Kuldīga (Goldingen)

Courlandian Judaism was long a Judaism of precarious tolerance. The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, a vassal of the Polish Crown from 1561, granted Jews no stable legal status, with the notable exception of the ecclesiastical district of Pilten (Piltene), an enclave where they enjoyed a particular right of residence. Since the end of the fourteenth century, Jews had lived scattered, without legal status, in Courland, except in Pilten.

It was in this context of intermittent tolerance that the first nucleus of Goldingen took shape. The first Jewish settlement in Kuldiga most likely appeared toward the end of the seventeenth century. These early arrivals were merchants, peddlers, and craftsmen established on the margins of urban life, dependent on the goodwill of the dukes and facing the hostility of Christian guilds that feared their competition.

The decisive turning point was the annexation of Courland by the Russian Empire in 1795, ratified a few years later. From 1799 onward, following the annexation of Courland by Russia, the Jews of the region were granted civil rights, and the Jewish communities of Kuldiga and elsewhere grew rapidly. Access to a recognized legal framework transformed a tolerated presence into an established community. The figures confirm this unambiguously: in 1800, there were 658 Jewish merchants and craftsmen living in the district of Goldingen, representing fifteen percent of the district's total population. The International Jewish Cemetery Project specifies the scale of this relative weight: in 1800, 658 Jewish merchants and craftsmen lived in the district of Goldingen — fifteen percent of a total of 4,350 — with a strong Judeo-German cultural imprint.

This Germanic imprint was not incidental: it shaped the mentality, the liturgy, and the way of life of the community. The Jews of Courland perceived themselves as the heirs of a Western civilization, distinct in language and culture from the Yiddish-speaking masses of the Pale of Settlement.

The acquisition of civil rights was followed almost immediately by the founding of the cardinal institutions of Jewish life. Around 1801, the first synagogue was built and a chevra kadisha — a burial confraternity — was established. Not long after came the educational and mutual aid institutions: soon, a "talmud torah" was built and Jewish social organizations formed.

The most imposing monument of this communal landscape remains the great synagogue erected in the second half of the century. The synagogue located at 6 rue 1905, built in 1875, is one of the largest buildings in Kuldiga, endowed with a splendid marble interior with gilded details. It was not a mere place of worship, but the center of a complete institutional ensemble: it formed part of a larger complex comprising an adjacent house of prayer and a Jewish school, still existing today, its community having been active since the sixteenth century. The splendor of this marble interior bears witness to a community that, at the height of its prosperity, possessed both the means and the ambition to assert its presence in the urban fabric of Goldingen.

This dense institutional life — monumental synagogue, house of prayer, school, burial confraternity, mutual aid societies — reveals an organized, settled community, mindful of transmission. The Jewish school occupied a particular place in a community where German culture and the values of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, had found fertile ground; monographs devoted to Jewish society in Courland and Riga between 1795 and 1915, such as the work of Svetlana Bogojavlenska, situate Goldingen among the centers of this acculturation where rabbinical tradition and scholastic modernity intersected [Bogojavlenska, Die jüdische Gesellschaft in Kurland und Riga 1795–1915].

The 19th century was the demographic golden age of the community. Statistical records trace the curve of a group that, for a time, constituted the majority of the urban population. In 1835, the Jewish population stood at 2,330 persons, representing fifty-seven percent of the total. The mid-century marks the peak in absolute terms: in 1850, 2,534 Jewish residents were counted, among them 112 merchants and 1,137 active craftsmen.

These figures reveal the economic structure of the community. Far from a group of notables, it was a working population dominated by crafts and small trade — tailors, cobblers, tinsmiths, bakers, alongside a merchant minority. A local tradition even associates the community with the nascent industrial life of the city: the old water mill of Kuldiga may perhaps have powered a match factory belonging to Jews.

The 19th century was also the century of the first departures. Agricultural colonization in the southern reaches of the Empire drew away part of the population: in 1840, 171 Jews from Kuldiga — 22 families — left for agricultural colonies in the southern Russian province of Cherson, to take up a tsarist offer of land and exemption from military service and certain taxes, in exchange for settling these borderlands of the Ottoman Empire.

Then came the demographic reversal. In the second half of the century, a great number of Latvians came to settle in the city and the Jewish community lost its majority status. The imperial census of 1897 fixes this new proportion: in 1897, there were 2,543 Jewish residents, representing twenty-six percent of a total population of 9,720. The community remained sizable but henceforth a minority in a city experiencing full Latvian growth.

The economic and political difficulties of the late nineteenth century set in motion a lasting hemorrhage. Faced with the difficult economic and political times of the second half of the nineteenth century, the Jews of Kuldiga began to emigrate. This movement followed two directions: the internal exodus toward dynamic economic centers and transatlantic emigration. Some remained in Latvia but moved to the great ports of Libau and Windau, where economic activity was more vigorous.

The Baltic ports — Libau (Liepāja), Windau (Ventspils) — offered opportunities that small Goldingen could no longer provide, while others crossed the ocean toward America and South Africa. Family histories preserve traces of this dispersal: the Brachmann family, for example, whose presence in Kuldīga can be followed from the end of the eighteenth century, illustrates both ancient rootedness and subsequent dispersion. The history of the Brackman family can be traced back to the late eighteenth century, with the presence of Jews in Kuldīga, also known by its Germanic name of Goldingen, in Latvia; the family appears to have had a substantial presence there, with numerous related members.

On the eve of catastrophe, the community was no more than a shadow of its former greatness. After the brief period of Latvian independence and the establishment of Latvia as a sovereign state following the First World War, Jewish life in Kuldīga continued in a reduced form. By 1935, the Jewish population had declined. German sources specify that Jews then represented barely a tenth of the city's population. This numerical decline, felt throughout rural Courland, nonetheless left intact a community organized around its marble synagogue, its school, and its traditional institutions — a community that, in 1941, still counted the greater part of its members in place.

The German occupation signed the community's death warrant. In 1941, the synagogue became a trap when all the Jews of Kuldiga were imprisoned within its walls. The chronology of the destruction has been established with cruel precision. On July 1, 1941, when the Nazis occupied the city, the majority of the community was still there; immediately afterward, Latvian fascists began committing acts of violence against the Jews and murdered several of them.

Then came the phase of forced labor, followed by concentration. The remaining Jews were subjected to forced labor; during 1941–1942, they were rounded up and systematically murdered in pits they had been forced to dig at various locations around the city. The great synagogue of 1875, the community's pride, served as a place of detention before execution. The memorial narrative handed down, corroborated by documentary sources, describes an imprisonment of nearly two weeks followed by murder in the surrounding forests, carried out by Latvians from Kuldīga and by German units, before the belongings of the victims were auctioned off among the local population — a sequence in which Memory and archive respond to and confirm one another.

The site of the massacre and its memory are now identified. During the Soviet era, a wooden commemorative plaque was erected at one of the murder sites in the forest of the parish of Rumba, approximately 7 km from Kuldiga; however, the inscription on this plaque is no longer legible. A more lasting commemoration came into being at the beginning of the twenty-first century: in 2006, the Council of Jewish Communities of Latvia erected a black granite monument beside the original plaque, whose inscription in Latvian reads: "Here, in July 1941, fascists murdered and buried the Jews of Kuldīga." Uncertainty nonetheless remains regarding the exact toll: the precise number of victims and the full circumstances of their murder remain unknown.

From the annihilated community, stones and names remain. The rare survivors — those who had fled to the interior of the Soviet Union or emigrated before the war — did not return to settle in a city henceforth emptied of its Jewish presence. With time, the survivors left the city, many of them making their way to the new State of Israel.

The fate of the synagogue building alone encapsulates the fate of this material memory under the Soviet regime. The preserved synagogue building was converted into a cinema in the early 1950s; since 2011, the edifice has housed the municipal library. This trajectory — from house of prayer to cinema, then to library — is emblematic of the destiny of the synagogues of Eastern Europe, secularized and repurposed, their original function effaced behind successive uses.

Kuldīga, a city whose remarkably preserved historic center has been inscribed on the World Heritage List, thus bears the discreet yet persistent trace of its vanished community: the former synagogue complex, the cemetery, the monument in the Rumba forest. Contemporary genealogical research — driven by descendants scattered across the world and by projects such as those of the JewishGen network — patiently reconstructs lineages, such as that of the Brachmann family, whose end in Latvia, like that of millions of others in Eastern Europe, concludes tragically in 1941 with elderly men, women, and children massacred in the Shoah at the hands of the Nazis. Where the municipal archive falls silent, family memory and the work of diaspora historians fill, as far as possible, the silence.

The history of the Jews of Kuldīga-Goldingen follows the long rhythm of Baltic Judaisms: a furtive medieval presence without rights, a period of settlement in the late seventeenth century, a dazzling rise after the granting of civil rights by Russia in 1799, a peak in the mid-nineteenth century when the community formed a majority in its city, then a slow decline driven by emigration and Latvian population growth, before the total annihilation of 1941.

This was a singular Judaism, oriented toward German culture and the West, industrious and well-established, of which the great marble synagogue and the school remain as stone witnesses. Its destruction, swift and methodical in the very first weeks of the occupation, caused to vanish within a few months what three centuries had built. What remains today is a repurposed building, a black granite monument in the forest of Rumba, and the never-finished task of naming the disappeared. The present Great Book is part of this effort at restitution: to provide a framework for a peripheral community that was, until its last day, a living link in the Jewish world and its diasporas.