This post was first published on Adath Jeshurun’s website. It has been reprinted here with permission.
For Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day on April 28, 2014, Minneapolis-based agency Olson launched an interactive experience that allows anyone, anywhere in the world to tour the Riga Ghetto as it existed during the time of the Holocaust. With each step you take, you are virtually taking steps through the streets of this Latvian town as it existed at the time. You become a part of the living history.
In partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation, Latvia’s Riga Ghetto Museum operates the website, which “provides a graphic guide to the evolution of the Holocaust there,” Olson wrote on its Facebook page. Through the site you can also tour the halls of the museum.
Adath Jeshurun Congregation member Ross Teichner, worked on the project. “It’s really one of the first times I’ve gotten to participate in a subject so close to my own identity as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, and make a real global impact,” Ross told us.
The site combines a groundbreaking mix of Google Street View, archival photos and geo-location technology to allow anyone with a mobile device to walk the Riga Ghetto by walking around their apartment, office or neighborhood. Along the way, they’ll encounter a number of survivor stories narrated by a survivor of the Ghetto, and learn about the atrocities committed in Latvia, a little known corner of the Holocaust experience where more than 70,000 perished.
The site, which is available at http://rgm.lv, also includes six full survivor stories told as interactive graphic novels.
The site shares the same mission as the museum: to offer visitors a window into the everyday reality of the Riga Ghetto and a graphic guide to the evolution of the Holocaust in Latvia.
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