Estonia's first synagogue since the Holocaust has opened in the capital, Tallinn,
to serve the Baltic state's current community of about 2,500
Jews.
The Nazis had described Estonia as being "free
of Jews" by the time they held the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 to plot the Final
Solution.
Few who escaped the Nazis returned after the war and those who did faced religious
curbs under Soviet rule.
Estonia's top rabbi said his community
could once again "feel like Jews".
"For a long time... there
was no rabbi, no kosher food... no possibility to learn about
Judaism," Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot told The Associated Press.
The new, privately funded synagogue
in central Tallinn, described by news agencies as an ultramodern,
airy structure, can seat 180 people in its main worship area.
Estonia's Holocaust
Previous synagogues in Tallinn and
the second city, Tartu, were destroyed during the war which
saw a Jewish community of about 4,500 displaced or destroyed.
About 3,500 were able to escape to the USSR before the Germans arrived but of
the 1,000 who remained, all but seven were murdered by
Nazis or Estonian collaborators, Dr Efraim Zuroff of the
Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem told the BBC News
website.
Some of those who escaped later helped defeat the Nazis as soldiers in the Soviet
Army and the controversial relocation of a Soviet
war memorial from a Tallinn square earlier this
year had been a "sensitive issue" for the community, Rabbi Kot told Reuters.
While welcoming
the synagogue's opening, Dr Zuroff told the BBC
News website that Estonia was not doing enough
to track down Estonian Holocaust collaborators
who escaped abroad after the war - a suggestion
a police spokesman has denied.
Under Nazi
rule, Dr Zuroff says, Estonian security police
units played a part in the Holocaust in Belarus
and Poland, as well as helping murder Jews in
their own country.
An unknown
number of Jews from other parts of Europe were
also worked to death in 20 labour camps set up
by the Nazis on Estonian soil and guarded, in
part, by Estonian police.
New investigations
Since gaining
independence from the USSR in 1991, Estonia has
convicted 11 people of Soviet-era crimes, particularly
the mass deportation of 1949, but has not prosecuted
any suspected Nazi-era war criminals.
The Soviet KGB extensively investigated Estonian Nazi war criminals itself and
convicted at least 18 in the 1960s, Superintendent
Martin Arpo of the Estonian security police board
told the BBC News website.
In 2001, the police investigated an Estonian expatriate who was a police official
under the Nazis, and was identified as a Holocaust
suspect by the Wiesenthal Centre. The case, apparently
rejected by the KGB itself in the 1960s for lack
of evidence, was dropped by the Estonians for
the same reason.
Two other
Nazi-era cases are still under investigation,
Supt Arpo added, saying he could not give names
for legal reasons.
Dr Zuroff
says that questions like Holocaust restitution,
education and commemoration in the new Estonia
can be decided in the future.
However, the
prosecution of surviving Nazi war criminals,
he believes, has to be decided now "because once the criminals die, that's the end of the issue".
news.bbc.co.uk
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