Estonia’s Jewish community this week memorialized several people considered Holocaust victims on the island of Saaremaa, whose remains have been reinterred and now have a third resting place.
By ERR News | Photos: EJK
The Jewish population of pre-war Kuressaare, the island’s capital, and Saaremaa as a whole, was small, but left an indelible impression: Some of the victims whose remains have been reburied were active in the defense league, in motorsport and in medicine, while prominent architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) and noted portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz can also trace ancestry back to the island.
Over 200 civilians executed during World War Two were reburied as part of a project overseen by the National War Museum, which mainly deals with the removal of Soviet-era monuments, war memorials and other features.
Where such sites contain human remains, these are carefully reinterred at cemeteries nearby. However, the Kuressaare case is an unusual one in that the victims were those of the Nazi occupation of Estonia, and not the Soviet one.
The reburial of the remains took place at the Saikla-Nõmme cemetery in Orissaare, at the other end of Saaremaa from Kuressaare, the Estonian Jewish Community (EJK) noted in a post on Wednesday, November 5.
The re-interment was due to a decision by the Saaremaa municipal government; a traumatic undertaking in any case, but in Judaism in particular this is significant as disinterment for reburial is generally forbidden under Jewish law, given the dead should not be disturbed. Being moved to a Jewish cemetery from a non-Jewish one, for instance, is one exception to this rule.
The reburial in Orissaare is in fact the second time these people’s remains have been moved; a first reburial took place in 1964, when the remains were relocated to a site behind the Kuressaare episcopal castle in the town center.
Five names are known of those Jews who were among the civilians executed at the Loode grove, names which EJK President Eduard Klas noted in his speech at the ceremony.
The ceremony was also attended by the Chief Rabbi of Estonia Shmuel Kot, who recited from the Tehillim (Psalms) and offered a memorial prayer, and a representative of the Estonian Jewish Museum.
At the end of the ceremony, a bouquet of flowers and stones bearing the victims’ names were placed.
