $60 million, 400,000 square foot Jewish Community Center and Holocaust Museum now under construction in Dnepropetrovsk will be a city within a city, a showcase for a Ukrainian industrial backwater waking up to boom times in Jewish and civic contexts.
Construction Begins On World’s Largest Jewish Community Center
DNEPROPETROVSK, Ukraine — Straddling two blocks, a $60 million, 400,000 square foot Jewish Community Center and Holocaust Museum now under construction in Dnepropetrovsk will be a city within a city, a showcase for a Ukrainian industrial backwater waking up to boom times in Jewish and civic contexts.
The seven-tower, twenty-story museum and center multiplex will stretch around the existing Golden Rose synagogue is sweeping in its scope of programs.
“Any Jewish person, any age and every time of the day will have a reason to spend quality time at the center,” said Dnepropetrovsk’s Chief Rabbi and Chabad representative, Shmuel Kaminezki. At maximum capacity, the center will hold over 10,000 people, a chunk of Dnepropetrovsk’s 50,000 Jews.
Funded by Gennady Bogolubov, president of the Jewish Community of Dnepropetrovsk and partner in the international industrial firm Privat Group, the center will cement the city’s Jewish renaissance.
A Jewish mall in the center will offer easy access to kosher food and lifestyle necessities on a level unfathomable in the lean days of the communist and immediate post-glasnost era. Kosher restaurants, coffee shops, fast food joints, an Internet café, a bookstore, Judaica store, supermarket and pharmacy will line the first two floors of the center. Currently, ten tons of kosher meat products are produced in Ukraine, including ten different kinds of deli meats, per month. When the center is completed, demand is expected to grow further.
Above the mall, floors of auditoria and suites will become home to programs for children, children with special needs, women’s groups, adult education and seniors. A wing is reserved for Jewish courses offered to the community’s college students and for its on-site business school. Teachers at the school and community workers will live in the 30 apartments within the complex.
Yanky
WOW! That’s amazing!
Proud to be A Lubavitcher
Mazal Tov! Awesome News! May Every Shliach have such a Golden opportunity!
Inspired
wow. the rebbe’s kochos shining through!
Inspired
Wow! I am completely amazed, boggled, dumbfounded, astonished….. at the growth of this community, led by their wonderful shluchim.
This is beyond magnificent!Rabbi Shmuel and Chani Kaminetzki are true examples of what the rebbes shluchim should be.
I still remember as a seminary student sitting at their shabbos table while on a tour of russia and ukraine, and listening to their stories of how they first arrived, young, newly married, to a place devoid of any outward signs of Yiddishkeit, and now- well now,see what they have accomplished! Wow!
avi
i think rabbi butman need to change his slogan of “moshiach is in the air”
this sounds like moshiach’s times to me.