The Lithuanian Jewish Community and YIVO held a press conference at the Community building in Vilnius Friday to talk about upcoming events to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the Jewish research institute, originally based in Vilnius, and the joint project between YIVO, the LJC and the Lithuanian National Martynas Mažvydas Library to digitize the YIVO collections in Vilnius and New York.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky briefly outlined the program of events and turned the floor over to Suzanne Leon, the director of development for YIVO, who spoke about the appropriateness of celebrating YIVO’s 90th birthday in the organization’s hometown.

About the new cooperation with Lithuanian institutions and the LJC, Leon said: “YIVO is now making history. Usually YIVO collects history.”

She said YIVO is looking to the future and the project to digitize documents and make them available on the web to all interested parties will have a monumental impact on Yiddish studies.

Following their statements, a reporter asked Faina Kukliansky what she thought about the recent transfer in legal ownership of the Vilnius Sports Palace for plans to refurbish the aging building there. Kukliansky said she hoped to include a visit to the site as part of the YIVO anniversary program’s Jewish Vilna walking tour so people could see for themselves there were no plans to bulldoze gravestones. She said there are no gravestones there and she thought the best way to pay homage to people still buried there was to make sure the site didn’t become a trash dump, a place to take narcotics or a homeless camp.

One person asked Suzanne Leon whether there had been dissent in the YIVO ranks over plans to work together with the Lithuanian government, and whether Holocaust issues and politics were a part of YIVO’s decision-making process. Leon responded by saying that Holocaust issues do figure prominently in everything YIVO does, and that YIVO zamler (collectors of information in the field) who had survived the Holocaust began sending in information about what happened immediately after the war. She said in Judaism there is a tradition of yortsait, of remembering the dead every year on the anniversary of their deaths. “We don’t have information” about most of the dead, she said, saying the Holocaust represented a total break, a disconnect with the past, and that the digitization project would make more information available to relatives, and would help American Jews research their roots. “About 80 percent of American Jews come from this part of the world,” she said. She also said there was a variety of opinions among YIVO members on how to deal with Lithuania, but that the process had been on-going for years and had bore fruit. As an example, she cited Lithuania’s decision to allow documents from the pre-war YIVO collections which survived in Vilnius to be sent to New York for copying and then sent back again. She said there were probably more documents and texts still undiscovered in Lithuania’s share of the pre-war YIVO collections which might come to light during the digitization process, scheduled to run until 2017.

Faina Kukliansky echoed her words, saying the issue of the Shnipishok cemetery was about how best to preserve the memory of the dead in the tradition of yortsait. “All the scandal about it is misplaced. We are working together with the Rabbinical Council of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe, and the government is working with them officially, and we trust them. If they say human remains will be safe under the current plan, we believe them. We aren’t a religious organization, the Lithuanian Jewish Community is separate from the religious community, but we are all working together to make sure the interests of all parties are served. I simply do not see any ill-will on the part of the Lithuanian Government, there is no attempt to sneak something past us, they are acting in good faith and are being completely transparent and sensitive to Jewish tradition.”

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky ended the press conference, until then conducted in both Lithuanian and English, in the Yiddish language, saying that she remembered the work of YIVO as a child and what a great and remarkable thing it was to have YIVO back in Lithuania, in the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilne.

Deputy chairwoman Maša Grodnikienė passed out copies of the new Jewish Community calendar for the year 5776 to reporters. The calendar features YIVO history, materials and personalities mainly from the pre-war period.