On September 19, 2022, marked the 78th anniversary of the massacre of Jewish prisoners of the Klooga concentration camp. About 2,000 Jews, mostly from Lithuania, were shot by the Nazis a few days before the camp was liberated. A monument to the victims of the Holocaust in Estonia was erected at the place of execution in 1994.
As marks the tradition, representatives of the Community, students and teachers of the Tallinn Jewish School hold a memorial ceremony. At the event, the Community was represented by chairman Alla Jakobson, council member Avi Dobrysh, head of the Jewish Museum of Estonia Gennady Gramberg.
This year, 10th grade students arrived in Klooga, director Igor Lirisman, Hebrew teacher, representatives of the State of Israel in Estonia Shlomo Voskoboinik. Also present were Malle Talvet-Mustonen, representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and head of the Estonian delegation to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Anne-Li Reimaa, representative of the Ministry of Culture, and Shmuel Kot, Chief Rabbi of Estonia.
Klooga was a sub-camp of the Vaivara concentration camp complex, established Estonia in 1943 by occupying Nazi German forces, a force labor camp where inmates, predominantly Jews from the Vilnius and Kaunas ghettos in Lithuania, and also from locations further afield in Europe, were deported.
Ahead of advancing Red Army troops, Waffen SS personnel massacred as many as 2,000 inmates in a single day, during the course of the evacuation of the camp during Sept. 19-22 1944.
Many other inmates were transported to concentration and death camps in present-day Poland.
