Russia to launch online guide to Jewish history of Yekaterinburg

The Russian city of Yekaterinburg will launch an online guide to the Jewish history of the city in honor of its 300th anniversary, Russian state media TASS reported on Tuesday.

The guide currently exists in an in-person medium and this year won the 5th All-Russian Competition for Best Practices in the Field of Ethnic Relations.

The Russian news agency announced that it will host a press conference regarding the launch of the online guide to Jewish Yekaterinburg.

Sergey Plakhotin, the deputy head of Yekaterinburg, will speak at the conference along with Museum of the History of Yekaterinburg researcher Ekaterina Kaluznikova and Irina Gutkina, the director of the Yekaterinburg Jewish Cultural Center.

As part of the "Unknown Yekaterinburg" project, visitors and residents of Yekaterinburg will be able to independently create and explore routes that will provide educational material about the history of the Ural city’s Jewish community. 

Yekaterinburg has a Jewish community with its own Chabad center, located centrally within the city itself.

The Jewish community in Yekaterinburg is small, and in 2003, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported that the city had a population of only 13,000 Jews. Nevertheless, Jews from the city have risen to prestigious leadership roles.

In 2013, Yekaterinburg elected Yevgeny Roizman, a man of patrilineal Jewish heritage, to the position of mayor.

The execution site of Russia's last tsar

Yekaterinburg is famously known as the site of the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family. According to the US embassy in Russia, it is Russia’s third or fourth most populated city with 1.5 million people.

The TASS press conference dedicated to the launch of the online guide will be held in a hybrid, in-person and online format. However, the news agency announced that entrance to the event will only be open to previously accredited media representatives.