Ukraine's Rocket City on the Great River Bend — the third-largest city in Ukraine bends around the Dnipro River at a grand meander, once the secret Soviet centre of space rocket production (the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau built the Soviet SS-18 ICBM here), with a riverside embankment and museum of Jewish history that anchors one of Ukraine's most vibrant Jewish cultural revivals
Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk, renamed 2016) is the third-largest city in Ukraine — a city of one million on the great bend of the Dnipro River in east-central Ukraine, 400km southeast of Kyiv. Dnipro was one of the most classified cities in the Soviet Union: the Yuzhnoye Design Bureau (still operating) developed the R-36 ICBM (NATO code: Satan/SS-18), the world's largest ICBM, at a closed facility that appears on no Soviet maps until the 1990s. The city's industrial legacy is being reframed through culture: the Menorah Complex — a Jewish cultural and business centre on Sholom-Aleichem Stre…
The area was a Cossack fortress (Sich) site and an important Zaporozhian Cossack territory. The city was founded in 1776 as Yekaterinoslav ('glory of Catherine') by Grigory Potemkin for Catherine the Great as a planned southern Russian capital — more ambitious than Moscow or St Petersburg, on a grand scale that was never fully realised. The city's Jewish history began in the 1850s when Jews were first permitted to settle in the region; by 1900 the Jewish community was 37% of the city's population and one of the most culturally productive in the Russian Empire (Shalom Aleichem lived and wrote…