Riga’s Peitav-Shul Bears Witness to Latvia’s Jewish Heritage
Rabbi Eliyohu Krumers, who leads Riga’s Peitav-Shul, trained in Latvia. (Photo by Robert Carle)
RIGA, Latvia — Thirty men gathered in the brightly lit basement of Riga’s Peitav Synagogue for Shabbat on a recent Saturday morning. During the two-hour service, men in black fraying suits, wearing yarmulkes, rock back and forth in prayer. A gaggle of children play in the rear of the sanctuary. Their mothers are separated by a screen on the left side of the room.
There were 200 synagogues in Latvia before World War II. Peitav-Shul is the only synagogue building to have survived both the Nazi and the Soviet occupations of Riga. The bright blue interior, built in 1905, is decorated with Egyptian and Assyrian-Babylonian geometric patterns. The Aron Kodesh (the Holy Ark), where the Torah scrolls are kept, faces Jerusalem. A marble pulpit faces the congregation.
Rabbi Eliyohu Krumers, who leads the Peitav-Shul, trained in Latvia.
LISTEN: Riga's Peitav Shul Survives History of Violent anti-Semitic Attacks
“We had a very small center of Torah studies. We had teachers from Israel come to teach us,” he said.
At Peitav-Shul, regular congregants consist mostly of a few dozen elderly Russian-speaking Jews. It is difficult for such a small congregation to maintain the historic, five-story building.
“We barely raise enough money to make ends meet. This winter, the bills for heating and electricity went up four or five times,” Krumers said.
A Canadian Jewish foundation helped pay for expenses. The Peitav-Shul was in the crosshairs of the traumatic events that shook Latvia in the 20th century. In June 1941, Hitler turned against Stalin, and German troops invaded Latvia. Peitav-Shul was spared the invasion only because it is located in the center of Riga’s Old Town, and it couldn’t be set on fire without endangering the Old Town. Instead, the Nazis used the synagogue to stable animals.
Some Latvians treated the Germans as liberators from their Soviet oppressors.
Viktors Arajs, who was a unit commander of a Riga auxiliary police force, enthusiastically adopted Nazi policies. His unit burned down the Great Choral Synagogue with the congregation inside, killing 400 people. Latvian auxiliary police units under Arjas’ command killed thousands of Latvian Jews. More than 90% of the 85,000 Jews who lived in Latvia before World War II died as a result of Nazi massacres. Today, fewer than 10,000 Jews live in Latvia.
In the 1990s, the Peitav-Shul was bombed twice by local neo-Nazi groups, causing $60,000 in damages. The bombs tore out the 200-pound synagogue door, shattered all the windows and casings in the first three floors, and left deep holes in the synagogue’s wall. The European Union funded the renovation of the synagogue, which was completed in 2008. The Latvian government has permanently stationed police at the Peitav-Shul.
Karlis Verdins, who teaches literature at the Art Academy of Latvia, hopes to confront Latvians with an honest reckoning of their complicity in the Holocaust. He obtained a record of the two-year Victors Arajs trial in Hamburg, which took place in 1977-79. Verdins turned the story of the trial into a drama, which opened in a small theater in Riga in March 2023.
The title of the play, “Wasn’t There. Don’t Know. Don’t Remember,” refers to Arajs’ defense at his trial. Holocaust survivors who saw Arajs murder Jews contradicted his testimony, and the court sentenced Arajs to life imprisonment.
Israeli Ambassador to Latvia Sharon Rappaport-Palgi. (Photo by Robert Carle)
Verdins said that the dramatization of Arajs’ trial is an important step for his fellow Latvians. Latvians have been loath to acknowledge their complicity in the Holocaust.
“They wanted to protect their old, loving fathers and grandfathers who had committed such crimes,” Verdins said. “Latvians cannot whitewash Nazi crimes just because we think that Soviet crimes were even worse.”
Sharon Rappaport-Palgi, Israel’s ambassador to Latvia, said that Latvia is today one of the safest places in Europe for Jews. She has not experienced any overt antisemitism during the two years that she and her four children have lived in Latvia.
“In Latvia, I don’t see public manifestations of antisemitism” Palgi said. “Latvian society would not be accepting of that.”
In October 2022, the Israeli embassy in Riga teamed up with the Latvian Ministry of Education to organize a two-day conference on Holocaust education for 100 Latvian school teachers. Palgi said she hopes that Holocaust education will become a standard part of the Latvian curriculum.
Despite Latvia’s welcoming atmosphere, the Peitav-Shul struggles to attract young people to its congregation. Latvia is now part of the European Union, and Latvian youth can easily seek employment in other EU countries. Jewish youth who want to practice Orthodox Judaism tend to emigrate to Israel or the United States, where it is easier to be observant.
The restrictions that Orthodox Judaism places on congregants make it difficult to to work and socialize in Latvia. Orthodox Jews cannot work on the Sabbath or on other holy days. There are very few kosher restaurants in Riga. One of Peitav-Shul’s congregants is a designer with a very strong resume, but she said that stores are reluctant to hire her because she cannot work on Shabbat.
Johannes Proempeler, 23, a German medical student who studies medicine in Riga, attends Peitav-Shul every day. Proempeler represents a small but growing trend among European youth to find meaning and community in rigorous religious practice. Proempeler grew up in a Catholic home, but he became engaged with Judaism as a teenager, even though there was no synagogue in his hometown.
Proempeler is in the process of converting to Judaism. He said that he is prepared to pay the professional price that being observant entails because Judaism is a “whole way of life” that traces its origins back to Mount Sinai.
“The world around us changes, but Torah does not,” Proempeler said.
For Rabbi Krumers, the sacrifices that Orthodoxy demands of his congregants are worth making because they enable believers to remain deeply connected to the Almighty.
“In Torah, you have this chain of generations of Jewish thought and philosophy and understanding which stretches all the way back, which we believe will never be torn or stopped,” Krumers said. “Other civilizations have survived since antiquity, but you do not find the continuity that you find in Judaism.”
The Peitav-Shul is not, however, evangelical in the Christian sense.
“The Almighty by no means requires people to become Jewish,” Krumers said. “If a non-Jew observes some basic things about living a decent life, then according to the Torah, he is considered to be a righteous person, but if he undergoes conversion to Judaism, he has to observe all the laws of Torah. If he turns on a light during Shabbat or cooks something for himself or writes something down, then automatically he is making a grave transgression. It is very hard for a person, especially nowadays, to accept the idea that from now until his death, whether he can find a job or not, he will commit to obeying the law.”
Robert Carle is a professor at The King’s College in New York City and a Senior Contributor to Religion Unplugged. He spent the month of May 2023 in Riga, Latvia.