JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

BALTIC SEA
Tallinn
ESTONIA
Parnu
Narva
Nymme Tartu
Valga Voru
L
Riga
A T V I A
Major Jewish communities in Estonia, 1918–1940.
Leningrad
and six Independents. Subsequently the Zionists gained in
strength, and by 1939 held 20 of the Council’s 27 seats. After
a severe struggle within the Council on the issue whether the
language of instruction in Jewish schools should be Hebrew
or Yiddish, the supporters of Hebrew finally prevailed, and
most of the Jewish schools were affiliated to the Hebrew Tarbut
educational network, including the two secondary schools of
Tallinn and Tartu. About 75% of the Jewish children attended
Jewish schools. A chair for Hebrew language and literature
was established at the University of Tartu. There were three
Jewish cooperative banks in Tallinn, Tartu, and Narva, with a
total of 625 members in 1935. Estonian Jewry attained important
national achievements, but because of its small numbers
remained culturally dependent on the neighboring Jewish
populations of Latvia and Lithuania. During the 1930s, a Fascist
movement was formed in Estonia which launched an antisemitic
propaganda campaign. The hardening anti-Jewish attitude
was reflected in the decrease of the number of students
at the University of Tartu, from 188 in 1926 to 96 in 1934.
After the annexation of Estonia to the Soviet Union in
1940, the Jewish institutions were liquidated and the political
and social organizations disbanded. On the eve of the German
invasion of the Soviet Union, some 500 communal leaders
and affluent members of the congregation were arrested
and deported to the Russian interior. Due to the efforts of the
Soviet army to halt the German advance on Leningrad, the
conquest of Estonia took about two months. Tallinn was not
occupied until Sept. 3, 1941, and about 3,000 Estonian Jews
succeeded in escaping to the Russian interior. All the Jews remaining
in the zone of German occupation were murdered
by the end of 1941 by the Einsatzkommando 1a with the active
help of Estonian nationalist Omakaitse units. On October 12
all men aged 16 and above, about 440, were murdered, and in
the last weeks of 1941 the others were liquidated – in all, 936
Jews according to the report of Einsatzgruppe A, from January
1942. This left Estonia “judenfrei,” a fact which was reported
in the Wannsee Conference at the same time. In 1942
and early 1943 about 3,000 Jews, mainly from Germany, were
U. S. S. R.
estonia
sent to the extermination camp in Kalevi Liiva. By May 1943
Heinrich *Himmler had ordered the cessation of mass shooting
and the erection of forced labor camps. The main camp
in Estonia was Vaivara, commanded by Hans Aumeier (sentenced
and executed in 1947). About 20,000 Jewish prisoners,
mainly from Vilna and Kaunas (Kovno), passed through its
gates to labor camps at Klooga, Lagedi, Ereda, and others. The
inmates were employed in mining slate and building fortifications.
The successful advance of the Soviet army led to the
evacuation of the camps to Tallinn and from there to *Stutthof
from where a “death march” of 10,000 took place along the
Baltic coast. Other camps were also liquidated (2,400 killed
at Klooga and 426 at Lagedi). On Sept. 22, 1944, Estonia was
finally liberated. The Germans attempted to burn the bodies
of their victims to conceal their crimes.
After the war, Jews from all parts of Russia gathered in
Estonia. The Jewish population numbered 5,436 in 1959 (0.5%
of the total) of whom 1,350 (25%) declared Yiddish as their
mother tongue, about 400 Estonian, and the remainder Russian;
3,714 Jews (1.3% of the total population) lived in Tallinn.
As in the rest of the Soviet Union, there was no organized Jewish
life in the Estonian S.S.R.
[Yehuda Slutsky / Shmuel Spector (2nd ed.)]
Revival of Jewish Life
There were an estimated 3,200 Jews in Estonia at the end of
1993 and 1,800 in 2001.
Jewish communal life was renewed in 1988 with the creation
of the Jewish Cultural Society in Tallinn, the first of its
kind in the Soviet Union. The Society organized concerts
and lectures, and a Jewish school going up to the ninth grade
was opened in 1990. Jewish culture clubs were also started in
Tartu, Narva, and Kohtla-Järve. Other organizations followed,
like the Maccabi sports club and the Jewish Veterans Union.
Courses in Hebrew were offered. The Jewish Community was
established in 1992 as a voluntary umbrella organization; its
charter was approved on April 11, 1992. The community published
a Jewish newspaper, Hashakhar (“Dawn”), and the radio
program “Shalom Aleichem” was broadcast monthly. A synagogue
was also reopened, attended mostly by the elderly.
In November 1993, an Estonian translation of the Protocols
of the Elders of Zion, giving no details of the publisher,
appeared in Tallinn bookshops. After the protests of the Jewish
community and the Estonia-Israel Friendship Society, the
book was withdrawn by the bookshop owners. However, in
August 1994 the nationalist weekly Eesti published an article
by Juri Lina, an Estonian émigré in Sweden, claiming that the
Protocols were authentic and demanding to lift restrictions on
their publication.
A more serious danger for the future of the small Jewish
community in the country lay in the activities of Russian extremists
in Estonia. An antigovernment demonstration, organized
by ethnic Russians in Narva (North East) in December
1993, displayed anti-Jewish placards; two parties which are
counterparts to Zhirinovsky’s LDPR in Russia – the harshly
ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6 521