The Sabbath begins at 7:46 P.M. on Friday, September 11, and concludes at 8:38 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath and Rosh Hashanah candles should be lit and prayers recited by or before 7:28 P.M. and completed before sunset at 7:46 P.M. Rosh Hashanah begins at sundown on Friday; Sabbath rules apply.
September 11
7:00 P.M. Minchah and Maariv
September 12
10:00 A.M. Shacharit
12:00 noon Musaf
6:45 P.M. Mincha
September 13
10:00 A.M. Shacharit
12:00 noon Shofar horn
12:30 P.M. Musaf
6:45 P.M. Mincha and Maariv
Shana tova u’metuku!
Dear members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and friends,
As we near Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I want to wish you and your loved ones shana tova u’metuku, a happy and sweet new year!
Rosh Hashanah is not just the start of a new year, it’s a time reflect, to look back on the foregoing year, to take stock of what we’ve achieved and to look forward to the future in hope. It’s the time when we remember how important communication, friendship, being together and caring for one another is.
The Jewish prayer says: “He who makes peace in his high holy places, may he bring peace upon us, and upon all Israel.” Let these words usher us into the year 5787.
I wish the New Year brings health, peace, goodness and abundance to your house, and that there would be no lack of sincerity, warmth and warm moments. May our community remain strong and united, and may none of us lack faith and hope in a better future.
May 5787 be safer, more peaceful and full of good works, beautiful encounters and reasons to smile.
A good, sweet and meaningful New Year!
Shana tova u’metuku!
Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman
Lithuanian Jewish Community
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, members of the regional Jewish communities, the Israeli ambassador to Lithuania and embassy staff and others celebrated the Jewish New Year this week at the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum in Vilnius. Happy 5787.
Vandals attacked the monument to one of the mass graves in the Pivonija Forest outside Ukmergė (Vilkomir) following a commemoration there on September 6. Local police say the desecration happened on September 6. The mass grave site has suffered vandalism including from four-wheel off-road vehicles before. Police said they will investigate fully the latest incident.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Israeli ambassador Shelly Hugler Livne and members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community, the Ukmergė (Vilkomir) Jewish Community and Kaunas Jewish Community attended a ceremony to commemorate Holocaust victims at the memorial and mass grave site in the Pivonija Forest on September 6. The United States embassy’s deputy ambassador Dan Hunt and diplomat Emma Locatelli attended, as did Lithuania’s deputy minister for culture Lina Baublienė and others.
After the ceremony participants were invited to attend an exhibit of Righteous Gentiles at the Ukmergė Tolerance Center. Ukmergė Jewish Community chairman Artūras Taicas took the opportunity to announce a new initiative to create an internet archive of historical Jewish passports and identity documents.
A ceremony to mark the 85th anniversary of the liquidation of the Ponevezh ghetto was held in the northern Lithuanian city September 8 with a number of speakers and music.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said they had gathered both to honor the dead and keep memory of the Holocaust alive for future generations.
Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Shelly Hugler Livne said 85 years is long time in human life but only an instant in terms of historical memory.
Lithuanian MP Ramūnas Vyžintas reiterated the need to safeguard historical memory.
Sister Leonora Kasiūlytė from the Congregation of the Sisters of God’s Providence told the story Marija Rusteikaitė, the nun from the Panevėžys area who rescued 15 Jews including children.
A delegation of about 30 Litvaks living in Israel are visiting the northern Lithuanian city Panevėžys, or Ponevezh, and have met with the mayor of the city, Loreta Masiliūnienė. For many of the visitors the trip is very personal, an opportunity to visit where their parents, grandparents and forefathers lived and died.
Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel Grisha Deitch sat with mayor Masiliūnienė at city hall in front of the rest of the Israeli delegation and they discussed the history of the Ponevezh community, securing its future and ties with Litvaks abroad.
A memorial ceremony will be held at the monument marking the gates of the Panevėžys ghetto will be held at 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September 8, followed by a walking tour of Jewish sites. Later the delegation and others will visit the mass murder site in Kurganava Forest where about 8,000 Jews were murdered, and the mass murder site in Žalioji Forest, where about 5,000 Jews were murdered.
Last week the Vilnius Jewish Public Library recognized Irina Guzenberg and Henrik Agranovski’s impressive and encyclopedic book Vilnius, the result of more than 30 years of research, published in English and Russian.
The book is both a short encyclopedia and a chronicle of Yerushalayim d’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilnius. Israeli ambassador Shelly Hugler Livne, Lithuanian deputy foreign minister Kristupas Vaitiekūnas, a large contingent from Beit Vilna, Lithuanian Jewish Community members and academics from Lithuania, Israel and the USA attended to book presentation.
The book was previously published as a much shorter version of Jewish sites in Vilnius for tourists and others. The larger volume goes into much greater depth about the sites and histories.
The Kaunas Jewish Community is celebrating this year’s theme for the European Day of Jewish Culture, love, with a free concert. A new installment in the Dance Me Back to the Future called Erev Shel Shoshanim, Evening of Roses, is a two-voice musical dialogue featuring Hebrew love songs and operatic arias.
Katya Kov is the organizer with support from Pasaka and the Create Culture Group in cooperation with Cvi Parkas. Supporters include the Goodwill Foundation and the city of Vilnius.
“The title Dance Me Back to the Future combines Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Time and Robert Zemeckis’s film Back to the Future,” she explained. “Together, they open a path between the past and the present, following Lithuanian and Litvak history and stories, recollections and cultural ties which travel from generation to generation and find new voices today,” she said.
The concert is free and open to the public.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Tuesday, September 8
Place: Mikas and Kira Petrauskas House, K. Petrausko street no. 31, Kaunas
The Sabbath begins at 8:03 P.M. on Friday, September 4, and concludes at 8:57 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 7:45 P.M. and completed before sunset at 8:03 P.M. This Friday, September 4, is Labor Day in the United States. Wednesday, September 9, is Day of the Victims of the Holocaust and of Racial Violence in Slovakia. This holiday first established by the Slovak Parliament in 2000 commemorates the day in 1941 when the Slovak government issued a decree on the legal status of Jews in the country, known as the Jewish Codex, which led to the deportation of Jews from the country, resulting in the murder of approximately 70,000 Slovak Jews. The commemorative day was created to ensure this event remains fresh in the minds of all Slovaks so that this tragedy is never repeated.
Memorial for two victims attended by 800, including senior government figures; statement from King Charles read at ceremony: “Hatred can never prevail over our shared humanity”
Photo: Heaton Park Synagogue’s Rabbi Daniel Walker speaks at a memorial service for victims of the 2025 Yom Kippur terror attack, August 31, 2026. Courtesy Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region.
More than 800 people gathered Monday, August 31, at Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the deadly Yom Kippur terrorist attack.
Two people were killed on October 2, 2025, when British-Syrian citizen Jihad al-Shamie rammed his car into the gates of the synagogue during prayer services on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Al-Shamie stabbed Melvin Cravitz, 66, to death, then tried to storm the synagogue before police shot him dead. Adrian Daulby, 53, died from a single gunshot wound to the chest fired by a police officer responding to the situation.
The attack was one of the worst antisemitic incidents in Europe since the war in the Middle East began with the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Eugene Smotkin, 72, currently lives in Puerto Rico and works in renewable energy. He and wife Linda recently visited Panevėžys whence his family comes, and visited the Panevėžys Jewish Community where they were warmly received by chairman Gennady Kofman. They visited the mass murder sites in the Žalioji Forest and Kurganava Forest together.
Eugene Smotkin said his father Morris was 16 when his uncle, Rabbi Meyer Kimmel, arrived in Ponevezh. He took Morris to New York where he entered yeshiva, then enlisted in the army. Morris knew five languages and during his service he interrogated captured SS officers, collecting intelligence on Nazi Germany.
“I never wanted to write a book about myself. My goal was to tell the story of post-war Jewish life, and the example I know well is our family,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said Friday at a reading room in Palanga where she presented her book Dainos iš mėlynos užrašinės [Songs from the Blue Notebook].
She spoke about her family’s story, including stories about the post-war reality, and the childish fears and joys which sometimes last a lifetime.
“Don’t be surprised if I cry. My whole family got teary-eyed reading this book,” she cautioned.
Her book about her parents, grandparents and cousins, their experiences and fates, was more than an autobiography. It’s a portrait of three generations of Litvaks, the story of how they carried on after the Holocaust and learned to take joy in life again, while always carrying inside the unfathomable tragedy.
The European Day of Jewish Culture enters its 22nd year this Sunday, September 6, with this year’s theme love. In Judaism love is more than romantic emotions, it’s the connection between cultures and communities, linking the past with the present and people with generations.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to celebrate the European Day of Culture with us with a special program of events.
Program:
11:00 A.M. Ruth Reches will deliver an introductory Hebrew lesson at the LJC. Registration required before 5:00 P.M. Friday by clicking here.
The Sabbath begins at 8:21 P.M. on Friday, August 28, and concludes at 9:16 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 8:03 P.M. and completed before sunset at 8:21 P.M. Tuesday, September 1, is the first day of school and a national holiday in Lithuania.
Police were called Wednesday to Ožeškienės street nos. 19 and 21 in Kaunas after construction workers prevented a man from destroying an art installation there with a hammer. Neighbors called the police and told the media the perpetrator is a citizen of the Republic of Ireland who teaches at Kaunas Techological University. They also said this isn’t the first time he’s vandalized the tribute to Lithuanian Jews and Jewish partisans from the Kaunas ghetto. This time he was caught on video, which was played on the national evening television news in Lithuania.
The Kiemo galerija, or Courtyard Gallery as it’s known began 12 years ago and was the brainchild of resident Vytenis Jakas. He started collecting stories from local oldtimers in both buildings who told him many of the residents were Jews before they were rounded up and murdered. One such couple was Juda Zupavičius and Dita Sperling-Zupavičienė. Dita’s brother Hirsh, their mother and Juda’s comrade Ika Grinberg, the son of the owner of the building, also lived there.
In the summer of 2014 Dita travelled from Tel Aviv to Lithuania with the hope of commemorating her husband Juda and his fellow members of the Kaunas ghetto resistance during the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Kaunas ghetto.
Faina Kukliansky will present her book “Dainos iš mėlynos užrašinės” [Songs from the Blue Notebook] in Palanga Friday at the Palanga summer reading room and will sign copies. The book is a family history comprising three generations of Litvaks, from her grandparents who survived the Holocaust, to her father who spent his youth in a concentration camp to Faina’s sister Sulamita and Faina herself, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and accomplished attorney.
“People sometimes ask me why I spend so much energy on the issue of history and the place of the Jews in the world, and all the more so since most of my people are no longer with us. All I can say is my goal: to preserve their memory. We don’t have my parents’ candelabrum anymore, in which every Jewish family lights their Sabbath candles. All we have left is memory and respect,” Kukliansky said.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Friday, August 28
Place: Palanga summer reading room, Vytauto street no. 72, Palanga
The Jews murdered August 15 and 16, 1941, in Rokishok were commemorated on August 16, 2026, in this small northern Lithuanian town and former shtetl. The Rokiškis Regional History Museum invited the public to attend a “Road of Memory” procession from the ghetto next to the Rokiškis manor house (where the museum is now housed) to the Velniaduobė forest about 4 kilometers outside town where the Jewish population was slaughtered.
Rokiškis Regional History Museum staff spoke at the beginning, midway and end of the procession. Participants places inscribed with the names of victims at the memorial stele marking the mass murder site where around 3,200 Jews, 6 Lithuanians and 1 Pole were killed.
Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman was in attendance and said no Jewish family was untouched by the Holocaust. Rokiškis regional municipality council member Vytautas Saulis spoke about the Soviet trials of Lithuanians who murdered Jews held in 1965, and said the main question hadn’t been addressed: why?
According to Lithuania’s International Commission to Asses the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupations in Lithuania, which is behind the Road of Memory initiatives throughout Lithuania, around 75% of the town’s population was Jewish before they were murdered.
The Sabbath begins at 8:37 P.M. on Friday, August 21, and concludes at 9:35 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 8:19 P.M. and completed before sunset at 8:37 P.M.
