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Riga the capital of Latvia was founded in the thirteenth century – at different times it was under German, Polish, Swedish and Russian rule. From 1918 to 1940 it was the capital of independent Latvia.
In 1940 it was annexed to the Soviet Union with the rest of Latvia, and became the capital of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. Jews first settled in Riga in the seventeenth century. They were expelled from the city in 1742, but a few decades later Jews were again living there.
In 1935 the Jewish population of Riga was forty-three thousand, about half the total number of Jews in Latvia and eleven percent of the city’s total population.
Riga was the political and cultural centre of Latvian Jewry. It had Jewish schools with Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian or German as the language of instruction. There were seminars for kindergarten teachers, a rabbinical academy, a “people’s university”, a theatre, several hospitals, welfare institutions and three Yiddish dailies and several periodicals in different languages.
On 1 July 1941, nine days after the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Germans occupied Riga. Several thousand Jews – among them soldiers serving in the Red Army – managed to get out of the city when it was being evacuated, but many Jews from other places who had taken refuge in Riga were caught there.
On the first day of the occupation, Latvian volunteer units began arresting Jewish males by the thousands and imprisoning them in the Centralka and Terminka jails, in police headquarters, and in the cellars of the headquarters of Perkonkrust (Thundercross), the Latvian fascist organisation.
After a few days of torture and beatings, the prisoners were killed in the nearby Bikernek Forest and at other locations, but the precise number is not known. At that time a pogrom was launched inside the city, Jews were rounded up for forced labour, subjected to assault and rape, chased away from the food distribution lines, and denied treatment in the hospitals.
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Many Jews were driven out of their homes to make room for Germans, and their money, furnishings, and valuables were confiscated. On 4 July 1941 the Latvian volunteers set fire to the Chor synagogue, in the centre of Riga, leaving only the Pietstavas synagogue standing, since the adjacent buildings were inhabited by Latvians.
Between July and October 1941 the Germans issued one anti-Jewish decree after another. Jewish property was confiscated, and Jews had to register and to be identified by a Star of David. They were not allowed to use public transportation, walk on the sidewalk, frequent public places, attend any educational institution, or practice a profession (except for doctors, who were permitted to treat Jewish patients only).
Ritual slaughter was outlawed – Jews were permitted to purchase food in only three stores and they suffered from discrimination in the allocation of food rations. Any property still owned by Jews was put under tight control and conscription of Jews for forced labour was made official.
In mid- August a decree was enacted ordering all Jews into the ghetto, which had been set up in the Moscow quarter, a suburb north of Riga populated by Jews and poor Russians. By the time the ghetto was sealed off 29,602 Jews were concentrated there, made up of 15,738 women, 8,212 men and 5,652 children.
A high fence was erected around the ghetto and Latvian guards were posted at its gates to supervise exit and entry. The ghetto covered an area of 96,875 square feet and was extremely congested, most of the houses were dilapidated, and sanitary conditions and water supplies were totally inadequate.
Even before the ghetto was cut off from the rest of the world, an Altestenrat (Council of Elders) was appointed, chaired by Michael Elyashov, and a Jewish ghetto police was formed with Michael Rosenthal as its commander.
The Council of Elders and its sections and committees made efforts to improve living conditions in the ghetto, establishing a hospital, a medical clinic, and a pharmacy, a home for the aged, a laundry, a shoe repair shop and a variety of other services in which handicapped persons were put to work.
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A Labour exchange supplied the Germans with Jewish forced labour – the unskilled were employed in backbreaking work and the skilled artisans in their regular occupations. A few Jews with technical skills were given preferential treatment.
The women were employed in kitchen and cleaning jobs. Occasionally groups of Jews were sent to work outside the ghetto, in peat bogs or in farms, or on the construction of the Salaspils concentration camp, which was being set up on a nearby site. On the eve of the ghetto’s liquidation four thousand men and one thousand women were listed as workers, out of a total of eight thousand and sixteen thousand respectively.
On 11 October 1941 Himmler appointed SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln as Higher SS and Police Leader for Ostland, and in post war testimony that when he met Himmler in November 1941, Himmler said “that all Jews in the Ostland had to be destroyed to the last man.”
Read more here: http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/riga.html
The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team
www.HolocaustResearchProject.org
Copyright Carmelo Lisciotto H.E.A.R.T 2009
