Documents

More than 5,000 documents of various contents and significance make up a large part of the museum’s collection. This collection includes documents of religious life and traditions before the 20th century and documents of several political organizations, economics, religious congregations and cultural associations from 1918 – 1940, when Jewish political and social life flourished.

Information about the Holocaust includes lists of ghetto and other prisoners, lists of killed Jews and lists of surviving Jews. Documents of the Nazi-occupation included in the collection are reports from the German Security Police and Einsatzgruppe “A” as well as documents of various Nazi authorities containing information about the course of the Holocaust, the collaboration of the local population and participation in the Holocaust.

Furthermore, it includes reports of the USSR State Emergency Commission on the crimes committed by the Nazis and their henchmen against Latvian Jews.

Evidence of post-war Soviet repressions against Jewish activists and the Jewish political underground in Soviet Latvia is part of the collection as well.

Another section is dedicated to personal papers from various periods, which contain information about Jewish political, social and religious workers as wells as Jewish businessmen, lawyers, doctors, scientists, philosophers, teachers and artists, writers and musicians.