Springfield Steven (born Isidor Springenfeld) (30 January 1923, Riga) — Holocaust surviver, public figure.
Steven Springfield was born into a family of Jewish retail traders. He studied at a gymnasium with instruction in Hebrew. During his school years, he was actively involved in a Zionist student organisation.
From October 1941 to April 1945, he was imprisoned in the Riga Ghetto and in the concentration camps Kaiserwald (Riga) and Stutthof (Poland), and was sent on a death march. All his family, with the exception of his elder brother, perished. Together with his brother, he was liberated by the Soviet army. After liberation, he worked for several months as a translator in the Red Army, but was arrested by SMERSH on false charges and released after four months of interrogations and torture “for lack of evidence.”
Without returning to Latvia, he emigrated to the United States in March 1947. He worked in the textile business in New York until his retirement in the early 1980s.
He was one of the founders of the organisation “Jewish Survivors of Latvia” (JSL) and served as its president from 1984. He initiated major JSL projects in cooperation with the Council of Jewish Communities of Latvia in Riga, including the construction of a memorial at the site of the burned synagogue on Gogol Street, the restoration of the Bikur Holim hospital, and the rebuilding and construction of a Jewish school in Riga.
For many years, beginning in 1989, he visited Riga several times a year to personally distribute financial assistance, funded by donations from Latvian Jews in the United States, to Holocaust survivors in Latvia (more than 50 trips in total).
As president of JSL, he actively supported Latvia’s accession to NATO, addressing letters to members of the United States Congress and to the ambassadors of nineteen NATO member states at the United Nations. From 1998, he was a member of the Commission of Historians under the President of Latvia.
He was awarded Latvia’s highest decoration, the Order of the Three Stars (2002).