Ukraine city names street for Lubavitcher Rebbe

2016/6/30 15:23:05

Dnipropetrovsk, home to 50,000 Jews, honors Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who fled the city in 1930s

 

Photo: Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (photo by Mordechai Baron ex Wikipedia)

 


By JTA June 29, 2016:

 

The city of Dnipropetrovsk in eastern Ukraine named a street after Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last and most prominent Lubavitcher rebbe, who fled the city after Communist agents arrested his father there in the 1930s.

 

Menachem Mendel Schneerson Street was unveiled in Dnipropetrovsk Sunday by its chief rabbi, Shmuel Kaminezki, who is one of the Chabad movement’s most senior envoys to Ukraine. The change came amid a larger national policy to replace the names of Soviet-era figures with Ukrainian national heroes.

 

“This is a very important event for the city and for the country in general,” Kaminezki said at the renaming ceremony for the street, along which a Jewish school is located.

 

“I want to note that it is not the Jewish community that initiated this name change The proposal to name a street after the Rebbe was received from the Ukrainians, who know the history of their city and its country and are proud of it,” he said in a statement published on the community’s website.

 

Dnipropetrovsk, which is one Ukraine’s most important Jewish hubs and has a Jewish community of 50,000, already has a Sholem Aleichem Street, named for the Yiddish writer. The community owns a giant, 22-story menorah-shaped complex there that was opened in 2012 and cost $100 million to build.

 

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http://www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine- ... et-for-lubavitcher-rebbe/

 

 

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