JEWISH MUSEUM OF LATVIA (MUZEJS EBREJI LATVIJĀ)

This museum traces the history of the Rīga ghetto. From 1918 to 1940, Rīga was the capital of independent Latvia. Before World War II, about 43,000 Jews, or just over 10 percent of the city's population, lived in Rīga.

In August 1940 the Soviet Union annexed Latvia, and Rīga became the capital of the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR). The German army occupied Rīga on July¹, 1941. Soon after the German army entered the city, the Einsatzgruppen (mobile intervention units) and their Latvian auxiliaries exterminated several thousand Jews. In mid-August, the Germans ordered the creation of a ghetto in the southeastern district of the city; walled in October 1941, it imprisoned some 30,000 Jews. In late November and early December 1941, the Germans announced their intention to move the majority of the ghetto's inhabitants "further east. On November 30 and December 8-9, at least 26,000 Jews from Rīga were shot by German extermination brigades and their Latvian auxiliaries in the Rumbula Forest. The 4,000 to 5,000 surviving Jews were incarcerated in a ghetto area known as the "Little Ghetto" or the "Latvian Ghetto. The Germans also deported 16,000 Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Bohemia-Moravia Protectorate. The area of the ghetto where these foreign Jews were imprisoned, called the "large ghetto," was separate from the "Latvian ghetto.