We don’t get a lot of tzitzit orders coming out of Latvia. Now I think I know why.

The shipping address listed on the order info looked quite odd to me, so I did a Google search for the city, Daugavpils. On the Wikipedia page that came up I noticed there was a section on religious demographics, so I scrolled down to take a quick peek. There are 10 churches and cathedrals listed, and one synagogue, the Daugavpils Synagogue, which was restored around 15 years ago.

Then there’s a jolting note: “Before the Second World War there were more than 40 synagogues in the city.”

Daugavpils has several names in Yiddish: Denenberg, Dinaburg and Dvinsk.

It seems that back in the early 1940s, some of the local Latvians were not so fond of their Jewish neighbors and were not loathe to collaborate with the Nazis in the decimation of the Jewish population. Before the Nazis invaded, the Jewish population of Daugavpils was 16,000. By the time it was liberated in 1944, the Jewish population was 100. Rachmana litzlan. Hy’d.

These figures are not pleasant to think about. But it felt slightly encouraging to send tzitzit to Daugavpils.