Holocaust Remembrance Day Commemorated With Ceremony in Klooga, Seminar
Today, on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Estonia also remembers its own victims of the genocide, with a ceremony held at the Shoah memorial in Klooga.
Although Estonia lay outside the tsarist-era Pale of Settlement, and many of the country's prewar Jewish population of 4,500 fled to Russia before the Nazi invasion, the killing was particularly thorough, with only a handful of known survivors among the 1,000 or so who were still in the country in 1941.
In addition, Estonia served as the scene for more extensive killings later on in the German occupation, with 10,000 Jews from other countries estimated killed in camps such as the one in Klooga in 1942.
The ceremony at Klooga, where Education Minister Jaak Aaviksoo will speak, will be followed by a Tallinn seminar for history and social studies teachers, opened by Minister of Culture Urve Tiidus.
Israel will be represented at the ceremony by Arezoo Herzel, the deputy director of the Helsinki embassy.
January 27, 1945 - the date of the liberation of Auschwitz - was first commemorated as a Holocaust memorial day in Germany in 1996. Estonia joined the tradition in 2003, and in 2005, the UN declared the date an official worldwide remembrance day.