Keldrimäe (Keldrimägi)

Cellar hill, named after a large concrete ‘cellar’ (underground storage facility?) in the neighborhood (see Mäe for discussion). Known formerly as Israelgasse (1893) plus variants Iisraeli (1921), Израильская ул (1907), but mainly Israeli tn (1885-1954), then Turu (1954-1991) during the Soviet Era. The first Jews in Estonia are believed to have come with the Teutonic knights. Jewish streets/quarters have been a typical feature of European towns since at least the 10^th C, with names like ‘Old Jewry’, Rue de la Juiverie (France), Judengasse (Germany), etc. The word ghetto seems to come from the Venetian dialect, gheta (related to Ital. goccia and Fre. goutte, for drip/drop, but see Harju for further details), after the 14-15^th-C foundry area where Jews were required to live. In ‘recent’ years, two main waves of Jewish immigration have occurred: one beginning sometime after 1856 when Alexander II abolished the army ‘Cantonist’ system of ‘conscripting’ Jewish boys for 25-year military service (the conscription was not limited to Jews, by the way), with the added intention of converting them to Russian Orthodoxy (an interesting variation of the early Ottoman practice of taking Christian slave boys – it being illegal to enslave Muslims – and molding them first into Muslims then Janissaries, the elite fighting force of the Sublime Porte), and gradually extended the pale of settlement to Jews according to how ‘useful’ they were. Jewish communities began to thrive across Estonia, culminating in 1933 in an Institute of Jewish Studies (supported by Albert Einstein) at Tartu University. Then came war, Soviet occupation, Nazis, deportations, pogroms and extermination (see Maakri). Given the ruthless efficiency of the latter, Estonia’s remarkably brilliant and ‘somewhat’ (did I hear ‘rampant’?) anti-Aryan and -Indo-European polyglot (±60 languages) Uku Masing (another Arbujad member, see Arbu) and his wife Eha were the only Estonians to be honored among Israel’s Righteous among the Nations for saving at least one man’s life. The second wave came after WWII with an influx of Jews from across the USSR.