(JTA) – Ukrainian officials have agreed to renovate an old army airport near the city of Uman and open it to commercial flights, including from Israel. The renovation, reported Monday by the news site Life, is being made possible thanks to a $140 million investment by unnamed parties from the United States.

The opening of an airport near Uman, situated 120 miles south of Kiev, has the potential of redirecting from the international airports of Kiev and Odessa tens of thousands of Jewish pilgrims who visit Uman to be near the gravesite of the 18th-century luminary Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, a spiritual father of the Breslav Hasidic movement. Some 25,000 pilgrims come on Rosh Hashanah alone. The pilgrimage often has created friction between the new arrivals and locals, many of whom resent the cordoning off by police of neighborhoods for the pilgrims. In 2016, approximately 50,000 pilgrims came to Uman, with 90 percent of them passing through Kiev’s main airport.

The Ukrainian lawmaker Maxim Polyakov last month said he had brokered a meeting between Ukraine’s trade minister, Stepan Kubiv, and “investors from the United States and Israel,” Life reported. They had “discussed the international airport construction project in the city of Uman,” Polyakov said at the time. But building a special airport for the pilgrims is not financially viable for the Ukrainian state without foreign investment, according to Life. In 2016, revenues from inbound pilgrims totaled $350,000.