Kraslava - Home
55°54'N, 27°10'E
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Kraslava
Municipal Coat of Arms
Copyright © 2008-10  Jon Seligman.  All Rights Reserved.
Kraslava in Latgale - Home of the Joffe & Swartzman Families
Kraslava is a small town in the Latgale region of eastern Latvia.  Its border location and hundreds of years of Russian rule left an ethnically diverse population - Jews, Russians, Poles, Belorussians and a minority of Latvians; each national group represented by an oar of the boat displayed on the municipal coat of arms.

After settling in Kraslava in the mid-18th century the Jewish population grew quickly and numbered over half of the residents throughout the 19th century. Emigration, the results of WWI and especially the Holocaust, would change all that, leaving Kraslava with only a tiny remnant of a once vibrant community.

You are invited to travel through pages of the history of our shtetl and view images of places that were once familiar to our ancestors.

Kraslava