^{Photo caption: Ilana Ivanova (Zivson), Liepāja.}

Every community rebuilt after a rupture needs someone who refuses to let the names be lost. In Liepāja, the Latvian port the Jewish world long knew as Libau, that person is Ilana Ivanova (Zivson). She is celebrating her 80th birthday, and I have called her "the soul of this community, a living memory".

A remnant of thirty

The arithmetic of Libau is brutal. Under Nazi occupation the town held nearly 6,000 Jews. Of those who were still there, roughly thirty lived to see liberation.

Two of the thirty were Ilana's parents, David and Henny Zivson. For nineteen months they shared a secret cellar with nine other Jews, kept alive by Roberts and Johanna Seduls. Roberts was killed by shrapnel not long before the war ended in the town; Johanna went on protecting the group alone. In 1981 Yad Vashem honoured Johanna Sedule as Righteous Among the Nations.

Her father also saved something besides lives. Made to serve as an electrician for the German Security Service, he found photographs of the massacres at Šķēde in the office of SS commander Karl-Emil Strott and copied them in secret. The German Resistance Memorial Center records that those prints became evidence at Nuremberg and in the Grauel trial.

Calling the diaspora back

What Ilana built from that inheritance is described by her daughter, Anna Petrova, who now chairs the Liepāja Jewish Religious Community and speaks of herself as third-generation. The list is long: world reunions of Liepāja/Libau Jewry, Holocaust memorial projects, exhibitions and conferences, educational and cultural work, the Otto Fischer project, and historical publications, including an e-book titled The Jewish Heritage of Liepāja in the Context of the City's History.

The reunions speak most directly to any diaspora that has learned to return. The 13th took place this summer: about 180 people from eight countries, among them families from Israel, the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, walking with diplomats and local officials through streets their ancestors had left or lost.

On 24 July 2026, during that gathering, a memorial was dedicated beside the Liepāja lighthouse, at Roņu iela 8C, where one of the first mass shootings of local Jews took place in the summer of 1941. It is dedicated to more than 2,000 victims and joins Šķēde as the town's second great site of Holocaust memory.

Stones in the dunes and in the cemetery

Šķēde itself is the work of the Liepāja Jewish Heritage Foundation, founded in 2004: a menorah of monumental scale set into the dunes, continued by an avenue dedicated to the Righteous Among the Nations, which was opened at the 2014 reunion with Israel's ambassador present.

Memory work in Liepāja has not paused since the summer. On 8 October 2026, a restored memorial to the Jews from Central Europe who died in Liepāja was opened in the Jewish section of the Livas cemetery. A short video by the Uniting Fund records the ceremony:

The Otto Fischer project belongs to the same effort. Fischer, an Austrian Jewish coach, took Olimpija Libau to the Latvian championship and was murdered in 1941 for being a Jew. A plaque at the Olimpija Stadium and a youth tournament now carry his name.

Small, and alive

None of this is only commemoration. At Kungu iela 21 the congregation keeps Shabbat, reads and studies Torah, and celebrates Rosh Hashanah, Hanukkah, Pesach and the rest of the calendar. It runs concerts, lectures and education, supports its elderly members, and works with the city, with Jewish organisations at home and abroad, and with embassies. A museum is being prepared in the building to tell how Liepāja's Jews lived, rather than only how they were killed. Descendants searching for their roots find an open door.

Anna Petrova does not pretend the prewar numbers will come back. Her point is simpler: the community is present, it is alive, and eight decades after an effort to erase it, candles are still lit on Friday nights.

For that, Ilana deserves our thanks. Mazal tov, and until 120.