On Sunday, September 20, 2015, the Lithuanian Jewish Community and YIVO Jewish research institute held a conference at the Lithuanian parliament to mark the 90th anniversary of the founding of the organization in Vilnius.
The conference was the main component in the YIVO birthday celebrations in Vilnius lasting most of the week.
Starting almost an hour late, LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky welcomed speakers and audience members, followed by former Lithuanian prime minister and current deputy speaker of parliament Gediminas Kirkilas and former parliamentary speaker and current deputy speaker Irena Degutienė, both of whom made significant statements of Lithuanian support for YIVO and Jewish culture in Lithuania.
Dr. Cecile Kuznitz, associate professor of history and director of Jewish studies at Bard College, one of the few if not the only academic whose research centers around the history of YIVO, gave a comprehensive presentation of the founding of YIVO in Vilnius, its early years of existence and briefly touched upon its post-war history, but was cut short because of time constraints. Her presentation included photographs from the YIVO Institute at Vivulskio street No. 18, which became, as she explained, world headquarters before the war. The building was destroyed during World War II and the street numbering changed after the war.
Dr. Abraham Lichtenbaum, a familiar face in Vilnius because of his work with the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University, gave an interesting talk about Zalman Reisen in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Dr. Lichtenbaum’s hometown.
Dr. Lara Lempertienė, senior bibliographer at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library located right next to the parliament, spoke about the joint initiative with YIVO to digitize documents and presented a number of interesting photos and scans, most of them unseen for many decades by the public. Her last slide was of the cover of a Yiddish edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book from pre-war Lithuania.
Kristina Dūdaitė, also a senior bibliographer at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library and a former Lithuanian student of Yiddish, spoke with expertise on the remnants of the pre-war YIVO collection held by the Lithuanian libraries.
Dr. Džiuginta Stankevičienė, head of communications at the Lithuanian Central State Archives, recounted YIVO collection remnants held at the Central State Archives.
Dr. Dovid Katz spoke about how YIVO was the first organization to conduct research into the Yiddish language in Yiddish.
Dr. Jonathan Brent, executive director of YIVO, gave an inspiring speech about YIVO’s past and future, touching on issues of power and powerlessness in Yiddish and cultural change, and thanked the Lithuanian hosts of the conference for their words and help. Brent said a disconnection had occurred, a kind of veil was thrown over the period from before the war and after, and YIVO hoped to bridge this gap with facts. He said there was a danger in distorting the historical facts, and that Jews were just as guilty of this as anti-Semites, distorting their own history with dangerous consequences. He also said that while YIVO can provide many facts, facts only go so far, and imagination is needed to fit the facts into a holistic picture of the past. He said the institute’s work was important both for Jews and non-Jews, that many Eastern European countries had a shared past waiting to be rediscovered, and that upwards of 85% of American Jews have roots in Eastern Europe.
Planned discussion before lunch was canceled because of the late start.
Dr. Mordehay Yushkovsky, academic director of the World Jewish Congress’s International Yiddish Center in Vilnius spoke in Yiddish about Vilna as a beacon of national remembrance in Yiddish literature, followed by Lea Garfunkel, professor of modern Yiddish literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who also spoke in Yiddish about the Jewish underworld of Vilnius.
Dr. Saulius Sužiedelis, professor emeritus of history at Millersville University, gave the facts he’s discovered about Lithuanian passivity and complicity in the Holocaust.
Dr. Šarūnas Liekas, director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute and dean of the Political Science and Diplomacy Faculty at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, then compared the much-touted but brief Jewish autonomy in the interwar Lithuanian Republic with Jewish communities in Poland.
Dr. David Fishman, history professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in America, spoke via skype projected onto the screen behind the podium, but unfortunately the connection was not good and much of what he said was difficult to understand even for native English speakers. The slides were not coordinated well during his talk and there was a bit of confusion for the moderators in Vilnius trying to display the slide he was referencing at the right time.
The brief discussion period which followed touched on the digitization project first, then an older member of the audience said a number of factual mistakes had been made during the conference (apparently foremost in his mind was a mistake concerning the life and death of Zelig Kalmanovitch), followed by a quite interesting comment made by a blind man in Lithuanian asking what future Yiddish could possibly have in Lithuania with the ever-dwindling number of Jews, the elder population dying off and the younger people perceiving little or no utility in the Yiddish language. The man also claimed there was no where to study Yiddish in Lithuania. YIVO director Brent said he hoped to change that trend, but that the Yiddish-speaking community in the future might look very different from the present and past communities. Dovid Katz said there were 5,000 Jews living in Lithuania and that that number was not equal to zero. He also claimed he had been trying for 25 years to get Yiddish courses taught at the primary school level at the Sholem Aleichem school in Vilnius. He said there were no schools teaching Yiddish throughout the year. Neither Šarūnas Liekas, director of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, nor Mordehay Yushkovsky, academic director of the World Jewish Congress’s new International Yiddish Center in Vilnius, responded.
LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky ended the conference with a few brief statements in Yiddish and English, and invited all the speakers and organizers back to the Lithuanian Jewish Community for dinner and a concert.