The Kaunas Jewish Community invites you to an evening commemorating literary critic and writer Israel (Isidore) Elyashev.

Bal-Makhshoves as he was also known, “man of thoughts,” used that nom-de-plume in his Jewish writing at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The commemoration will be held in the former Jewish cafeteria near Elyashev’s home where he died 100 years ago on January 13, 1924. Speakers will touch upon his friendship with the painter Marc Chagall, Jewish life in Kaunas, Elyashev’s home street now known as Daukšos gatvė but formerly called Yatkever or Butcher’s street with five synagogues located along it, about the return of “evacuated” Jewish exiles in 1921 and about the shared and separate Lithuanian and Jewish cultural legacy in Lithuania’s interwar provisional capital Kaunas.

Speakers will also detail his family, including his sister Ester Veisbart who was an art critic, teacher and Lithuania’s first female doctor of philosophy who died in the Kaunas ghetto; the rest of his family who were killed in the Kaunas and Vilnius ghettos and Soviet labor camps and the members of his family to made it to Palestine and lived.

Julijana Andriejauskienė, senior researcher at the Lithuanian National Library’s Judaica Research Center, will present her current research on Eliashev and his sister Ester based on recently discovered family documents. History of Kaunas researcher Marija Oniščik will moderate the event and share her thoughts as well. The evening will include piano interludes by Robertas Lozinskis. The event is a joint production by the Kaunas Jewish Community and the Art and Music Department of the Vincas Kudirka Public Library in Kaunas.

Time: 5:00 P.M., Monday, January 15
Place: Art and Music Department of the Vincas Kudirka Public Library, Mapu street no. 8, Kaunas