About Rumbula's Echo

Five children, including three from the Grinfeld family with mother Ita-Beila, 38, are ushered to the firing squad at the trench in the Skede dunes.

Rumbula's Echo is a feature-length documentary film in which a genealogy search introduces the story of the large-scale genocide at Rumbula. This central event occurs within the context of the Holocaust throughout one small country, Latvia. The country’s Jews are primarily murdered in mass shootings (photo: Five children, including three from the Grinfeld family with their mother Ita-Beila, 38, are ushered to the firing squad at the trench dug in the Skede dunes on the Baltic Sea).

The documentary is an outgrowth of the educational web site, Rumbula.org. It was launched in 2002 to tell the story of Jews and the Holocaust in Latvia, with a special focus on the Rumbula massacre. The portal was actively updated until 2014 and continues today as an archive so that its original content is accessible.

Rumbula.org received hundreds of thousands of visitors worldwide and was listed in the catalog of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington D.C. Among organizations linking to Rumbula.org were the USHMM, the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, the Jewish Agency for Israel, the Latvian Foreign Ministry's 2006 Holocaust Remembrance Day Program (web and print), and the University of Latvia Judaic Studies Center.

a drawing of a tree and of the faces of individuals in the branches.

The documentary opens with the same genealogy search that led to the creation of Rumbula.org. This family history search is interwoven with accounts of families who were murdered and individuals who barely survived.

Both Rumbula.org and Rumbula's Echo are projects of Luminescence Media Group NFP, an Illinois not-for-profit corporation.