Location of the monument:

Latitude: 57.155173
Longitude: 22.375365

The Nazi troops entered Talsi on 1 July 1941, and immediately imposing restrictions on Jews began – expropriation of property, orders to do hard manual labour, etc. Several Jews, who were considered to be Soviet activists, were immediately arrested and shot. Mass–scale murders of Jews from Talsi and its vicinity was conducted as a number of actions, which were implemented by local self–defenders and the Latvian SD unit “Arājs’ Commando” in July and August in various places, murdering 400 Jews in total. The first action for extermination of Jews took place in a forest of Ķūļciems parish, but the majority of Jews from Talsi were killed in the Sukturi Forest, in the vicinity of former leprosarium. Part of Jews from Talsi town and Stende parish were shot in a forest of Ruņķi village.

In 1959 several pits with the murdered were discovered in Ruņķi village, and the victims were reinterred in one place at the side of the road to Mordanga. In 2008 the Council of Jewish Communities of Latvia placed on the site of reinterment a monument with the Star of David and an inscription in Latvian “In July 1941 in this forest Nazis and their supporters murdered 120 Jews from Talsi and Stende.”

Further reading:

• Meler M. Jewish Latvia: Sites to Remember. Tel-Aviv: Association of Latvian and Estonian Jews in Israel, 2013.
• Ezergailis A. The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1944: The Missing Center. Riga: The Historical Institute of Latvia; Washington, DC: US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1996.

Search for the related names of Jews at http://names.lu.lv.