History of the Jews in Latvia

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Riga around 1800 (from left): Polish seasonal worker, Jewish cloth merchant, Latvian boy as a milk seller, Latvian and German maid. Graphic by Johann Christoph Brotze

The history of the Jews in Latvia began in the 16th century with the settlement of Jews in Courland and Latgale . Despite political disadvantages from the Polish, Swedish and Russian rulers and the German-Baltic upper class, an independent Jewish culture developed . At the end of the 19th century, the Jewish population in some cities of the Courland and Vitebsk Governors was more than 50%. The All-Russian census of 1897 counted 142,315 Jewish inhabitants in Livonia , Courland and Latgale. During the Second World War , almost all of the 75,000 or so Latvian Jews who came under the control of National Socialist Germany were murdered.

Until 1621

The peoples in the Baltic States did not come into contact with Jews until the Middle Ages. After the land was taken over and Christianized by German crusaders , Jews were forbidden to enter the territory of the Livonian Confederation . A decree of the order master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen from 1309 has been received in writing. The ban was motivated by both trade policy and religion. While Jewish communities increasingly formed in neighboring Lithuania since the 14th century, there are only isolated references to the residence of Jewish traders in the religious state in the sources. When the sovereignty of Poland-Lithuania was recognized with the Union of Vilnius in 1561 , one of the treaty points dealt with the Jews. They were not permitted to "conduct any trade or levy duties or taxes at any time in the whole of Livonia." Many documents, decrees and petitions to the Polish Sejm are known from the following decades , which deal with the expulsion of “prowling” Jewish and Scottish traders. Due to the protection of Polish and Lithuanian aristocrats, Jewish traders increasingly settled in during this time, despite all the prohibitions, and formed an unpleasant competition for the local industry. The first Jewish community in Latvia came into being after the Bishop of Courland Johann von Münchhausen invited Jewish families from Central Europe to settle in order to increase trade and industry. These immigrants spoke German or Yiddish.

1621 to 1721

When northern Livonia was conquered by Gustav Adolf in 1621 , this development stagnated here. In strictly Protestant Sweden there was no tolerance towards non-Christians and efforts were made to induce Jews to change their faith. In Riga, there was at that time the establishment of a special hostel Jews as the exclusive residence for the Jewish traders who in the spring with the Strusen the Daugava came down to sell their wares.

In the neighboring Duchy of Courland and Semigallia , the development took a different course. The 1561 contract of submission provided for a nominal upper limit to the number of Jewish families who could live in Courland. After the failed Khmelnytskyi uprising and the related anti-Semitic tendencies in many European countries, more and more expelled Jews settled in Courland. At that time, Duke Jakob Kettler pursued a mercantilist policy involving Jewish bankers, tax collectors and other specialists. In the 18th century, Jewish craftsmen and traders in Kurland occupied a “socio-economic niche” and lived comparatively integrated between the Latvian and German-Baltic populations of the country.

Polish-Jewish trader in Riga. Detail from a drawing by Johann Christoph Brotze around 1800

In Latgale (Latvian: Latgale), the first Jewish families settled in what is now Krāslava in the 16th century . These were families who had to flee Russia before Ivan IV . Their number increased significantly after the pogroms in Belarus and Ukraine as a result of the Chiemielski uprising. At the end of the 17th century, around 2000 Jews lived in what was then Polish Livonia , who had their own communities in Daugavpils and Krāslava. The cultural difference to the Kurland Jews consisted in more strict religiosity, use of the Polish-Yiddish language and also greater poverty.

1721 to 1842

In the 18th century, what is now Latvia became part of the Russian Empire , whose rulers traditionally had a hostile attitude towards Jews. A decree of 1727 expelling all Jews from Russia was not published in the Livonia Governorate. During the reign of Empress Elisabeth , however, all relevant ordinances had to be strictly implemented, although the commercial interests of the city of Riga were severely affected. Riga's trade with Poland, Polish-Livonia and Lithuania at that time was largely conducted by Jewish factors and dispatchers. Various requests by the city of Riga to the Empress to allow Jewish traders to stay for the purpose of trading remained unsuccessful. Other port cities such as Königsberg, Memel, Libau and Ventspils profited during this time. It was not until twenty years later that Russia's policy changed under Empress Catherine II. In addition to foreign colonists, the Jewish part of the population was to be brought in to settle and stimulate trade in the south of the empire. Due to the widespread anti-Semitism , however, the word "Jews" was largely avoided in the official documents. On February 4, 1785, the town of Schlock ( Sloka ) on the Bay of Riga, recently ceded by Courland, received market rights. According to the law, "both Russian free people and foreigners, regardless of their birth or religion, were allowed to settle there and be enrolled in the citizenship or merchant class". In Schlock, only 30 km from Riga, there were soon 400 Jewish citizens registered, most of them staying in Riga.

When Polish Livonia came to the Russian Empire through the first partition of Poland in 1772 , around 5,000 Jews lived there. In cities like Daugavpils they made up more than half of the population. Various decrees worsened the situation of the local Jews, who now had to live in special ghettos under extensive self-administration. In Courland, which became Russian in 1795, there were several thousand Jewish residents at the end of the 18th century, who were relatively wealthy despite various hostilities, disadvantages and pogroms.

As a result, more and more Jewish families settled in Riga in the first half of the 19th century. In 1840 the Jewish community in Riga was able to found a Jewish school, the Israelite Community School in Riga .

1842 to 1918

Old song, new landscape : German-Baltic baron and Jewish timber merchant present the cleared forests of Courland. Latvian caricature from 1907.

It was not until 1842, two years after the school was founded, that the Jewish community in Riga received official approval as a Rigi Hebrew community . It thus became the first officially recognized Jewish community in the Russian Empire outside the Pale of Settlement .

After the loss of the Crimean War , various liberal reforms and innovations took place under Alexander II's government , which also decisively improved the legal situation of the Jews. In the course of industrialization , immigrant Jewish craftsmen and traders found employment in the growing cities. In 1881 the 14,222 Jews of Riga made up 8.4% of the city's population. In 1897 there were 51,169 Jews in the Courland Governorate, 63,851 in Latgale ( Vitebsk Governorate ) and 27,295 in the Livonia Governorate (including Riga). There were many Jews among the richest manufacturers and entrepreneurs. Crafts such as hatmakers, jewelers and shoemakers were also Jewish domains. A lively cultural life developed with its own schools, hospitals and societies.

While the residents of Riga and the cities of Courland preferred the German language, the Jews in Latgale and the new immigrants from Lithuania and Poland mostly spoke Yiddish or Russian . The “Kurland Jews” generally had a better school education, were more affluent and religiously more liberal , in contrast to the Latgalian “Reissian Jews” (Yiddish: Russian Jews), who were mostly poorer and religiously orthodox . The relationship between Baltic Germans and Jews was relatively tolerant at that time, with the two groups partially merging. In the emerging Latvian literature, the Jewish trader is an integral part of rural life, for example in the novel Landvermesszeiten (Mērnieku Laiki) by Reinis Kaudzīte and Matīss Kaudzīte .

After the assassination attempt on Alexander II in 1881, there was increased anti-Semitism in Russia with repressive laws. The Jewish intellectuals reacted by turning to Zionism or social democracy . During the revolution of 1905 there was broad cooperation between the Jewish and Latvian social democratic organizations, the federal government and the LSDSP . When the First World War broke out, the Jewish ethnic group, like the German-Baltic ethnic group, was accused of being friendly to the Germans. The defeats of the Russian army in Lithuania in 1915 were blamed on the Jews who were said to have spied for the Germans in the rear of the front. After an incident near Kužiai in Lithuania, the Russian Commander-in-Chief Nikolai Romanov issued the order on April 17 (30) to deport all Lithuanian and Courland Jews to the interior of Russia. About 40,000 people were affected by this measure, many of whom died on the transport. Further deportations could not be carried out because of the arrival of the German army. The goals of the Jewish and Latvian political organizations differed significantly for the first time during this period. After the 1917 revolution , the Hebrew National Democratic Party ( Ebreju nacionāli demokrātiskā partija ) was founded. There were prominent Jewish representatives among the Bolsheviks and the communist Stučka government, as well as in the Baltic National Army . Only after July 1919 did the ENDP participate in the Latvian People's Council , where it had 14 representatives and a minister.

1918 to 1941

In the independent Republic of Latvia in the interwar period, the ethnic minorities had extensive cultural autonomy. The demographic development was largely stable as the population growth was offset by emigration to Palestine and America. Internal migration mainly resulted in an influx to the capital Riga. Jewish entrepreneurs and manufacturers played an important role in economic life. In 1924, six major Jewish banks owned 60% of Latvia's bank capital. In political life, the ENDP lost its importance because it only represented the interests of entrepreneurs and capitalists. Instead, Zionist and social democratic organizations gained influence. There was also a Marxist Jewish organization Bund with an illegal wing Kampf Bund .

While Russian was mostly taught in Jewish schools at the beginning of the 1920s, Yiddish and Latvian became increasingly important. In 1930 45.82% of the Jewish students learned Yiddish, 36% Hebrew, 13% German and 5% Russian. The most important Yiddish newspapers were Yidische Bilder (יידישע בילדער) and Frimorgen , both of which appeared in Riga.

In the 1920s, on the one hand, a new form of anti-Semitism emerged, which now related less to religion and way of life than to racial origin. Various Latvian nationalist newspapers regularly published extremely anti-Semitic texts. There were also multiple riots against synagogues . One of the points in the program of the pro-fascist organization Perkonkrusts , founded in 1930 as Ugunskrusts , was the creation of conditions that were supposed to force the Jewish residents to leave the country. The Baltic Germans also increasingly adopted National Socialist anti-Semitism from Germany. On the other hand, the life of Zigfrīds Anna Meierovics is an indication that in the 1920s a Jewish descent in Latvia - in contrast to other countries in East Central Europe - was not an obstacle to a successful political career.

In the leading group around Kārlis Ulmanis , which ruled Latvia authoritarian after a coup in 1934, no anti-Semites were represented. All anti-Semitic newspapers, among others, were banned. The ultra-national Perkonkrust was forced to carry out its activities underground. The policy of nationalizing banks and big industry ran counter to the interests of many Jewish financiers and entrepreneurs. From 1934, therefore, began an outflow of Jewish capital into the USA and Great Britain. Many specialists emigrated.

Until the "annexation" of the Sudetenland to National Socialist Germany in 1938, Latvia repeatedly accepted groups of refugees from Central Europe. The threat from Hitler's Germany and the news about the treatment of Polish Jews after the occupation in 1939 meant that the majority of the Jewish population of Latvia welcomed the protection treaty with the Soviet Union that was imposed in 1939 . There are isolated reports of Jews who euphorically welcomed the invasion of the Red Army . However, the reality after the capture of Latvia by Soviet troops in 1940 was different. Religious activity was a criminal offense, and Jewish and Zionist organizations were banned. The plan of the Soviet head of government, Josef Stalin , was to deport or kill the political, intellectual, spiritual and economic strata of the new Soviet republics, including Latvia, in order to make room for new Soviet settlers of Russian origin. The annihilation of the Baltic elite (and with it many Jews) reached its climax on June 13 and 14, 1941. The arrests and subsequent deportations and killings affected at least 1212 Jewish people, which corresponds to 13% of all those arrested. About half did not survive the transport and storage time.

1941 to 1945

Members of the Latvian auxiliary police guard Jewish women and children before their execution. Šķēde near Liepāja on December 15, 1941
Fragment of the choral synagogue in Riga that was destroyed by the National Socialists

Due to the rapid advance of the German Wehrmacht after the attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the entire territory of Latvia came under the control of National Socialist Germany by July 8, 1941. This marked the beginning of the annihilation of almost all of the local Jewish population (who had been deported from the German Reich to the Baltic States). Only about 15,000 out of 90,000 were able to save themselves with the withdrawal of Soviet troops to the east. Of the Jews who remained in Latvia, only a few survived the next three years.

In March 1941, while preparing for Operation Barbarossa, Adolf Hitler ordered the complete murder of all Jews in the conquered areas. To carry out this genocide in the Baltic region, Einsatzgruppe A of the Security Police and SD was formed under the leadership of SS Brigade Leader Walter Stahlecker . It was planned to involve the anti-Semitic forces in the Baltic States in the extermination campaigns. On the night of June 23-24, 1941, the Holocaust in Latvia began with the murder of six local Jewish residents in the Grobiņa municipal cemetery . The next day there were shootings by the SD in Durbe , Priekule and Asīte . On June 29, the first Latvian auxiliary unit of the SD was formed in Jelgava and the Perkonkrust member Mārtins Vagulans was used as its commander. This roughly 300-strong unit was involved in the murder of around 2,000 Jews in Zemgale in the summer of 1941.

After the capture of Riga, Stahlecker organized an anti-Jewish pogrom. Among other things, Viktors Arājs stood out, who was allowed to recruit a later notorious armed unit for the liquidation of communists and Jews. The emerging Latvian self-protection units were also ordered to shoot. In July 1941, under the supervision of Rudolf Batz , Rudolf Lange and Horst Barth, mass shootings occurred in the Bi Waldernieki forest, killing 4,000 people.

Similar massacres were carried out in the cities of Liepāja and Ventspils under the command of Erhard Grauel . On the road from Kuldīga to Ventspils, there was soon a large sign saying “Windau is free of Jews”. The head of Einsatzgruppe 1b, Erich Ehrlinger , and his successor, Joachim Hamann , led the killing of over 10,000 Jewish residents in Daugavpils and the surrounding area with the active assistance of the local auxiliary police . At Rēzekne there were 2,500 fatalities.

By October 1941 a total of 35,000 Jews had been shot in various cities in Latvia. Those who remained alive were humiliated, disadvantaged and robbed in every possible way. The head of the Reichskommissariat Ostland Hinrich Lohse pursued a policy of exploiting cheap labor. The Riga Ghetto , the Daugava Ghetto and later the Libau Ghetto were created for this purpose, and the extermination was temporarily interrupted. In the ghettos, the inhabitants had to live in confined spaces, without adequate food or medical care, and were only allowed to leave their fences for the purpose of work detachments.

At the end of October 1941, Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were working on plans to kill the Central European, mainly German Jews on the territory of Latvia in extermination camps . The first step was to kill all Latvian Jews in order to make room for newcomers in the ghettos. Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln was sent to Riga with special powers to carry out these actions . The construction of a concentration camp began in Salaspils . On November 30, 1941, the Riga ghetto was forcibly evacuated except for 4,000 able-bodied people. As a result, 27,800 people were shot in the forest of Rumbula . 962 of the fatalities belonged to a transport from Germany. Since there was still no free space in the ghetto, Jeckeln had them forwarded to the shooting site in Rumbula.

On December 15 and 17, another massacre took place at Šķēde north of Liepāja. At the end of 1941, Stahlecker and Jeckeln reported the extensive "settlement of the Jewish question in Latvia" to Berlin. 6,000 capable of work had been left alive with special permission. However, no specific extermination camps were set up in Latvia, as the Baltic States had become unsafe due to the success of the Red Army . In 1943 the ghettos were dissolved and the surviving inmates were transferred to the newly created Riga-Kaiserwald , Riga-Strasdenhof , Salaspils and Dondangen concentration camps for forced labor . As the front approached, the prisoners were then transported to Germany or Poland at the end of 1943. Until 1945 many of the Latvian Jews perished in concentration and extermination camps such as Auschwitz , Buchenwald and Treblinka .

1945 until today

After the war ended, those who fled to Russia in 1941 returned. Of the approximately 5,000 Latvian Jews who fought in the Red Army, 2,000 had died. Several hundred returned from the concentration camps in Central Europe. Some of those exiled by Soviet power in 1940 and 1941 were added later. The total number of former Latvian citizens of Jewish nationality or their descendants was around 14,000. The demographic number of Latvian Jews soon increased significantly as a result of immigration from Russia, Ukraine, and Central Asia. Most of these immigrants had Russian as their mother tongue. Jewish institutions and cultural institutions remained banned. At the end of Josef Stalin's rule , additional repression took place, like after the fabricated so-called doctors' conspiracy .

Since the 1960s, places of remembrance and memorials to the Holocaust have also been built in Latvia.

Israel's military victory in the 1967 Six Day War gave the Zionist movement among the Jews in the Soviet Union a strong boost. The large number of requests to leave the country increased the ruling class' doubts about the loyalty of the Jewish population. Increased efforts at Russification and restrictions on rights were the result. More than half of all Jews residing in Latvia emigrated to Israel or the West between 1968 and 1989. In the 1989 census, only 22.5% of the remaining 22,500 Jewish residents of the LSSR stated Yiddish as the family language. 27% spoke the Latvian national language.

By perestroika and the state independence of Latvia in 1990 a renewal of Jewish life with religious freedom was possible. Most of the local Jewish organizations pursued a course of integration into the Latvian state. In 2001 there were around 7,000 Jews in Latvia, most of them in the capital Riga, where a synagogue and various cultural institutions are also maintained.

See also

Well-known Jewish people from Latvia

literature

in order of appearance

History of the Jews in Latvia until 1940

  • Ruben J. Wunderbar: History of the Jews in the Provinces of Livonia and Courland. Since their earliest settlement there down to the present time. Hoffmann et al. Johannsohn, Mitau 1853, digitized .
  • Anton Buchholtz: History of the Jews in Riga up to the establishment of the Rigi Hebrew community in 1842. Kymmel, Riga 1899, digitized .
  • Josifs Šteimanis: Latvijas ebreju vēsture. DPU Saule, Daugavpils 1995, digitized version (Latvian).
  • Foundation for Church and Judaism Basel: From the history of the Jews in Latvia (= Judaica. Vol. 53, no. 4 = pp. 201–276, 1997, ISSN  0022-572X ). Foundation for Church and Judaism, Basel 1997.
  • Leo Dribins, Armands Gūtmanis, Marǵers Vestermanis: Latvijas ebreju kopiena vēsture, traģēdija, atdzimšana. LU Latvijas Vēstures Instītuta Apgāds, Riga 2001, ISBN 9984-601-16-1 (Latvian).
  • Svetlana Bogojavlenska: The Jewish Society in Courland and Riga, 1795–1915 . Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-77128-5 .

The Holocaust in Latvia

  • Max Kaufmann: Churbn Latvia. The extermination of the Jews of Latvia . Self-published, Munich 1947.
    • Makss Kaufmans: Churbn Latvia. Ebreju iznīcināšana Latvijā . Shamir, Riga 2014, ISBN 978-9934-8494-0-4 (Latvian translation supplemented with detailed comments).
  • Bernhard Press: Judenmord in Lettland 1941–1945 (= Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Series of documents, texts, materials. Vol. 4). 2nd, modified edition. Metropol, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-926893-13-3 .
  • Andrew Ezergailis: The Holocaust in Latvia. 1941-1944. The missing center. Historical Institute of Latvia, Riga 1996, ISBN 9984-9054-3-8 .
  • Marģers Vestermanis : Jews in Riga. On the trail of the life and work of a murdered minority. A historical guide. 3rd improved and expanded edition in German, 2nd edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 1996, ISBN 3-86108-263-2 .
  • Andrej Angrick , Peter Klein: The “Final Solution” in Riga. Exploitation and extermination 1941–1944 (= publications by the Ludwigsburg Research Center at the University of Stuttgart. Vol. 6). Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2006, ISBN 3-534-19149-8 .
  • Bert Hoppe , Hildrun Glass (arr.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 , Volume 7: Soviet Union with annexed areas I: Occupied Soviet areas under German military administration, the Baltic States and Transnistria . De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 .

Web links

Commons : Judaism in Latvia  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

References and footnotes

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Leo Dribins: Latvijas ebreju kopiena. 2001.
  2. ^ Anton Buchholtz: History of the Jews in Riga. 1899, p. 2.
  3. ↑ Leo Dribins: Latvijas ebreju kopiena. 2001. Section: Piltenes Vārti.
  4. ^ Christoph Georg von Ziegenhorn: State law of the duchies of Curland and Semgallia. Kanter, Königsberg 1772, or Foundation for Church and Judaism Basel: From the history of the Jews in Latvia. 1997, p. 219.
  5. ^ Foundation for Church and Judaism Basel: From the history of the Jews in Latvia. 1997, p. 225.
  6. ↑ Leo Dribins: Latvijas ebreju kopiena. 2001. Section: Latgales kahali.
  7. ↑ Buchholtz: History of the Jews in Riga. 1899, p. 35.
  8. ↑ Buchholtz: History of the Jews in Riga. 1899, p. 58.
  9. ↑ Buchholtz: History of the Jews in Riga. 1899, p. 80.
  10. ↑ Johann Christoph Brotze: Schlock. In: Nordic Miscellanees . 11./12. St. 1798, pp. 425-430, here p. 427.
  11. ↑ a b Ulrike von Hirschhausen : The limits of commonality. Germans, Latvians, Russians and Jews in Riga 1860–1914 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-35153-4 , p. 152.
  12. ↑ Ulrike von Hirschhausen: The limits of commonality. Germans, Latvians, Russians and Jews in Riga 1860–1914 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, p. 155.
  13. ↑ In the linguistic usage of the time, the “Kurland Jews” often included those Jews from Rigans whose families were the first to settle in Riga. Because most of these families came from Courland.
  14. ↑ They were so named because they did not come from the Baltic Governments .
  15. ↑ Ulrike von Hirschhausen: The limits of commonality. Germans, Latvians, Russians and Jews in Riga 1860–1914 . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, p. 158.
  16. ↑ Makss Kaufman: Churbn Latvia. Ebreju iznīcināšana Latvijā . Shamir, Riga 2014, ISBN 978-9934-8494-0-4 , pp. 60–61.
  17. ↑ Benjamin Conrad: Loyalty to a Latvian State? Baltic German politicians and the founding of Latvia 1918–1920 . In: Svetlana Bogojavlenska, Jan Kusber (ed.): Tradition and a new beginning. Research on the history of Latvia at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Small commemorative publication for Erwin Oberländer . Lit, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-643-12732-7 , pp. 33-53, here p. 49.
  18. ↑ Katrin Reichelt: Latvia under German occupation 1941–1944. The Latvian Participation in the Holocaust (= Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. Series of Documents, Texts, Materials. Vol. 78). Metropol, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-940938-84-8 , p. 58 ff. (At the same time: Berlin, Technical University, dissertation, 2010).