Tag #117263 - Interview #78030 (Margarita Kamiyenovskaya)

The Tallinn synagogue [29] was destroyed during the bombing of Tallinn by the Soviet aviation in March 1944. In the post-war period there was no synagogue in Tallinn. I remember, shortly after the war, Tallinn Jews started collecting money for the construction of the synagogue. They came to my father. Of course, he gave as much as he could. He said that he wasn't religious, but a Jew. Soviet authorities banned the construction of the synagogue. There was an anti-religion struggle in Estonia, which commenced in the USSR in the 1920-30s [see Struggle against religion] [30]. The Jewish community created a small semi-legal prayer house. It was a small premise, where people would go and pray. My father also went there. On holidays there were many people and on Yom Kippur even those who didn't show up in the prayer house on other occasions, came to pray. After Rabbi Aba Gomer had been killed by the Germans, there was no rabbi in the community. After the war Tallinn Jews had no opportunity to maintain a rabbi and his family. There were people who applied for the position of the rabbi, but they had no rabbinical education. They could be called rabbi conditionally. One of them was the gabbai, the elder of a religious synagogue. There was no organized Jewish life.