When the grand Hotel Bristol was built in Odessa in 1899 more than a third of the city's population was Jewish. Today Israeli President Reuven Rivlin arrives at the hotel for the 75th anniversary of the massacre at Babi Yar when more than 33,000 Jews and nearly 70,000 Roma and political prisoners were killed in Ukraine by the Nazis. (There were further mass killings in Odessa in 1941 and 1942). Rivlin will address parliament and participate in a conference at the Bristol Hotel about his ‘ideological mentor’, the Odessa-born Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), the subject of an exhibition in the city’s Literary Museum.
