Latvia - Jews
Since the late 1500s, the Jewish people of Latvia have demonstrated incredible perseverance and courage through inconceivable trials and persecutions. The first Jewish settlements in Latvia appeared in the late 16th century. Through steady immigration, expansion, and steadfast resilience, the community grew and spread across the country. As the Jewish population expanded, they contributed immeasurably to the economic, industrial, and cultural development of Latvia. These accomplishments came despite frequently being forced to cope with anti-Semitic laws and cultural prejudice.
Jews had contributed to Latvia’s heritage since the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century, a Jewish man named Abraham Kuntze invented the famous Rigas Balzam (Latvia’s signature liquor). Latvia’s Jews backed the independence movement in the early twentieth century, with hundreds volunteering for service in the Latvian Army and fighting heroically during the war for independence.
Latvia, which gained its independence and established a parliamentary democracy following the Great War, accepted and even to some extent encouraged a Jewish presence. Latvia’s Jews thrived during the independence period of the 1920s and 30s, helping write Latvia’s constitution. Jews served in the army and in government and formed a wide range of political parties - from religious to socialist Zionist - that were represented in the hundred seat Saeima, Latvia's parliament. The Jewish bloc won six seats in the first election, in 1920. Zigfrids Meierovics, the first Foreign Minister of Latvia, and twice Prime Minister, had a Jewish father. And among the socialist and communist opposition, it could be said that Jews predominated, many even volunteering to fight in Spain with the International Brigades against Franco.
The Great War and the emergence of an independent Latvia led to shifts in ethnic composition. By 1935, when the total population was about 1.9 million, the proportion of Latvians had increased to 77.0 percent of the population, and the percentages for all other groups had decreased. In spite of heavy war casualties and the exodus of many Latvians to Russia, in absolute terms the number of Latvians had grown by 155,000 from 1897 to 1935, marking the highest historical level of Latvian presence in the republic. Other groups, however, declined, mostly as a result of emigration. The largest change occurred among Germans (from 121,000 to 62,100) and Jews (from 142,000 to 93,400).
To judge from population and emigration numbers, the interwar years were good for Jews in Latvia. In Riga alone, the Jewish population nearly doubled between 1920 and 1935, going from 24,000 to 44,000. Even at the height of the Zionist movement's popularity, very few of these Jews went to Palestine - only 75 went in 1931. By the late 1930s, by one estimate there were approximately 93,000 Latvian Jews were living and prospering in the country.
Anti-Semitism was present, especially among the members of the local National Socialist Party. And the 1934 coup by the authoritarian Karlis Ulmanis made life more difficult for Jews. Leftist Zionist youth groups like Hashomer Hatzair were outlawed (the rightist Betar, whose mission the Fascists at least respected, was untouched). Businesses were nationalized, which affected many Jewish capitalists. But with the alternatives of Stalin to the east and Hitler to the west, Latvian Jews stayed put.
On 23 August 1939. Molotov and Ribbentrop sealed the nonaggression pact between Hitler and Stalin that placed the Baltic States in the Soviet "sphere of influence." By early October 1939, the Soviets were mobilizing thirty thousand troops for Latvia. When the Soviets arrived in Latvia in 1940, they shut down Jewish institutions and seized Jews’ property. When the Soviets deported tens of thousands of Latvians to Siberia, hundreds of Latvian Jews were deported as well.
Some Jews had memories of being treated well by the Germans after the Great War and hopes that the same would be true again. Even if they wanted to, many could not leave in time. Only a small number, about 10,000, fled farther east into the Soviet Union. The vast majority, about 78,000 by one estimate, were stuck. In the summer of 1941, Nazi troops occupied Latvia displacing the Russians, who had occupied Latvia just a year earlier. Within days of the occupation, the Nazis issued special decrees restricting Jewish rights and establishing ghettos. Shortly after the Germans arrived in Latvia, they created two Jewish ghettos. One was for able-bodied men, the other for women, children and the disabled. Jews from surrounding countries were forcibly transported to Latvian camps. Tens of thousands were murdered. Latvia was a killing zone.
On 29 November 1941, 15,000 Jews were driven outside of the city to the Rumbula / Rumboli / Rumbuli Forest, told to undress and lie down, and then shot in the head. A week and a half later, another 10,000 Jews were taken to Rumbuli and murdered. In this manner the Nazis executed all the women, children, elderly and disabled men. A progress report six months after the German invasion, signed by the head of one of the mobile killing units, put the Jewish death toll at 63,238.
In all, roughly 70,000 to 80,000 Latvian Jews - almost 90 percent of the total population – were murdered. By the conclusion of World War II, tragically, only 14,000 Latvian Jews remained. By another account, of the 35,000 Jews who lived in Latvia at the time of German occupation in 1941, just 300 survived. "Very few Latvian Jews escaped because the general population was not sympathetic to aiding the Jews," says William Schulman, director of the Holocaust Resource Center at Queensborough Community College. "The Germans made use of the Latvians to guard the Jews and persecute them, to send them to their death. So there are very few memoirs of survivors."
Unlike the camp survivors liberated by Americans or British who were immediately assigned to `displaced persons' camps and given medical treatment, those freed by the Russians were left to fend for themselves. After the war, a certain number of Jews from other parts of the Soviet Union settled in Latvia. Many of them had already endured antireligious campaigns under Stalin, and there were many obstacles placed in the way of reviving Jewish religious activity. Most former Latvian synagogues were confiscated by the state for other uses, and nowhere in the entire Soviet Union did there exist any centers for rabbinical education. In the years after the War, Jews from surrounding regions relocated in Latvia -- rebuilding their community to more than 36,000 people.
In the aftermath of the greatest evil ever perpetrated against a people, the Latvian Jews marched on -- restoring their culture and society, fighting against the oppression of Soviet rule. Latvia became one of the centers of Zionist dissidence and Jewish national movements in the Soviet Union. Jewish activists struggled for the right to immigrate to Israel and to openly honor the memory of Holocaust victims. Thousands emigrated to Israel, the United States and Western Europe.
Restitution of individual property confiscated or nationalized during the World War II period and thereafter was substantially completed under an expired denationalization law. However, some religious groups--including the Lutheran, Orthodox Christian, and Jewish communities--continued to claim additional communal and heirless properties. The status of many of these remaining properties was the subject of complicated legal and bureaucratic processes concerning ambiguous ownership, competing claims, and the destruction of the Jewish communities to whom properties belonged before World War II. The Jewish community has identified a number of properties for restitution. In 2008, the government established a task force to study the community’s outstanding claims and consider solutions. The task force did not release its report by the end of the year, and members of local and international Jewish communities continued to urge the government to resolve this issue.
According to the 2011 census, 6,416 persons, or 0.3 percent of the population, identified themselves as ethnically Jewish. By other estimates the Jewish community numbered approximately 11,000, and was estimated as high as 17,500 in 1997. After Latvia's independence in 1991, there was a resurgence of interest in religious affairs. Five Jewish congregations served the growth in demand for services. There was one synagogue operating in Riga, and a newly renovated synagogue opened in Daugavpils in April 2006.
The Jewish community is largely secular and Russian-speaking. In both Estonia and Latvia, most Jews (like ethnic Russians) were born elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and are thus unable to obtain citizenship. According to the 1989 census, of the non-Latvian ethnic groups in the country, only 53 percent of Jews in Latvia had been born in Latvia. In 1989 only ninety-six out of 1,000 Latvians had completed higher education. The most educated were Jews, with a rate of 407 per 1,000 completing higher education. Today, East European anti-Semitism has less to do with real Jews than with the abstract image of the Jews. It's a euphemism or codeword for imported, foreign, Western, modern, and uniquely in Latvia, Russian.
On 16 March 2006, Latvian Waffen SS veterans held a ceremony at the Cathedral in Riga and at a World War II cemetery near Riga in honor of their dead comrades. On the same day approximately 200 nationalists demonstrated near the Occupation Museum in Riga on behalf of a former Latvian Waffen SS unit despite a ban by the city authorities. A total of 65 persons were detained for participating in an unauthorized demonstration. On May 24, the Rezekne police reported that vandals had damaged a memorial which was scheduled to be unveiled on June 4 in memory of 120 local Jews who were killed during the Holocaust. In addition anti-Semitism continued to be expressed in Internet chat rooms and forums.
Anti-Semitic sentiments persisted in some segments of society, manifested in occasional public comments and the vandalism of Jewish sites. In addition, books and other publications addressing the World War II period generally dwelt on the effects of the Soviet and Nazi occupations on the country and on ethnic Latvians rather than the Holocaust or some citizens’ role in it. On 13 December 2011, the hosts of an independent radio program called “Age of the Native Land,” broadcast on the University of Latvia’s radio station, used offensive terms for Jews, questioned generally accepted statistics of Jews killed in the country during the Holocaust, argued that Jews were the instigators of Soviet deportations of Latvians to Siberia during the 1941 Soviet occupation, and criticized the level of attention given to the Holocaust, in their view, at the expense of attention to the suffering of other groups.
Jewish cemetery desecration and monument vandalism continued to be a problem. On June 28, a Jewish cemetery in Valdemarpils was desecrated with swastikas. On 17 May 2011 in Riga’s Second Forest Cemetery, the grave of Zanis Lipke (a protector of Latvian Jews in World War II) was vandalized. The foreign minister publicly condemned the act. In January 2011 police arrested three persons for vandalizing 89 headstones in the New Jewish Cemetery of Riga on December 7, 2010. The perpetrators, teenage members of the Russian-speaking community, pled guilty to possession of neo-Nazi materials. The three arrestees admitted their guilt, and their cases were pending as of the end of 2011.
On May 8, two persons from the Russian-speaking community painted Nazi symbols and anti-Semitic statements in the Latvian language on a memorial to Jewish Holocaust victims. Police promptly arrested the perpetrators. The perpetrators confessed, claiming they intended to cast suspicion on Latvian nationalist parties. On September 7, the defendants pled guilty, and a court sentenced them to 50 hours of community service.
The Latvian postal service produced first-day covers to celebrate the jubilee of the air force, one for domestic use with a swastika [initially the roundel of the Latvian Air Force], the other with a blank hole for international use. When some protested this to the President of the Latvian Parliament, he responded that the swastika was traditionally a symbol of happiness, not for the Jews of Latvia.
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