Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius congratulated Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky today on her receiving an award from the Jewish research institute YIVO for service to society.

On December 15 the YIVO institute in New York held a benefit dinner during which Kukliansky and others who contributed to a YIVO project were honored. The funds generated from the benefit dinner will be used for YIVO's Vilna project, which is aimed at digitizing and virutally conecting YIVO archives in Vilnius and New York over seven years.

Minister Linkevičius congratulated Kukliansky on her award and noted her many years of work with the Lithuanian Jewish community, strengthening ties between Lithuanians and Jews, celebrating the Jewish cultural legacy and deepening ties between the Jewish communities of Lithuania, Israel and the world.

The YIVO Yiddish – language archive is the largest and most comprehensive collection of pre-war documents in Yiddish in Eastern Europe. The archive was preserved by Jews, Lithuanians, Americans and others during and after World War II.