We are the committee for the establishment of a memorial for the Jewish community of Bauska. We are survivors, decendents and preservers of this community. Our primary goal is to celebrate the memory of the Jewish community that once lived and thrived in Bauska.
JEHUDA FEITELSON, CO-CHAIR
Jehuda is a former Bauska resident. His family lived in Bauska for at least seven generations. They owned a textile and ready-made clothes store on the marketplace where many Jewish stores were located. In 1915, Jews were exiled from the Baltic states to Russia which is where Jehuda’s parents, Isac and Vera, met and married. In 1920, the family returned to Latvia and lived in both Riga and Bauska. His father reopened the family store in Bauska. In 1922, Jehuda was born in Riga. He graduated from the Bauska Gymnasium (High School) in 1940 and enrolled in Riga University. During that same year, the Soviets nationalized Jews’ properties and his parents moved to Riga. When the Nazis occupied Latvia in 1942, they were forced to move into the Riga Ghetto where his parents were murdered during the “Section Action” that November.
“I was transferred to the Riga Ghetto work camp and hence to the Kaiserwald-Riga Concentration Camp. With the advance of the Soviet Army in 1944, we were shipped to German concentration camps, first Stutthof then Buchenwald-Madgeburg munitions factory. I was liberated by the US army in May 1945.”
Jehuda immigrated via Belgium to Palestine in 1946 and took part in the War of Independence from 1947-48. In 1949, he resumed his academic studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He received his Masters of Science degree in 1952 and his PhD in 1954. He did his post doctorate work in Cambridge, England and research at Chicago, Boston, Princeton, and Rockefeller Universities in the United States. He was a member of staff at Hebrew University from 1956 until 1992. He currently resides in Jerusalem, Israel.
YEHUDI “GAF” GAFFEN & BEVERLY GAFFEN ALTMAN, CO-CHAIRS
Siblings Beverley and Yehudi Gaffen’s mother’s family are documented as having lived in Bauska since at least 1740. The extended Arensburg family lived in an apartment above their grain business on the main square of the old town of Bauska. In August 1941, Yehuda Pesach, his wife Hoda Bassa and five of their eight children were part of the Jewish community exterminated in the Likverten forest. Fortunately, three of their daughters had emigrated to South Africa by then.
Beverley and Yehudi have lived in San Diego for over thirty years, raising their families and working actively for Jewish causes.