Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
RIGA, Latvia (AP) - Israeli President Shimon Peres on Tuesday took part in a ceremony to open a museum honoring a couple who saved some 50 Jews from extermination in Nazi-occupied Latvia.
The museum in downtown Riga, Latvia's capital, is located next to the property once owned by Zanis Lipke, a port worker who together with his wife hid Jews in an underground pit measuring some 9 square meters (90 square feet).
The three-story museum of dark gray wood resembles an overturned ship and is designed to give visitors a claustrophobic sense of life in a tiny bunker.
Peres took part in the ribbon-cutting ceremony together with his Latvian counterpart, Andris Berzins.
In 1966, Yad Vashem, an Israel-based center for studying the Holocaust, recognized Zanis and Johanna Lipke as rescuers of Jews.
Lipke died in 1987 and his wife in 1990.
(Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
