With profound sadness the Lithuanian Jewish Community mourns the loss on Thursday of one its founding members, Josep Levinson (1917-2015). Levinson was a pioneer in Holocaust research after World War II and located Jewish mass murder sites. He also led efforts to mark and commemorate such sites. His memory lives on in the his books “The Shoah: The Holocaust in Lithuania” and “The Book of Sorrow” he compiled and edited, monuments to the lost Lithuanian Jewish Community. The book contains information about and photographs of almost every Jewish mass murder site in Lithuania.

 Josif Levinson grew up in the shtetl Vishéy (Lithuanian Veisiejai) in the Dzūkija ethnographic region of Lithuania. He was graduated from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas with a degree in engineering. In 1941 his father and relatives were murdered in the village of Katkiškė near Lazdéy (Lithuanian Lazdijai). He fought the Nazis as a serviceman of the 16th Lithuanian Division during World War II and was seriously injured.  He was a founding figure of Vilnius’s Green House–the Holocaust exhibit of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum–and was one of the primary historians in the field of Lithuanian Holocaust studies.

We mourn our great loss and offer our condolences to the immediate family of the esteemed scholar and tireless advocate of memory and justice.