Great Choral Synagogue memorial Riga: what happened and how to visit
Where is the Great Choral Synagogue memorial in Riga?
The memorial is at Gogola iela 25, near the edge of Old Town, about 5 minutes walk from the Freedom Monument. The Great Choral Synagogue was built in 1871, burned on 4 July 1941 with people inside, and demolished by Soviet authorities in 1964. An outdoor memorial now marks the site.
The synagogue and its history
The Great Choral Synagogue (Lielā Horālā sinagoga) at Gogola iela 25 was completed in 1871 to a design in the Moorish Revival style — the fashionable approach to Jewish religious architecture in the mid-19th century, which drew on forms from Islamic Spain as a way of invoking the historical Jewish presence in Sepharad and asserting a cosmopolitan identity. The building was one of the largest and most architecturally significant synagogues in the Baltic region, with a capacity for hundreds of worshippers and a design that made it a significant presence in the Riga streetscape.
By 1941, it had served Riga’s Jewish community for 70 years. It was a building that people had been married in, had been bar and bat mitzvahed in, had prayed in weekly for their entire lives. It was, in the most fundamental sense, a community’s sacred space.
On 4 July 1941 — three days after German forces entered Riga on 1 July — the building was set on fire. The arson was carried out by the Arajs Kommando, the Latvian auxiliary police unit that had been organised within days of the German occupation. Accounts vary on the precise number of people inside, but contemporary witnesses and documentary evidence indicate that over 300 Jews who had sought refuge in the synagogue were killed in the fire. The building burned for several days.
What happened at the Great Choral Synagogue on 4 July 1941 was one of the first mass atrocities of the German occupation of Latvia, and one of the most visible: the burning synagogue in the centre of Riga was seen by thousands of residents. The moral weight of that visibility — who saw it, who did nothing, who helped — is part of what a visit to the memorial site asks visitors to consider.
What stands there now
The synagogue burned in July 1941. The ruined structure was partially demolished during and after the occupation. In 1964, Soviet authorities demolished the remaining walls of the building and cleared the site. The Soviet policy on Jewish memorial sites was generally one of suppression — the specific Jewish identity of victims was frequently elided in favour of the generic Soviet category “peaceful Soviet citizens.”
After Latvian independence, a memorial was established on the site. The current memorial is modest in scale — a stone monument, inscriptions in Latvian and Hebrew, and a cleared space that indicates the footprint of the original building. It does not reconstruct the synagogue or attempt to recreate its visual presence.
The restraint of the memorial is appropriate in a site where reconstruction would be impossible and falsifying. But it means that a visit requires knowledge of what stood here and what happened here to be fully meaningful. The memorial on its own — without context — communicates loss without fully communicating scale.
Join the half-day Jewish history tour for full historical context (€55, 4 hours)The Peitav Shul: the synagogue that survived
Five minutes walk from the Great Choral Synagogue memorial, on Peitavas iela 6a (which crosses Gogola iela), stands the Peitav Shul — a small 19th-century synagogue that is one of the very few Jewish religious buildings in the Baltic states to have survived the German occupation intact.
The survival of the Peitav Shul is attributed to a specific circumstance: a warehouse of highly flammable materials was stored in adjacent buildings, and the Germans did not want to risk spreading a fire that would threaten the surrounding infrastructure. Whether this explanation fully accounts for the building’s survival or whether other factors were involved is debated, but the practical result is that a functioning historic synagogue still stands in the area where dozens once existed.
The Peitav Shul is still an active place of Jewish worship for Riga’s small remaining Jewish community. Visitors are generally welcome to look at the exterior and often to enter outside of prayer times — check the signage at the entrance for current times. The interior is small, simple, and genuine in a way that a restored or reconstructed building cannot be. It is worth the five-minute detour.
The broader destruction of Jewish religious life
The Great Choral Synagogue was the largest of Riga’s synagogues, but it was not the only one destroyed. Before the German occupation, Riga had dozens of synagogues, prayer houses, and Jewish educational and cultural institutions. By the end of 1941, almost all of them had been burned, looted, or demolished. Some buildings were converted to other uses during the occupation; others simply ceased to exist.
The comprehensive destruction of Jewish religious infrastructure was not incidental to the Holocaust — it was part of the same project of erasure that included the mass murders. A community’s institutional memory — its schools, its cemeteries, its prayer houses, its cultural organisations — was targeted alongside its physical members.
Latvia’s Jewish cemeteries present a similar picture. Most of the historic Jewish cemeteries in Latvia were destroyed during the German occupation or damaged during the Soviet period. The reconstruction of Jewish memorial landscape in Latvia has been an ongoing project since independence.
Join the 2-hour Jewish heritage walking tour in Riga (€22)Visiting the memorial
Address: Gogola iela 25, Riga Old Town.
How to get there: A 5-minute walk from the Freedom Monument. Walk south along Brīvības bulvāris from the Freedom Monument, turn right on Merķeļa iela, then left on Gogola iela. The memorial is on the right.
Opening hours: The memorial is an outdoor public space and is accessible at all times. There is no entry charge, no visitor centre, and no staffed interpretation.
What to bring: Knowledge of the site’s history, prepared in advance. The memorial signage provides the basic facts but cannot substitute for preparation. If possible, read about the Great Choral Synagogue and the early days of the German occupation of Riga before visiting.
Combining with other sites: The Peitav Shul is 5 minutes walk. The Museum of the Occupation of Latvia is 10 minutes walk. The Riga Ghetto and Holocaust Museum is 20 minutes walk or 6 minutes by Bolt. A guided Jewish heritage tour (€22–55 via GYG) covers these sites in a logical sequence with interpretive context.
Understanding what you are visiting
The memorial at Gogola iela 25 is not a conventional tourist attraction. It is a place where several hundred people died horribly, followed by a site where a building that had stood for 70 years was first burned and then erased. The combination of initial violence and subsequent erasure is part of what the memorial asks visitors to confront.
Visiting seriously means arriving with preparation, spending time with the inscriptions, and allowing the scale of what happened here — not just at this site, but across Latvia in the summer of 1941 — to register. For the broader context, see our Riga Jewish history walking guide and our guide to the Riga Ghetto Museum and Zanis Lipke Memorial.
The Great Choral Synagogue before 1941: what was here
The memorial site is most meaningful if you know what it is replacing. The Great Choral Synagogue was not simply a large building — it was the ceremonial centre of Jewish Riga, the building that represented the community’s position in the city and the ambition of a prosperous and culturally rich community at the height of its confidence.
The building. Completed in 1871, designed by the German architect Johann Daniel Felsko (who also designed parts of Old Town), the Great Choral Synagogue was built in the Moorish Revival style that was the fashionable architectural idiom for major synagogues across Europe in the nineteenth century — a style that referenced the golden age of Jewish culture in medieval Islamic Spain. The building was large by any standard: it could accommodate approximately 1,000 worshippers and dominated the street it occupied. The name “Choral” referred to the use of a professional choir in the liturgical service — a practice associated with the modernising Reform Judaism movement that had significant influence in Riga’s middle-class Jewish community.
The community it served. By 1935, Riga’s Jewish population was approximately 43,000 — about 12% of the city’s total population. This was a community that had been present in Riga since at least the eighteenth century (despite periods of official restriction), that had produced significant figures in Latvian intellectual and cultural life, and that had its own schools, hospitals, charitable institutions, newspapers in both Yiddish and Latvian, and a complex internal structure of different religious denominations and political tendencies. The Great Choral Synagogue was the most prominent single institution of this community.
The neighbourhood. The synagogue stood in what was then a mixed residential and commercial area of the New Town — not a segregated Jewish neighbourhood, but an area where Jewish families, businesses, and institutions were concentrated. The synagogue’s neighbourhood is now ordinary streets of New Town Riga: apartment buildings, shops, a park. No trace of the pre-war Jewish urban landscape survives at street level except the memorial.
The events of July 4, 1941
The German Army entered Riga on July 1, 1941. By July 3, the Einsatzgruppen — the SS mobile killing units — and their Latvian auxiliary collaborators had begun operations against the Jewish population. On July 4, 1941, the Great Choral Synagogue was set on fire.
The sequence of events is documented: Jewish men were forced to gather outside the building; some accounts record people being forced inside before the fire was set, though the precise circumstances vary across testimonies and the historical documentation is not fully resolved. What is established is that the fire was deliberate, that it was set by the German occupiers and Latvian collaborators, that people were killed in or around the building, and that the number killed at the synagogue on that day is estimated at approximately 300.
This single event is sometimes treated as a footnote in the broader statistics of the Holocaust in Latvia — at the same site in the same weeks, tens of thousands of people were being murdered across the country. But the burning of the Great Choral Synagogue has a particular symbolic weight: it was the deliberate destruction of the most visible symbol of Jewish cultural and religious life in Latvia, within three days of the German arrival. The speed of the atrocity — and the participation of Latvian auxiliaries in it — is historically significant.
The remaining synagogues in Riga (there were approximately 50 synagogues and Jewish prayer houses in the city) were demolished or repurposed in the following months. The Peitav Shul (on Peitavas iela, in Old Town) survived because it was surrounded by apartment buildings that the occupiers did not want to damage — a survival by urban accident rather than any protective decision.
The Peitav Shul: the surviving synagogue
A 5-minute walk from the Great Choral Synagogue memorial, the Peitav Shul (Gobo Synagogue) on Peitavas iela 6–8 is the only synagogue in Riga that survived the German occupation intact. Built in 1905 in an Art Nouveau-influenced style, the building functioned briefly as a warehouse during the German occupation (which is why it was not destroyed) and was restored to Jewish religious use after the war.
The synagogue is functioning as an active place of worship for Riga’s current Jewish community (which numbers in the low thousands, compared to 43,000 pre-war). It is open to visitors outside of prayer times. The interior retains significant original features — the Bimah (Torah reading platform), the Ark, the gallery for women’s seating — and is the most direct surviving connection to pre-war Jewish religious life in Riga.
Visiting the Peitav Shul alongside the Great Choral Synagogue memorial creates a pairing that is emotionally significant: one building destroyed, one building survived. The survival of the Peitav Shul by historical accident (the apartment buildings that protected it) stands against the deliberate destruction of the much larger and more prominent Great Choral Synagogue.
Practical information
Great Choral Synagogue memorial: Gogola iela / Dzirnavu iela corner, Riga New Town. The garden is open at all times, free of charge.
Peitav Shul: Peitavas iela 6–8, Old Town. Open to visitors Sunday–Friday during daytime hours, outside of prayer times. Free entry; donations welcomed. Not open on Shabbat (Friday evening to Saturday nightfall) or Jewish holidays.
Getting there: The Great Choral Synagogue memorial is 15–18 minutes walk from Old Town (north through the canal park, up Barona iela, right on Dzirnavu iela). The Peitav Shul is in Old Town itself, on Peitavas iela, easily walkable from Town Hall Square.
Guided tours: The half-day Jewish history tour and the 2-hour walking tour both include the Great Choral Synagogue memorial and the Peitav Shul as standard stops. See our comparison of Riga Jewish heritage tours.
Frequently asked questions
Can I visit the Great Choral Synagogue memorial at any time?
Yes. The memorial garden is in public space — it is not enclosed and has no opening or closing time. You can visit early in the morning or late in the evening without any constraint.
Is there anything to read at the memorial site?
Yes — there are information panels with historical text in Latvian and English at the site. The panels provide a summary of the synagogue’s history and the events of July 4, 1941. They are informative but brief; prior reading will significantly enhance the experience.
How many Jewish people were killed in the Holocaust in Latvia?
Approximately 70,000–75,000 of Latvia’s pre-war Jewish population of approximately 95,000 were murdered — a destruction rate of approximately 90%, one of the highest in occupied Europe. The primary massacre sites were the Rumbula forest (where approximately 27,500 people were killed in November–December 1941) and the Biķernieki forest. The Great Choral Synagogue burning was an early act of cultural destruction in this broader process.
Is the Peitav Shul worth visiting if I have already seen the Great Choral Synagogue memorial?
Yes, as a counterpoint. The Peitav Shul is the survival where the Great Choral Synagogue is the destruction. Seeing both in the same visit — the garden where the larger synagogue once stood, and the smaller synagogue that survived — creates a more complete picture of what was lost and what remains.
Frequently asked questions
When was the Great Choral Synagogue burned?
The Great Choral Synagogue on Gogola iela was set on fire on 4 July 1941 — three days after German forces entered Riga on 1 July 1941. Over 300 Jews who had sought refuge inside the building were burned alive. The arson was carried out by the Arajs Kommando, a Latvian auxiliary unit working with the German SS.What does the memorial look like today?
The site is a modest outdoor memorial space — a cleared area with a stone monument, inscriptions, and some landscaping. It does not reconstruct the synagogue or display the scale of what stood there. A visit is best combined with a guided tour that can explain what the site looked like before 1941.Were there other synagogues in Riga before 1941?
Yes. Riga had dozens of synagogues and Jewish prayer houses before the German occupation. Almost all were destroyed in July–August 1941. The Great Choral Synagogue was the largest and most prestigious, but the destruction of Jewish religious life in Riga was comprehensive.Is there a Jewish community in Riga today?
Yes, though very small compared to the pre-war community. The Peitav Shul synagogue on Peitavas iela in Old Town is one of the few synagogues in the Baltic states to have survived the German occupation intact (it was saved because a warehouse of flammable materials was stored next to it, and the Germans did not want to risk spreading fire). It still operates as an active synagogue.What is the Peitav Shul?
The Peitav Shul (Gogoļa iela 6a, near Old Town) is a small 19th-century synagogue that survived the German occupation and remains an active place of Jewish worship in Riga. Visitors are welcome outside of prayer times; check the times at the entrance. It is a 5-minute walk from the Great Choral Synagogue memorial site.
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