Location of the monument:

Latitude: 56.311675
Longitude: 25.509548

Exact information about the course of the Holocaust in Nereta is not available. In August 1941 part of Nereta’s Jews were killed in Pilkalne (approximately 4 km from Nereta), but part of them, possibly, in the gravel pits in the vicinity of Ilza (Ķišķi) Graveyard (approximately 5 km from Nereta). The Zadowitschs from Nereta, together with approximately 9 Jews from Mazkalne was murdered separately, on the Čigānu hill.

After the war the majority of victims were reinterred in the Jēkabpils Jewish Cemetery, but the remains of some victims – in the Smiltaine Graveyard, where a red granite monument in the shape of a human figure (author – O. Feldbergs) was erected in 1980, it bears an inscription in Latvian: “In Memory of the Victims of Fascistic Terror”.

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.