Last night President Lennart Meri received in his home at Viimsi the founder and President of the Council of the Kistler-Ritso Foundation Mrs Olga Kistler-Ritso. Mrs Olga Kistler-Ritso was accompanied by her husband Mr Walter Kistler and the Chairman of the Board of the Kistler-Ritso Estonian Foundation Mr Heiki Ahonen.

The Kistler-Ritso Foundation was established in 1998 in the state of Washington and the aim of its activities is to establish a museum of occupations of Estonia in the recent past. The President of the Republic Lennart Meri is the patron of the Kistler-Ritso Foundation.

At the meeting the President of the Republic thanked Mrs Olga Kistler-Ritso for the initiation of the idea of the occupational museum and setting up a foundation for its support. Mr Heiki Ahonen gave an overview of the activities of the foundation. The construction works of the occupational museum to be built in Tallinn near the Kaarli Church should start in the spring of 2002.

Olga Ritso (before Estonianization Ritson) was born in Kiev in 1920 as a daughter of a physician. She graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Tartu in 1944 and defended her doctoral thesis in the University of Erlangen in Germany in 1946. In 1949, Olga Ritso went to live to the U.S.A., where she got married with Mr Walter Kistler. Till 1971, Mrs Olga Kistler-Ritso was an oculist in Buffalo, from 1971 she had lived in Redmond near Seattle.

In February 2001 the President of the Republic awarded Mrs Olga Kistler-Ritso with the 2nd Class Order of the Estonian Red Cross.


Press Service of the Office of the President
At Kadriorg on 12 July 2001

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