Riga Ghetto Museum and Zanis Lipke Memorial: visiting guide

The Riga Ghetto and Holocaust Museum

The site and its history

The Maskavas Forštate neighbourhood — the Moscow Suburb east of Old Town — was the centre of Jewish Riga for centuries. By 1941, the neighbourhood had synagogues, schools, cultural organisations, small workshops, and the dense social fabric of a working-class community with deep roots in the city.

In August 1941, six weeks after German troops occupied Riga, the German occupation authorities established the Riga Ghetto in a small area of this neighbourhood. Approximately 30,000 Jews were confined in a few city blocks enclosed with barbed wire. The conditions were deliberately inadequate: food was restricted, movement was prohibited, and forced labour was compulsory.

The ghetto existed for only a few months before the SS and German police, assisted by the Arajs Kommando (a Latvian auxiliary unit), began the process of murdering the population. On November 30 and December 8, 1941 — the two “Rumbula actions” — approximately 26,000 Jews from the Riga Ghetto were marched 10 km to Rumbula forest and shot. The process took two days. In the first action alone, 13 November 1941, approximately 15,000 people were killed in a single day — one of the largest single-day mass murders of the entire Holocaust in Europe.

The ghetto area was then repopulated with Jews from Germany, Austria, and other Western European countries — people who had been transported east unaware that the local Jewish population had already been largely exterminated. These “Reichsjuden” (German Jews) died in subsequent killings and in the Kaiserwald concentration camp north of Riga.

By the end of the German occupation in 1944, Latvia’s pre-war Jewish population of approximately 95,000 had been reduced to fewer than 3,000 survivors.

The museum itself

The Riga Ghetto and Holocaust Museum at Maskavas iela 14a opened in 2010. It occupies a wooden building that dates from the ghetto period — one of the few surviving structures from the area that was enclosed as the ghetto in 1941.

The permanent exhibition is structured in three sections: the history of Jewish life in Latvia before the occupation, the two occupation periods (Soviet and German), and the Holocaust in Latvia specifically. The exhibition uses documentary photographs, personal objects, oral history recordings, and historical documents to build a comprehensive account.

The section on the deportations and mass killings is detailed and does not soften the material. The Rumbula actions are documented with eyewitness testimony, photographic evidence, and a precise accounting of the methodology used. This is difficult to read; it is important to read.

The section on rescuers includes documentation of the various Latvian Christians who helped hide Jewish Latvians during the occupation — a significantly smaller number than the perpetrators and bystanders, but individuals whose choices represent a different possibility. Zanis Lipke is the most prominent example in Riga.

The names project. The museum maintains an ongoing project to document the names of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Latvia. The database includes over 70,000 names. Visitors can search the database if they have family connections to the Latvian Jewish community.

The Zanis Lipke Memorial

Who was Zanis Lipke?

Zanis Lipke (1900–1987) was a Latvian docker — he worked as a labourer at the Riga port — with no particular social or intellectual prominence before 1941. When the German occupation began and the systematic murder of Riga’s Jewish population started, Lipke began using his work access — he worked with groups of forced Jewish labourers brought from the ghetto to the port — to smuggle individuals out of the ghetto and into hiding.

With the help of his wife Johanna and a network of farmers, friends, and local clergy across the Riga countryside, Lipke hid approximately 55 Jews over the course of the occupation — in cellars, barns, and in a purpose-built bunker beneath his house on Ķīpsala island. This was extraordinarily dangerous: the penalty for hiding Jews was death. Lipke knew this and continued for three years.

In 1977, Lipke was recognised as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem — the Israeli Holocaust memorial authority that honours non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. He was the first person in the Soviet Union to receive this recognition.

He died in 1987, four years before Latvian independence, and was buried in Riga. His house on Ķīpsala island has been converted into a memorial.

The memorial architecture

The Zanis Lipke Memorial was designed by architect Andris Kronbergs and opened in 2012. The design makes specific architectural choices that reflect the experience of hiding: the structure is partly underground, with a low entrance that visitors must duck to enter, and the interior is deliberately intimate and compressed — giving a physical sense of the confined space in which the people Lipke hid spent months of their lives.

The exhibition inside the memorial is focused specifically on Lipke and the individuals he saved. It includes testimonies from survivors and their descendants, photographs from before the war and from the postwar period, and a documentation of the full network of people who helped Lipke in his work.

The memorial is not primarily about statistics or about the broad history of the Holocaust — for that, the Ghetto Museum is the better resource. The Lipke Memorial is about individual moral choice: what it meant for one person, with no special position or resources, to decide to help when most did not.

Practical information

Riga Ghetto and Holocaust Museum

Address: Maskavas iela 14a, Riga (Maskavas Forštate neighbourhood).

Opening hours: Sunday–Thursday 10:00–17:00, Friday 10:00–15:00. Closed Saturday and Jewish holidays.

Entry: €3 adults, €1.50 students/pensioners. Guided tours in English available in advance.

Getting there: 15–20 minutes walk from Old Town (east on Raiņa bulvāris, past the Central Market, continue on Maskavas iela). By Bolt: €4–5, about 6 minutes.

Zanis Lipke Memorial

Address: Mazā Balasta dambis 8, Ķīpsala island, Riga.

Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday 11:00–18:00. Closed Monday.

Entry: Free (donations welcome).

Getting there: Cross the Vanšu bridge on foot (15–20 minutes from Old Town) or take Bolt across to Ķīpsala island (€5–6 from Old Town). From the bridge, the memorial is about 10 minutes walk on the island along the waterfront path.

Planning your visit

For most visitors, the best approach is to combine both sites in a single half-day — the guided tour (€55) does this with transport and interpretive context. If self-guiding, visit the Ghetto Museum first (1–1.5 hours), then take a Bolt to Ķīpsala island for the Lipke Memorial (45 minutes), then return to Old Town.

For the broader Jewish history context, see our Riga Jewish history walking guide. For the Great Choral Synagogue memorial in Old Town, see our dedicated guide. For tour options, see best Riga Jewish heritage tours compared.

The Maskavas Forštate neighbourhood: understanding the setting

The Riga Ghetto Museum is in Maskavas Forštate — the Moscow Suburb — which was the historical heart of Riga’s Jewish community before 1941. Understanding this neighbourhood is part of understanding the museum.

Maskavas Forštate is one of the oldest and most historically layered parts of Riga. It developed as a suburb outside the old city walls, primarily settled by traders and working-class residents from the eighteenth century onward. The neighbourhood had a significant Jewish population from at least the nineteenth century — not because Jews were restricted to living there (Latvia had no mandatory ghetto tradition before the German occupation) but because community life, institutions, and social networks concentrated people in areas where those institutions existed.

By 1941, Maskavas Forštate was a densely settled, mixed working-class and lower-middle-class district with a substantial Jewish presence alongside Latvian and Russian-speaking residents. The wooden buildings, narrow streets, and small commercial premises of the pre-war neighbourhood have been substantially demolished and rebuilt since then — the district today is a mix of Soviet-era housing blocks and surviving older structures, none of it easily legible as the neighbourhood it was.

The museum site on Maskavas iela preserves some of the material of the pre-war neighbourhood in its structure. The ghetto — which was established in this neighbourhood in August 1941 by forcing residents out and confining the Jewish population within a reduced perimeter — occupied the area immediately around the museum. Standing at the museum entrance, you are standing inside the approximate boundaries of what was the Riga Ghetto from August 1941 until its liquidation in 1943.

The November 1941 massacre: what happened and why it matters

The most historically significant and most difficult event in the Riga Ghetto history is the massacre of November 30 and December 8, 1941 — known as the Rumbula massacre, for the forest site where it occurred.

In November 1941, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln arrived in Riga with orders to “solve the Jewish question” in Latvia. Approximately 27,500 residents of the Riga Ghetto were marched to Rumbula forest (approximately 12 km from Riga city centre) in two operations on November 30 and December 8. They were shot into pits. The operation was one of the largest single-site massacres of the Holocaust, exceeded in scale only by Babi Yar in Kyiv.

The perpetrators were both German (the Jeckeln SS unit) and Latvian (the Arajs Kommando and other Latvian auxiliary units). The role of Latvian perpetrators in this massacre is a subject that Latvian society has engaged with unevenly — the Riga Ghetto Museum addresses it more directly than most official Latvian memorial institutions.

After the November massacre, the ghetto was repopulated with Jewish deportees from Germany, Austria, and the occupied territories of Western Europe. The contrast — Latvian Jews cleared out; German Jews installed in the same buildings — was noted at the time by residents and witnesses. The German Jews were subsequently also murdered in later operations.

The museum covers the November massacre and its aftermath in detail. This is the hardest part of the exhibition to spend time with and the most important.

Žanis Lipke: the rescue in detail

The Žanis Lipke story is the moral counterpoint to the destruction documented at the Ghetto Museum, and it is worth understanding in detail before visiting the memorial on Ķīpsala.

Žanis Lipke (1900–1987) was a Riga docker — an ordinary working-class man with no particular political education, no religious motivation, and no organisational affiliation. Beginning in 1941, he began visiting the Riga Ghetto with the excuse of bringing workers to the German military facilities in Riga (a legitimate work activity that gave him access to the ghetto). He began smuggling individuals out — hiding them under goods in his cart or simply walking them past guards.

Over approximately two years, Lipke rescued approximately 50 Jewish individuals from the ghetto. He hid them in a series of underground hideouts — the most significant was a dugout beneath his woodshed on Ķīpsala island, where he hid between 8 and 12 people at a time. He and his family provided food, basic shelter, and the essential service of not reporting their presence. His wife Johanna was an equal partner in the rescue operation, though history has paid her less attention.

What distinguishes the Lipke rescue is its sustained nature — not a single act of impulse but two years of sustained risk under constant threat of execution — and the fact that it was undertaken without any institutional support. Lipke was not acting under orders from a resistance organisation. He was acting on personal moral judgment at a time when collaboration was common, resistance was dangerous, and the majority of the population (Latvian, Russian, and German) was either complicit or indifferent.

In 1987, Žanis Lipke was recognised as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem — the State of Israel’s designation for non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Latvia has subsequently recognised him as a national hero. The memorial on Ķīpsala island is on the site of his actual woodshed, at the actual location where people were hidden.

Why the woodshed location matters

The Žanis Lipke Memorial is not in a prestigious location. Ķīpsala island is a quiet residential area across the river, not immediately adjacent to any major attraction. The memorial itself is small — an architectural intervention over the actual site of the woodshed, not a grand monument. It requires a specific journey to reach.

This is appropriate. The rescue did not take place in a grand location. It took place in a woodshed on a river island, in a working-class neighbourhood, by a man whose status conferred no particular protection. The specificity of the location — this exact woodshed, this exact island — is what the memorial exists to honour.

The architect Zaiga Gaile’s memorial building is one of the better contemporary memorial designs in the Baltic states. It is small, quiet, and formally considered — a shelter over the site of the original shelter. The interior is minimal: the outline of the original dugout pit marked in the floor, objects from the rescue period, testimony from the people Lipke saved. It takes 20–30 minutes to engage with properly and rewards the journey.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Riga Ghetto Museum suitable for children?

The content includes descriptions and photographs of mass murder, imprisonment, and extreme suffering. It is not appropriate for young children. For teenagers who are studying the Holocaust in school, it is highly informative. Parents should use their judgment based on their children’s maturity and prior exposure to this history.

How long should I plan for the Ghetto Museum?

Plan 75–90 minutes for a serious visit. The exhibition is substantial — multiple rooms covering pre-war Jewish Riga, the occupation period, the ghetto, the massacres, and the survival stories. Spending less time means skimming the surface. The English-language interpretation is good throughout.

Is the Žanis Lipke Memorial difficult to reach without a car?

It is reachable on foot from Old Town (25–30 minutes walking, crossing the Vanšu bridge) or by Bolt (approximately €5–6, 8 minutes). It is not difficult to reach but requires a deliberate decision to go there. The guided half-day tour includes transport, which is the practical advantage of taking the tour for visitors without a car.

Why are the Ghetto Museum and the Lipke Memorial visited together?

They represent two sides of the same history — the organised destruction of the Jewish community (Ghetto Museum) and the individual rescue within that destruction (Lipke Memorial). Visiting both creates a complete picture rather than a one-dimensional experience of either loss alone or rescue alone. The moral weight of the Lipke rescue is greater, not less, when you have already spent time with the Ghetto Museum’s documentation of what the rescue was set against.

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