Jewish Odessa Tour
Different from all others – this is what Odessa streets as well as its decorations and literary fame keep saying. Odessa is different in all ways and first of all in attitude to Jews. It became the first city of the Russian Empire, where Jews were allowed to settle. By the time of the WWII Odessa Jewish community became the third largest in the world, after New York and Warsaw, having reached almost 47% of the city population.
Long before the State of Israel was founded, the Jewish community in Odessa raised money for the land where Tel Aviv was established. Odessa was the birthplace of Revisionist Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky, of essayist and Zionist intellectual Ahad Ha’am and Israeli national poet Haim Nahman Bialik. And it was in this Black Sea port city that modern Hebrew was born in the poems of Shaul Tchernichovsky and where Tel Aviv’s first mayor, Meir Dizengoff, spent his formative years.
With our professional guide you’ll visit all main Jewish heritage sites of Odessa, find out about the history of the Odessa Jewish community, dark days of Holocaust, and get acquainted with modern Jewish Odessa.
3h Jewish Heritage tour of Odessa highlights are: 2 main city Synagogues, The Brody Synagogue, The Holocaust Memorial, The International Community Center, Yevreiskaya (Jewish) street, The House of Bialik, The House of Zhabotinskiy, The House of Palestine Committee.
Highlights:
1. Odessa Holocaust Memorial
There are several memorials those commemorate the Jews murdered by the Romanian occupiers and German Einsatzgruppen (SS mobile killing squads) in Odessa during World War II. On October 16, 1941, following two-and-a-half months of bitter fighting, the Soviet Red Army surrendered Odessa. Romanian troops backed by the Nazi-German Wehrmacht marched into the city. Odessa was... 2. The Brody Synagogue
In the early 1800s Jewish immigrants began to stream into Odessa from Europe, many of them came from the town of Brody. After using a leased a small house as a synagogue for about 20 years, in 1860 they got a permission to begin building a new synagogue. The Brody Synagogue was designed by the...
