The Lithuanian Jewish Community’s Knafaim Club for young people is starting a new season and invites everyone to come and get involved. We’ll be meeting every Friday at 6:00 P.M. at the Ilan Club on the second floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius. For more information, contact club coordinators Elan Chackelevič at elan.chackelevic@gmail.com or Mark Garas at margaris146@gmail.com.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community’s Dubi Mišpacha Club invites children aged 0-3 and their parents to come take part in club activities at 11:00 A.M. on Wednesdays. For more information contact Alexandra Žitkauskienė-Khenkin by calling +370 672 50599.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community will host a concert to celebrate the winners of the Nehama Lifshitz (Nechama Lifšicaitė) song contest at 6:00 P.M. on November 3. Performers: Marija Maminskaitė, Lukrecija Šiaulytė, Estera Reches, Emilija Lopaitytė, Alfredas Miniotas,
Elzė Liškauskaitė and Deividas Bartkus under the direction of Rūta Mikelaitytė-Kašubienė and professor Nijolė Ralytė.
The same program will be performed on November 7 at the concert hall at the Einav Center in Tel Aviv together with performers from the Nehama Lifshitz Yiddish song studio in Tel Aviv.
The Sabbath begins at 6:05 P.M. on Friday, October 14, and concludes at 7:14 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
The Dubi Club at the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius offers supervised club activities for children aged 3 to 6, meeting every Sunday from 12 noon to 2:00 P.M. For more information contact Margarita Kozhevatova at +370 618 00 577.
The harvest has been gathered, Jews have built sukkas and are celebrating with friends and family. That is what was, but now there are only echoes, to keep the traditions and to survive, thanks to our rescuers, for whom there are no statues.
The difficult, crowded and confusing streets of Vilnius remind us of our shared pain. This pain envelopes a Jew and makes him try to share it with, with a Lithuanian, a Pole or some foreign visitor. But without malice, with love for his neighbor, but always remembering, so it might never happen again.
An exhibit is being prepared for the traditional gallery on Pylimo street. This will be diaries with pastel in hand, recording life as it is, but also with an eye to the philosophic and the tragic. Stay tuned for more information.
The Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club invites competitors who play badminton, indoor soccer, volleyball, basketball and/or ping-pong to apply to play in the continuing tradition of the Lithuanian mini-Makiabada. Send an email to info.maccabilt(at)gmail.com before October 23 if you’d like to participate and for more information.
The Sabbath begins at 6:22 P.M. on Friday, October 7, and concludes at 7:31 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
Sukkot, or Sukkos in Ashkenazic, begins at 6:17 P.M. this Sunday, October 9.
The Festival of Sukkot–literally meaning booths, tents, tabernacles–is celebrated for seven days in Israel and eight days in the Diaspora, starting on the fifteenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei. It is one of the three festivals during which Jewish men were required to make pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the times of the Holy Temple.
Yom Kippur at the Choral Synagogue, Pylimo street no. 39, Vilnius:
Monday, October 3:
6:30 P.M. Preparations for Yom Kippur, lesson on the holy day, kapparot ritual
Tuesday, October 4:
5:30 P.M. Supper before fast
6:10 P.M. Kol Nidre
6:30 P.M. Fast begins
Wednesday, October 5:
10:00 A.M. Shacharit morning prayer
12:00 noon Izkor
5:30 P.M. Mincha prayer
7:30 P.M. Niila prayer
7:38 P.M. conclusion of fast, dinner
Following a pause in activities, the first general meeting or jamboree of Litvak scouting groups will take place at 2:30 P.M. on October 6 at the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius. For more information, please write skautai@lzb.lt.
Photo: Artist Jenny Kagan’s immersive exhibition “Out of Darkness” in Kaunas, Lithuania, July, 2022 (photographer Gražvydas Jovaiša).
Near the site of one of the genocide’s most heavily photographed atrocities, lighting designer Jenny Kagan brings the city’s wartime past “Out of Darkness”
by Matt Lebovic, Times of Israel, October 1, 2022
The 1941 Lietūkis garage massacre in Kaunas, Lithuania, was among the Holocaust’s most heavily photographed aktions against Jews, but many of the city’s current inhabitants have never heard of the atrocity.
On June 27, 1941, a group of pro-German Lithuanian nationalists tortured and murdered at least 50 Jews at the city’s Lietūkis garage. During the massacre, a German soldier took photos of dozens of Lithuanians, including children, cheering while a man called “the death dealer” beat Jews to death with a crowbar.
Among the Jewish men murdered that day was British artist Jenny Kagan’s grandfather, Jurgis Stromas, who owned the Pasaka (Fairytale) cinema in town. At one point during the public slaughter, the “death dealer” climbed atop a mound of corpses and performed the Lithuanian national anthem with an accordion.
The Sabbath begins at 6:40 P.M. on Friday, September 30, and concludes at 7:48 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
by Michael Kretzmer
For the last three years my life has been entirely absorbed in the making of a documentary film that attempts to tell the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust. This has been a terrible task, an entirely unwanted one, and one that has exacted a significant personal price. Many times I have bitterly regretted taking it on, but once started there could be no turning back: the injustice of what happened to our people, and even more importantly, what is happening today in Lithuania, cannot be ignored.
The most painful task was the journalistic duty to forensically research and report the depraved cruelty of our persecution. Nothing can prepare you for the incomprehensible, sordid detail: the celebratory murder of children in front of parents; the delicate physics of smashing babies’ skulls against trees (thousands of them); the horror carnival of small, terrified girls being loaded onto trucks for deadly rape parties by Lithuanian gangs; the imprisonment of thousands of Jews in their own synagogues and their slow murder either by fire or by starvation and thirst amidst human filth and the stench of their loved ones’ rotting bodies; the beheadings, the immolations, the thousands of deadly humiliations; the destruction of this dazzling 600-year-old civilization–220,000 Jews slaughtered, the highest murder rate in all of Holocaust Europe; and above all, the thought of our depraved Lithuanian tormentors laughing at our pain and humiliation. And the knowledge that the Lithuanian government is still, politely, laughing at us today.
I am a journalist and film-maker by profession but for months I struggled to find the narrative voice that could tell this terrible story. And one day I found that voice. It was obvious, the only voice that matters. The voice of the murdered. This is why I have called my film J’Accuse! It is their cry for justice from the killing pits of Lithuania.
A Kabalat Shabat ceremony and dinner according to the tenets of progressive Judaism will be held at 6:30 P.M. on September 30 with the main ceremony the third floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius and kiddush downstairs at the Bagel Shop Café. The price is 10 euros, children and minors 16 and under are free. For more information and to register, contact Viljamas by writing viljamas@lzb.lt or call +370 672 50699.
The Sabbath begins at 6:57 P.M. on Friday, September 23, and concludes at 8:06 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community invite you to come celebrate Rosh Hashanah at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius at 6:00 P.M. on September 25. All in attendance will receive our calendar for the new year, 5783.
The Vilnius Jewish Religious Community invites you to a commemoration of the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius from 10:00 A.M. to 11:00 A.M. September 23. The commemoration will include a reading of the names of victims. Those attending will light candles in memory of those murdered.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to attend a ceremony commemorating victims of the Holocaust on September 23, the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide at the Ponar Memorial Complex outside Vilnius. The ceremony starts at 1:30 P.M. Friday with pre-event assembly about 10 to 15 minutes earlier near the railroad tracks and in the parking lot outside the memorial complex to form a marching column. Those requiring transportation will need to wait for a special bus at 12:15 P.M. outside the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius, but all bus passengers must register by sending an email to office@Izb.lt or by telephoning +37068506900. The bus will return to Vilnius around 3:00 P.M.