ODESA, AUGUST 8th, 2013, CONTEXT-PRICHERNOMORIE ― Odesa Jewish Community “Chabad Shomrey Shabbos” will create Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre in Odesa, Context-Prichernomorie correspondent reports.

Press Secretary of the community Berl Kapulkin reported today, 8 August.

According to Mr Kapulkin, Chabad activists in Odesa announced plans to build the city’s second Jewish museum.

Berl Kapulkin, said the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Centre is scheduled to open soon on Deribasovskaya Street in the heart of Odesa’s old city, according to the news site Odeskaya Zhizn. The director will be Pavel Kozlenko, the former head of Odesa’s Holocaust Museum.

“Visitors will be able to look at the world through the eyes of Odesa Jews,” Kozlenko said.

In 1939, approximately 30 percent of Odesa’s 600 thousand residents were Jewish, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Black Sea port city served as an important centre for European Jewry and Zionist activism, according to the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum, but 99 thousand Odesan Jews died in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis and their Romanian allies.

Today, the city has about 45 thousand Jews, according to the European Jewish Congress.

Odesa’s Migdal Jewish Community Centre opened a small Jewish museum in 2002. Run from an apartment of roughly 1,700 square feet, the Migdal Jewish museum is headed by historian Mikhail Rashkovetskiy and has some 7 thousand items.