Estonia is preparing for the opening of its first synagogue since the country's Jewish community was destroyed in the Holocaust.
Speaking ahead of the building's official opening ceremony on May 16, Chief Rabbi Shmuel Kot, the country's first Rabbi since the early 1940s, said the occasion was the best answer to "fascism, communism and Nazism".
Kot, of the Chabad Lubavitch Orthodox Jewish movement, said: "I am the first rabbi after the Holocaust. The last rabbi was killed by the Nazis."
He was reluctant to speak about Estonia's recent decision to remove a Soviet-era war memorial which riots by mainly Russian-speaking Estonians - a significant minority of 300,000 in the country of 1.3 million.
But he said, on Thursday, it had been a sensitive issue for Jews living in Estonia as many were Russian-speaking war veterans.
The new synagogue was built at a cost of about $2 million with money from the US-based Rohr family foundation and Estonian Jews and non-Jews.
It will fit 180 people in the main worship area.
The Jewish population of Estonia is about 3,000.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8E844DB1-C5F4-454F-843F-77290323D846.htm
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