Jewish relief organizations here today received information that all Jews living in the ghetto in Riga, Latvia, are being deported to Nazi-held Russian territory and that the Nazi administration has decided to make Latvia “judenrein” within the next few weeks.
Jews from Holland, Belgium and Germany who were deported to the Riga ghetto are among those being sent further east, Neutral non-Jews who visited the Baltic States recently attempted to ascertain to where the Jews from the Riga ghetto were being exiled, but no information could be secured from the local non-Jewish population which is afraid to furnish any information about the fate of their former Jewish neighbors. Letters sent to Jews in the Riga ghetto from neutral countries have been returned recently stamped with a notice from the postal authorities that the recipient has “left for the East.”
The Manchester Guardian publishes a comprehensive survey of the Jewish situation in Latvia revealing that large transports of Jews were sent to the Riga ghetto from Berlin, Cologne, Dusseldurf and other German cities. “The fate of these German Jews is not known since they were also deported recently from the ghetto in Riga to some unknown destination,” the English paper writes. It estimates that only 4,000 Riga Jews were still left in the ghetto after the terrible massacres carried out by the Nazis in the Latvian capital. Before the Nazi occupation there were about 50,000 Jews in Riga, constituting one-half of the entire Jewish population in Latvia.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
