This project is an attempt to investigate, identify and record the fate of Latvian Jewry in the Holocaust. The digital images of Jews ensure that personal identities of the once vibrant Jewish community, wiped out during the Holocaust, are documented and memory of perished victims is preserved.
The list is based on the 1935 census, that is used in connection with other pre-war materials, that allow to add to the list persons born at that time and exclude from the list persons who died during this period of time (list of inhabitants from 1939 to 1940, house lists, passports, business directories and records, birth, marriage and death records for 1935-1941 etc.)
Among the surveyed collections are documents of The State Extraordinary Commission for the Determination and Investigation of Nazi and their Collaborators' Atrocities in the USSR (ChGK) (the copies of these documents can be found at the Yad Vashem and The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, USHMM); Yad Vashem's Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names; the concentration camp records (such as Kaiserwald, Buchenwald etc), and sources from the “Jews in Latvia” Museum.
Name list of persons deported on June 14, 1941 (stored at The Latvian State Archives), as well as the lists of evacuees (the list is partly accessible at the USHMM) allows to exclude these Jews from the of victims of the Holocaust.
Important sources are scientific publications. A visible input into the Holocaust research had made the Commission of the Historians of Latvia (five of the volumes, published by the Commission, are devoted to the Holocaust in Latvia) and several local hisotry researchers, who have compiled lists of pre-war Jewish community members in several villages. There are also many memoirs of Holocaust survivors published.
The so called "indirect" approach, developed by prof.Edward Anders during his research of Liepaja's Jews, had been also used in this project. The method implies that those Jews living in Latvia in 1940-1941 who can not be found among survivors and who have not been recorded as victims should be considered as Holocaust victims. It can be used together with the "direct" approach in identifying the victims of the Holocaust. However, drawbacks of the "indirect" method is that it will inevitably include some of the living among the dead (for example, refugees who fled to the USSR, prisoners who aren't mentioned in the camp records, etc.)
An importnant stage of the research is to integrate the information, received from the surviving relatives and friends.
During this stage visual information is added - photos of Jews from prewar passports and other documents.