Ha'aretz - 09.20.2005

Ha'aretz

Katsav lays cornerstone for first Estonian synagogue since WWII


(Reuters) -- President Moshe Katsav on Monday laid the foundation stone for Estonia's first synagogue since the Holocaust when the Nazis boasted there was not a single Jew left in the Baltic nation.

Katsav also laid a wreath at the site of the Klooga concentration camp deep in the Estonian forest. Klooga was closed in 1944 after the SS shot the last of its prisoners, who included Jews from Estonia and elsewhere in Europe.

"At this place, on this day, Jews from Vilnius, Poland and other countries were killed," Katsav said in a ceremony at the Klooga site attended by Estonian President Arnold Ruutel, 40 students from Tallinn Jewish school and local Jewish leaders.

Estonian government records show the country had 4,381 Jewish residents in 1934, but hundreds were deported during Soviet occupation in 1940 and many others fled the invading German army the following year.

Some 1,000 Jews who remained were killed by the Nazis, who at the 1942 Wannsee Conference to coordinate the deportation and murder of European Jewry declared Estonia "free of Jews."

Estonia's last synagogue was destroyed during the bombing of Tallinn in 1944 as Soviet forces advanced.

Today, around 3,000 Jews live in Estonia. Their chief rabbi, Shmuel Kot, told Reuters at the Klooga ceremony that the local Jewish community now wanted to look ahead.

"We are looking to the future and part of the future is the visit of the president of Israel to Estonia and the laying of the foundation stone for the first synagogue since 1944," he said.

Katsav, who spent the day in Estonia as the first leg of a Baltic tour also taking in Latvia and Lithuania, said he did not see any residual anti-Semitism in Estonia.