Location of the monument:

Latitude: 56.487
Longitude: 25.854

When the Nazi occupation started, at the beginning of July 1941, the Jews of Jēkabpils were arrested and placed in two guarded synagogues. At the end of July “self–defenders” of Jēkabpils and Krustpils transferred the Jews to Kūkas (approximately 15 km from Jēkabpils), where they spent approximately a fortnight in the barracks of the peat factory’s workers. On 10 August the Latvian SD unit (“Arājs’ Commando”), which had arrived from Rīga, shot approximately 418 Jews in the Kūkas Swamp.

In 1958 the remains of people murdered in the Kūkas Swamp, together with the remains of Jews shot in Viesīte and Nereta, were reinterred in the Jēkabpils Old Jewish Cemetery, where a monument was erected in 1959 – a light granite stele with an inscription in Russian and Yiddish “Eternal remembrance to the perished Jewish inhabitants of Jēkabpils, Viesīte, Nereta, shot by German occupants in 1941”.

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.