Over the entirety of Lithuania’s 25 years of independence the Lithuanian Jewish Community hasn’t had the opportunity to share our thoughts publicly during the marking of the Day of Mourning and Hope at the Parliament of the Republic of Lithuania. Seventy-five years have passed since the beginning of the mass deportations of Lithuanian citizens. For the Jewish people, who suffered prophetic exile from the times of the Assyrians, Babylonians and Romans, the experience of exile could be considered part of our historical identity. Seventy-five years ago about one precent of the Lithuanian Jewish community at that time were deported, and as a percentage represent the largest group to be deported from Lithuania. State repression did not put an end to Jewish identity: Zionist organizations operated underground, there was a Hebrew educational system, and all sorts of measures were employed to enable members of the Jewish community to leave for Palestine.
According to Jewish historiography, during the deportations of June, 1941, alone about 3,000 Jews were deported, including Jewish activists from the left and right side of the political spectrum and owners of large industrial enterprises and factories, with about 7,000 people being deported in total during the first year of Soviet rule. On the eve of the first Soviet occupation the majority of Lithuanian Jews were involved in different cultural, social and political organizations and associations. The tradition of Zionism, however, has always been especially strong in the Lithuanian Jewish community; in Lithuania between the two world wars members of the Jewish conservative cultural orientation were the most active and influential, and spoke out for the creation of an independent Jewish nation-state in Palestine. In this regard the confrontation with the Soviet system was especially vivid.
Solomon Atamuk reports there 16 Jewish daily newspapers, 30 weeklies and 13 non-periodical publications as well as 20 collections of literature being published in Lithuania before World War II. After the June 14, 1940 ultimatum to Lithuania and the consequent occupation the Jewish community soon experienced social and cultural repression. All newspapers, belong both to organizations on the Jewish political left and the right, were shut down. Even the Folksblat newspaper, popular with Communists and issued by the Jewish People’s Party, was closed.
Besides the ban on the Jewish press and the firing of editors of Jewish publications, the system began to reorganize and close down academic institutions as well. The activities of YIVO, the Jewish research instituted, were restricted, personnel were fired, books of all kinds were confiscated from the institute and there were recalls of books and collections. Opportunities to read Hebrew were intentionally restricted and Jewish libraries were shuttered.
Gradually the Soviet system began to threaten to destroy the spirit and values of the Jewish people; the sovietization of education was a great blow to the Jewish community and no private or communal schools remained. Some Jewish schools were simply closed, while others were taken over by the state, with nor more Hebrew language education. There were no more traditional ethnic Jewish studies programs. In their stead were introduced required classes such as Russian language and the constitution of the USSR.
Since I’m an attorney myself, I looked into the fate of my Jewish colleagues during the first years of occupation.
Just before the elections to the so-called People’s Parliament, respected lawyers and public figures such as Lev Garfunkel and Jakov Goldberg were arrested. Following immediately were changes to the profession and body of lawyers, and many lawyers were fired by order of justice minister Povilas Pakarklis. Zigmas Toliušas found nearly half of all Lithuanian lawyers suffered from the Bolshevik terror.
Paradoxically, Henrikas Landau, a venerable Panevėžys lawyer, was fired by order of the minister on July 5, 1940. He presented a list of 40 people who had been tried for Communist activities and whom he had defended in court. But it didn’t help.
Lawyers from the Vilnius region and refugees from Poland also suffered. In October of 1939 Yosef and Rokha Chernikov, Yuri Preis and Aleksandr Rozengold were arrested. As shown in their case-files I found conserved at the Lithuanian Special Archive, they were accused of being lawyers. A court of the Byelorussian SSR tried them under Byelorussian law. They each received eight years in prison. In September of 1941 they were granted amnesty as citizens of Poland, but the persecution continued. Attorney Preis was soon arrested again and sentenced to seven years.
The Soviet system nationalized the property of the communities and a large portion of private property, business and capital were likewise seized. In 1937 Jewish craft workshops located in more than 200 Lithuanian cities and towns accounted for 56 percent of all such enterprises in Lithuania. The personal property rights of the majority of owners of these sorts of enterprises were restricted in the first year of Soviet occupation, and some, especially owners of larger operations, were repressed by the state.
Of the total number of enterprises seized in 1940, 83% belonged to Jews and provided a living to a large portion of the Lithuanian population. When land reforms were carried out, land was seized from Jews, and then followed the use of physical force, arrests. It wasn’t only activists from Jewish organizations on the right and left who were arrested. In Vilnius and throughout Lithuania the system imprisoned and deported for longer periods notable Jewish figures, including Ruven Rubinstein, Leiba Garfunkel and future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin.
A large portion of Jewish deportees came back to Lithuania after Stalin’s death and after changes to the “closed border” policy in 1970, after real possibilities emerged especially with help from Jewish organizations in the West to leave the Soviet Union. The majority made use of the opportunity: returning Jewish deportees experienced unbearable agony not finding their loved ones brutally murdered by the Nazis and collaborators, not finding entire Jewish shtetl communities which had been exterminated.
Russia’s political dissidents sought reforms within the USSR, Lithuanian dissidents dreamed of Lithuanian independence and the priority of Jews became emigration to Israel. It was namely for this reason that the majority of Jews didn’t publicly oppose the Soviet system, especially not in Lithuania, because at that time compared with other parts of the USSR the largest number of permissions were issued in Lithuania for leaving for Israel. This led to a large wave of migration of Jews from the USSR into Lithuania which became a way station on the journey to Israel. Some of them never left for Israel but instead established deep ties with Lithuanian dissidents and settled in Lithuania. These Jews and their descendants have become part of the current Lithuanian Jewish Community.
It is a great shame the figure of the Jewish deportee has all but been forgotten in Lithuanian society today, or is ignored, with deportation being understood as solely the tragedy of the Lithuania people. Perhaps that explains why the rights of former Jewish deportees receive separate treatment and are restored differently even in the laws of contemporary independent Lithuania. This is well illustrated in the laws on restoration of rights to Lithuanian citizenship and property.
From 1940 to 1990 the institution of Lithuanian citizenship wasn’t completely abolished, it still existed legally but could not be implemented in the occupied territory of Lithuania. After defining Lithuanian citizens primarily as those people who were citizens until June 15, 1940, the continuity of the pre-war Republic of Lithuania in the Republic of Lithuania restored on March 11, 1990, was affirmed. This continuity, however, was only partially established. The requirement to renounce citizenship of another state essentially meant Lithuanian citizens who had acquired the citizenship of another state were considered to have lost their formerly held Lithuanian citizenship. This requirement was quite clearly unacceptable to the absolute majority of Lithuanian citizens who had acquired citizenship of another state. In effect they had been stripped of their Lithuanian citizenship. In 1995 the law on citizenship was amended. The condition contained in the previous redaction–“if they have no acquired the citizenship of another state”– was struck from the law. But it wasn’t removed for Jews, including Jewish deportees, because the concept of “repatriate” was applied to them. Thus all Jewish deportees who had left during the Soviet era, following exile, for Israel could not enjoy their right to restoration of Lithuanian citizenship, although they had never voluntarily renounced their citizenship even when sent to Siberia and never recovered their property nationalized or otherwise seized by the Soviets, even though this property was the reason for their being deported.
Today I speak in the name of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. There are still deportees in our community, and some of them are here in this hall today, including Jakov Mendelevskij. He lived with his parents in Ukmergė. His family was deported in the morning of June 14, 1941, first to Jonava, then they were herded onto cattle cars and taken far away. Jakov says his car was filled exclusively with Jews from Ukmergė. They deported them all to the village of Medvedevka in the Altai region.
The pain of exile is shared and known by the people of Lithuania from likely every ethnic group. The Day of Mourning and Hope is, we believe, also a day of unity. The experience of state repression is painful to all of us, but shared pain should bring us together, not drive us apart. It is after all so basically human to understand that the lives of all deported were desecrated, that everyone shared the same dream of returning home, to Lithuania.
It is not even rare thing at all for a Jewish deportee who hasn’t lived in Lithuania for many years to consider this country his home, the place that provided the basis for forming and celebrating his own identity, an important part of which is Israel. Six hundred years of shared history will remain always in our memory and our nature.