The Jewish Community of Riga

Leo Yehuda Shamir (1913-1994) cantor and singer. Born in Riga, Latvia, named Leo Yehuda Scheftelowitsch, he studied in the 1930s in his native Riga with singer Hermann Jadlowker and built up his singing career there until 1941. He performed as a guest choirmaster in Riga’s Old/New Synagogue, amongst others. During World War II his career was interrupted and he was deported to several concentration camps, where his wife and daughter perished. Following the Liberation in 1945, he went to Heidelberg, Germany, married his second wife and opened a concert agency in Mannheim. He also performed in public. In 1948 he emigrated to Israel, settled in Petach Tikva, and worked in various odd jobs. Shamir, as singer, recorded for the Israel Radio (among others, with Miriam Levit). He never sang again as cantor. In 1958, Shamir returned to Germany and resettled in Heidelberg, where he worked as an innkeeper. From 1985 he suffered ill health resulting from his time in the concentration camps. Shamir died in Heidelberg, Germany.

Abraham Blaustein (1836-1914), cantor, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire), Blaustein was first appointed cantor in Lomza and later in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania. In 1874 he settled in Germany, where he initially served in Gnesen (now Gniezno, Poland). From 1877 until his death he served as cantor in Bromberg (now Bydgoszcz, Poland). Blaustein edited a weekly for cantors. He died in Bromberg (then Germany).

Marc Lavry (1903-1967), composer and conductor, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). He studied architecture at the Technical College in Oldenburg and music at the Leipzig Conservatory. He worked as a conductor in Riga, Saarbrücken, Munich and Berlin, where he was associated with the Laban Dance Ensemble and the Universal film studio.
He settled in Eretz Israel in 1935 and conducted at the Palestine Broadcasting Service. Between 1941-1947 he conducted the Folk Opera in Tel Aviv. Between 1949-1962 Lavry was music director of the World Zionist Organization’s broadcasts to the Diaspora, Kol Zion la-Golah. In 1962 he moved to Haifa where he continued his activities under the sponsorship of the municipality.
Lavry wrote many compositions. His last work bears the opus number 349. His works represent the style and ideology of the Mediterranean school of music. His melodic elements are Ashkenazi and Near Eastern and drew upon the then new folk song of Eretz Israel. Lavry’s successful symphonic poem, EMEK (1937), is based on his own song for choir, written a year earlier. In 1945 he composed DAN THE GUARD, considered the first Israeli opera. Among his other works are the oratorio Song of Songs; Sacred Service Shabbat Liturgy; the operas Tamar and Gideon; two piano concertos; two symphonies (Warsaw Ghetto and 1949); the symphonic poem Stalingrad; orchestral songs; and the orchestral suite Israeli Dances. He died in Haifa.

Solomon Rosowsky (1878-1962), composer, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). A lawyer by education, Rosowsky graduated in 1909 from the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition with Vitol and Liadov and counterpoint and instrumentation with Rimsky-Korsakov. He was founder of the Society for Jewish Folk Music. In 1910 he initiated the musical courses attached to the Society, and proposed to create a permanent ethnographic commission to carry out theoretical research on Jewish songs. In 1915 he represented the Society at the All-Russian Congress of Workers of the People's Theater. In 1925 he left Russia for the Land of Israel and taught in Jerusalem. After World War II he went to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life. In 1957 he published his major work, the book The Cantillation of the Bible. He died in New York in 1962.

Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), social and political philosopher, one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 20th century, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). Berlin's work on liberal theory and on pluralism has had a great influence on social thought. Born the son of a wealthy timber company owner, he was a direct descendant of Rabbi Shneur Zalman, the founder of Chabad Hasidism.

The family lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, but left in 1920 after feeling the oppression of Bolshevism and anti-Semitism. They came to Britain in 1921. Berlin was educated at St Paul's School in London, then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he studied classics. He then took another degree, this time at Oxford, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. He was appointed a tutor in philosophy at New College, Oxford, and in 1932 at the age of 23, was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. He was the first Jewish fellow at All Souls College. Berlin was to remain at Oxford for the rest of his life, apart from a period working for British Information Services in New York, USA, from 1940 to 1942, and for the British embassies in Washington, DC, and Moscow from then until 1946.

Berlin was fluent in Russian and English, spoke French, German and Italian, and knew Latin and Ancient Greek. From 1957 to 1967, he was Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford and in 1966 he was elected to be the first president of the newly founded Wolfson College in Oxford. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. The annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held at the Hampstead Synagogue and both Wolfson College and the British Academy each summer.

The London based "Independent" newspaper once wrote that "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time ... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential"

In 1956, Berlin married Aline Halban, née de Gunzbourg, who was from an exiled half Russian-aristocratic and half ennobled-Jewish banking and petroleum family He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959.

His work was characterized by a very liberal attitude to social and political questions. In his “Karl Marx”, published in 1939, he examines Marxism in the context of the times when it was written. In the “August Conte Memorial Lectures” he opposed the notion that events are inevitable and therefore predictable. His essay "Two Concepts of Liberty", delivered in 1958 as his inaugural lecture as Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at Oxford argued for a nuanced and subtle understanding of political terminology, where what was superficially understood as a single concept could mask a plurality of different uses and therefore meanings. He distinguished between thinkers who tried to find liberty within a framework of restraints while recognizing the diversity of human needs and those who are dogmatic and try to “force men to be free`' and so end up by enslaving them.

For Berlin, values are creations of mankind, rather than products of nature waiting to be discovered. He argued that the nature of mankind is such that certain values – for example, the importance of individual liberty – will hold true across cultures, and this is what he meant when he called his position "objective pluralism". When values clash, it may not be that one is more important than the other. Keeping a promise may conflict with the pursuit of truth; liberty may clash with social justice. Moral conflicts are "an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life". "These collisions of values are of the essence of what they are and what we are." For Berlin, this incommensurate clashing of values within, no less than between, individuals, constitutes the tragedy of human life.

Berlin had many close ties to Zionism and Israel having close friendships with Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist leaders. He was a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Berlin's essay "Historical Inevitability" (1954) focused on a controversy in the philosophy of history. Berlin is also well known for his writings on Russian intellectual history, most of which are collected in Russian Thinkers (1978; 2nd ed. 2008),

Herman Jadlowker (1878-1953), singer (tenor) and cantor, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). Jadlowker studied at the Vienna Conservatory and began his operatic career in Cologne in 1889. Between 1901-1906 he sang with the Berlin State Opera and between 1910-1912 with the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1912, he was again engaged by the Berlin State Opera, where he sang until 1919. From 1929 until 1938 he was cantor in Riga, Latvia. He then settled in Tel Aviv, where he taught singing.
His more important roles included the Prince in Engelbert Humperdinck’s Koenigskinder (1910) and Florindo in Wolf-Ferrari’s Le Donne Curiose (1912). He died in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Niko Gunzburg (1882-1984), jurist, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). He was taken to Belgium as a boy. From 1923 he taught law at the university of Ghent where he was the first Jew to be made a professor. He founded its Institute of Criminology in 1937 and headed it until 1952 except during World War II when he worked in the Belgian embassy in Washington. Gunzburg was professor of law at the university of Djakarta, Indonesia, 1953-56. He enjoyed an international reputation for his works on penal law and criminology. He was active in the Jewish community and headed the Council of Jewish Associations, 1947-50.

Kalman Aron (1924-2018), portrait painter and Holocaust survivor of seven Nazi concentration camps, born in Riga, Latvia.  He began drawing at the age of and 3 had his first exhibition at 7. A decade later, he painted a portrait of Latvian President Karlis Ulmanis, who helped arrange for the aspiring artist to attend the country’s fine arts academy in Riga.

He was a student when the Germans entered Riga. His father was killed by the Germans in 1941, and his mother was killed one year later in a mass murder of Latvian Jews. Aron was sent to a number of labor and concentration camps. He started to sketch portraits of his guards, using smuggled pencils and scraps of paper and canvas. He then created a miniature portrait of the parents of a concentration camp commander.   

He emerged from anonymity when he began to sketch portraits of his guards, using smuggled pencils and scraps of paper and canvas. In return for his portraits, Aron received small favors, such as extra blankets, bread or soup — and was excused from forced labor.

He was at Theresienstadt, his seventh and final concentration camp, when the Soviet troops liberated the place in May 1945. Aron was not freed with the other prisoners. Instead, he and five other young men from Latvia and Lithuania were put on a truck because they were considered Soviet citizens. Fearing that they would be sent straight from a concentration camp into the Soviet army, they escaped. Aron ultimately reached a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, Austria, where he continued to draw and paint. It was then that an art academy in Vienna offered Aron a scholarship to continue his schooling. Eventually he received a master’s degree from Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Aron immigrated to the USA settling in Los Angeles in 1949. He painted ceramics and later worked for a mapmaking company while painting on the side — often scenes of the Holocaust, done mostly in black and gray.

Aron started receiving commissions and was able to quit his office jobs to concentrate on painting. In 1956, the magazine Art in America included him on a list of “100 outstanding American artists.” As the years passed, he abandoned the dark, grim palette of his youth and began to paint with bright bursts of color.

He went on to paint portraits of President Ronald Reagan, writer Henry Miller, conductor Andre Previn and other celebrities. Some of his works, which include landscapes and abstract paintings, are in the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust and in other museums and private collections around the world.

Aron, who was married four times, died in Santa Monica, California.

Werner Bergengrün (1892-1964) author, poet, born in Riga, Latvia (then part of the Russian Empire). In 1922, Bergengrün published his first novel in a Frankfurt newspaper. He was expelled from the writers union of the German Reich in 1937, "because he does not contribute to the building of German culture and is not politically reliable." His home near Munich was bombed in 1942, after which he went to live in the Tyrol, and thence to Switzerland. In 1949-1950 he lived in Rome, and afterward settled in Baden-Baden.

He completed his doctorate at the University of Munich in 1959. His autobiography - Memoirs from the Writing Table - was published in 1961.

Joseph Carlebach (1882-1942), rabbi. His father, Solomon Carlebach, was rabbi in Luebeck, Germany, for over 50 years. Joseph had a teaching career, opening a Hebrew high school in Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania, during WW1 I. Later he became headmaster of the Talmud Torah high school in Hamburg and rabbi of Luebeck (1919-1922), Altona (1927-1937) and then of Hamburg. He is thought to have been the original of the rabbi depicted in Thomas Mann's novel, Dr. Faustus. He died in the Holocaust in a concentration camp near Riga. Carlebach wrote biblical commentaries and other Jewish studies.