anti-Semitism – Page 15 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Three Groups Found Worthy of “Legitimate” Derision in Lithuania: The Circus, Homosexuals and Jews

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

Conservative Party candidate for Vilnius mayor Valdas Benkunskas yells in his political advertisements: “A mayor without circuses!” Kaunas mayor Visvaldas Matijošaitis, frightened by public debate, echoes the sentiment: “Kaunas doesn’t need a circus!” The press frequently carries headlines such as “Politics Is Not a Circus,” “Circus in the Political Arena,” and so on. It’s horrifying, wherever you look, there’s that damned circus again. Really?

Let me first take care of the myth the circus is worthy of derision. First, for example, the flying trapezist: if he were to act like the MP Petras Gražulis, Ramūnas Karbauskis, Visvaldis Matijošaitis or Valdas Benkunskas, he’d kill himself after attempting his first salto mortale. The flame appearing in the hands of the circus magician would burn him up immediately, and the trick of sawing the young female assistant in half would result in her real dissection. In other words, the professional circus has nothing in common with the political balagan.

This is also proven by the fact the largest American circus, Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Baily Circus, has revenues reaching $98 million annually. Another US circus, Circus Circus, has annual revenue of $160 million and employs 1,500 people. There are around 300 circuses operating in the United States. Cirque du Soleil, Inc. pays a circus actor from $6,000 to $10,000 per month. (The largest circus in Scandinavia is the Cirkus Scott, to the premieres of which the entire ruling elite of Sweden turn out. King Carl XVI Gustaf often attends with the royal family. In the 1989-1990 period this circus paid me €6,000 per month. How long did my performance take? Ten minutes. This was a gigantic sum back in those days, even in Sweden.)

2023-02-212023-02-21

Anti-Semitic Attacks in Los Angeles

Last week two Jewish men were shot as they left synagogue in the space of 24 hours in the predominantly Jewish Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. A suspect has been arrested, 28-year-old Jaime Tran, known for his anti-Semitic rants on the internet and death threats sent by e-mail to former classmates.

Rabbi Abraham Cooper speaking to media at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in LA said the men were only wounded.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky expressed her and the Community’s support and prayers for the affected community in Los Angeles.

“This event shows yet again that we must not remain silent when there are outbreaks of hatred. Only in that way will we stop evil from taking root,” she commented.

2023-02-21

Jews, Hungarians, Beggars and Blockheads: Trakai Shrovetide Invitation Still Full of Stereotypes

by Olga Ugriumova

The municipality of Trakai invited the public to a Shrovetide ball in the town, including pupils of local schools and community members. The poster announcing the event calls it a winter fair in the charming town with a “Svetelių eisena marga.” This can be translated as a “gaudy procession of strangers or foreigners.” The poster continues to the effect that Jews, Hungarians, beggars, doctors, cranes, bears, roosters, Gypsies and all sorts of blockheads and horrific monsters will turn out for the winter festival and see the sun.

Full article in Russian here.

2023-02-20

Kaunas Isn’t a Lithuanian City, Despite Long-Standing Claims to the Contrary

A Lithuanian translation of interwar Jewish author Kalmen Zingman’s book “On the Spiral Staircase” was recently published by the Hubris publishing house. Goda Volbikaitė translated it.

What can this novel written in 1925 and only now available in Lithuanian tell today’s readers? First of all, it talks about Kaunas. The translation of this book is also a kind of proof Kaunas wasn’t just a Lithuanian city. People of other ethnicities also lived there whose works can (and should) be listed in our literary canon. We spoke with the translator of this book about the little-known figure of Kalmen Zingman, spiral staircases, the Aleksotas aerodrome, Slobodka and Yiddish literature.

Just three years before his death, Zingman wrote in his diary: “I feel like that wonderful time when I will be recognized and famous isn’t far off.” Unfortunately his dream was not to come true. Why do you think Zingman wasn’t successful in literature and recognition?

For truth’s sake, it has to be said that no Yiddish writer working in Kaunas in the period between the two world wars got famous. We are talking about around 30 authors in total who lived in Kaunas for a shorter or longer time.

It’s very clear why they didn’t become famous in the Lithuanian context: there was a lack of interwar translations from the Yiddish language into Lithuanian, just as there is in our time. I should say Lithuania is still just in the early stages of discovering Yiddish literature. Sutzkever and Kulbak are better known now, and some rarer names such as Matilda Olkin and Yitzhak Rudashevski. But basically whole strata of Yiddish literature made in Lithuania are still unknown to the Lithuanian reader.

2023-02-142023-02-15

Silvia Foti Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

According to a blog post by Grant Gochin in the blog section of the Times of Israel internet site, Jonas Noreika’s granddaughter Silvia Foti has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.

Although the Nobel Prize committee has historically refused to release the names of nominees for 50 years, according to Gochin’s blog post:

“[Former Beverly Hills] mayor [and current Council Member John] Mirish proudly announced that Silvia Foti has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Foti is the granddaughter of an apex mass genocidal murderer of Jews in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika. She bravely exposed her grandfather’s crimes and Holocaust fraud by the government of Lithuania. Foti is the first non-Jewish Lithuanian in history ever to be nominated for the most prestigious peace prize in the world.”

If selected for the prestigious recognition, Foti would joint earlier female writers who received the prize including indigenous Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu who won the Nobel peace prize in 1998, Belarus’s Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich who won the prize in literature in 2015 and 2018 peace prize recipient Nadia Murad Basee Taha, the Yezidi human rights activist from Iraq.

Silvia Foti has written an extensive biography detailing her grandfather’s Nazi activities during the Holocaust in Lithuania published in English and Lithuanian.

Grant Gochin’s blog post with an interesting story about the Lithuanian consul in Los Angeles here.

2023-02-082023-04-04

Young Jewish, Roma Leaders Visit POLIN Museum

Participants in the project to promote mutual understanding among young future leaders from Lithuania’s Roma and Jewish ethnic communities sponsored by the Goodwill Foundation and Germany’s EVZ Foundation visited the award-winning POLIN Jewish history museum in Warsaw. Besides viewing the interactive exhibits teaching about 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland, the young people and educators engaged in a discussion there among themselves and with educators from the museum

People often say there are two Warsaws, pre- and post-war, not surprising since the entire city was leveled in warfare and especially during the Warsaw Uprising, and painstakingly reconstructed in the post-war period. The female guide for the Lithuanian delegation was a rare original resident of the Polish capital and able to speak something like seven languages.

“This museum is a huge story and we have the moral duty to tell it,” she said. The bright modern museum located in the Warsaw ghetto stands in sharp contrast to the dark granite monument commemorating the heroes of the Uprising. The guide told the group around 80% of world Jewry called Poland home for centuries. The Lithuanian delegation led by the guide viewed multimedia installations, texts, music, paintings, photographs and recreated scenes from Jewish daily life.

2023-02-072023-02-07

YIVO Digitizes Chaim Grade’s Archive, a Yiddish Treasure Trove with a Soap Opera History

Photo: Chaim Grade and his wife Inna Hecker Grade in the United States in 1978. They met in Moscow in 1945. Courtesy YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

by Andrew Silow-Carroll, jta.org, February 5, 2023

JTA–Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.

A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.

As Max explains in his 2008 memoir “From Schlub to Stud” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers–Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982–a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.

Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013 Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s West 16th Street.

2023-02-072023-02-07

US Ambassador Calls on Ukmergė Mayor to Remove Monument to Lithuanian Nazi

Photos: Grant Gochin via Times of Israel

According to an article on the webpage of Lithuanian State Radio and Television, US ambassador to Lithuania Robert Gilchrist did more than just attend events to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to the report, he sent a letter to the mayor of Ukmergė (Yiddish Vilkomir), Rolandas Janickas, asking a a monument be erected at the site where around 10,000 Jews murdered there in the Holocaust, and asking an existing monument to Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator Juozas Krikštaponis be removed from its location at the central park in the small Lithuanian town north of Vilnius.

According to Lithuanian State Radio and Television, copies of the letter were sent to speaker of parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, Lithuanian culture minister Simonas Kairys, Lithuanian foreign minister Garbielius Landsbergis and director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania Arūnas Bubnys.

He also wants the plaque to Jonas Noreika in central Vilnius removed. According to the US embassy’s website, ambassador Gilchrist said the following in an address on Holocaust Remembrance Day at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius:

“I would like to express appreciation to the Speaker, the government, and the Seimas for the recent passage of legislation to provide symbolic compensation for heirless and pending claims on private property lost by Jewish Lithuanians during the Holocaust. I also commend you for the passage of legislation that would direct removal of monuments to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, which includes Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust. I hope this will lead to the swift removal of such monuments, including to Juozas Krištaponis in Ukmergė and Jonas Noreika here in Vilnius.”

Full article in Lithuanian here.
Ambassador Gilchrist’s full address here.
Background here.

2023-02-062023-04-19

Discussion Club: Was Jewish Life Wonderful under Smetona?

The #ŽydiškųPašnekesiai discussion club will address the topic “Was Jewish Life Great during the Smetona Era” at the Bagel Shop Café at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius at 5:00 P.M. on February 8. The discussion will be live-streamed on the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s facebook page.

In the broader public discussion of whether to erect a statue to the interwar Lithuanian president and dictator Antanas Smetona, proponents have begun saying he defended Lithuania’s Jewish population and was even known as “King of the Jews.” Opponents of the monument counter there were no stops placed on anti-Semitism in Lithuania in the period between the two world wars, meaning the entire span of Lithuanian independence, and Jews were banned from public service and elsewhere.

What do today’s Jews and Lithuania’s current crop of historians think about these issues? Attend or tune in to find out.

Moderator and club founder Arkadijus Vinokuras will put the question to Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman, Lithuanian Jewish Community; Žygimantas Menčenkovas, member of the Leftist Alliance, philosopher, teacher and activist and via internet Linas Venclauskas, historian and author of a recent book on Lithuanian anti-Semitism prior to 1940.

2023-02-062023-02-06

Šiauliai Students Learn about the Holocaust

Šiauliai’s Gegužės pro-gymnasium marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a lesson for the combined group of 7th graders there about the Holocaust, taught by Šiauliai Jewish Community member and math teacher Ieva Rafael, religious faith teacher Elvyra Ramoškienė and history teacher Kristina Puzarienė. Other teachers from the school, colleagues at schools in Akmenė and Papilė and members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community observed the lesson.

Ieva Rafael focused on the mass extermination, religious faith teacher Elvyra Ramoškienė spoke about the moral and spiritual issues as well as Jewish symbols and history teacher Kristina Puzarienė talked about the spread of prejudices and stereotypes and abuses of human rights according to teaching methodologies she acquired in professional training in Israel.

The young people heard the story of the Jewish girl Hana who was rescued from a ghetto and discussed the dangers of not speaking out or acting in the face of pressure.

Sixth-graders from the school attended the commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day with members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community at the memorial stone marking the former gate of the Šiauliai ghetto.

2023-02-06

Review of BBC Documentary How the Holocaust Began

Photo: Historian James Bulgin at the Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin, Poland Credit: Benjamin Holgate/BBC

James Bulgin’s BBC Two documentary contains horrifying footage, showing how ordinary people facilitated the Nazis in murdering Jews

What springs to mind when you hear the word “Holocaust?” This was the question which opened James Bulgin’s film “How the Holocaust Began” (BBC). Most likely you will think of somewhere like Auschwitz, and the Nazis presiding over processed mass murder. But Bulgin, an historian from the Imperial War Museum, wanted to show us something different.

Large-scale executions of Jews began in 1941 as the Germans made their way across Eastern Europe. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out many of these murders. But the chilling truth presented here was that they did not, in fact, could not, act alone. They needed not just the tacit support of the civilian population, but their active participation. Ordinary people facilitated and sometimes carried out the mass killings of men, women and children.

The documentary contained horrific footage, a “home movie” shot by a German soldier of people being marched into trenches and shot in the head. Spectators gather round, smoking and talking, to watch. It was a terrible thing to see. But equally unforgettable were the words of Faina Kukliansky, whose grandmother had been rounded up in Alytus, Lithuania, and taken to a forest along with 2,500 others to be murdered. Kukliansky had discovered that this was done by local townsfolk and even school children: “That confirms what my uncle used to tell me… That probably his classmates killed his mother.”

Full review here.

2023-02-022023-02-02

LJC Asks Conservative Party to Look Into Member’s Anti-Semitic Remark

Photo: Old cemetery in Nemakščiai

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has asked Gabrielius Landsbergis, the leader of the conservative Homeland Union/Lithuanian Christian Democrats Party, to look into remarks made by fellow party member Remigijus Laugalis.

“If you don’t vote for me, then you can bury yourself in the Jewish cemetery,” Laugalis allegedly remarked.

Remigijus Laugalis is currently the alderman of the town of Nemakščiai and is seeking to be elected to the town council of Raseiniai, Lithuania.

The LJC has asked Landsbergis to undertake actions to educate residents of the Raseiniai district about the consequences of uncontrolled anti-Semitism and racism. The LJC has offered to help hold educational meetings with historians, cultural experts and writers in a spirit of cooperation based on mutual respect.

Update: The politician apparently made a glib comment as a joke in response to a question posed by a reporter which he found ridiculous. The questions was, is it true you said if people didn’t vote for you, you wouldn’t allow them to be buried in the local cemetery?

2023-02-022023-02-15

Ona Šimaitė Bio Better Known in US, Israel, France than Lithuania

Rimantas Stankevičius utilized Holocaust Remembrance Day to present again his biography of Lithuania’s first recognized Righteous Gentile Ona Šimaitė on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The book was published back in 2021 by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania. He gave an interview about his book to the news website delfi.lt.

“… at the intersection of Stiklių and Didžiosios street [in Vilnius] there was a false-flag operation intended to show Jews had attempted to kill a German officer. … Men, women, children and the infirm were sent en masse [from the nieghborhood] to the prison. One elderly woman was carried. Women marched cradling babies and with small children who clung to their mothers’ skirts. Many children from the orphanage were marched there along with their teachers. I saw a cobbler with a limp from Stiklių street whom I knew well. He wasn’t able to walk without a walking stick. They took his cane at the entrance to the prison and began beating him with it. Then they threw the stick through the prison gate whistling, guffawing and cursing the prisoners. On the other side of the prison I saw a Jewish woman in a white hospital gown. She appeared to have become completely lost. I looked for my 11-year-old daughter who was taken from home to no one knows where when she was supposed to be on duty at the hospital. I advised the woman to go home quickly so she wouldn’t end up in the prison. I wrote down her name and address and promised to do everything I could. The well-known Lithuanian public figure Marcelė Kubiliūtė and I went to the home of Buragas, the director of Jewish affairs. I went to Lithuanian security. I looked over lists there but didn’t find the girl’s name. I shrugged my shoulders and asked, ‘Is it worth getting all worked up about a Jewish girl?’ When I inquired where the girl might be, they suggested I go to the Lithuanian Special Squad which was shooting Jews. There was no sense going there at all,” Ona Šimaitė, librarian at Vilnius University from 1940 to 1944, stated.

2023-02-012023-02-01

First Plaque Commemorating Jews of Palanga

International Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds residents of Lithuania’s sea-side city of Palanga of June 27 and October 12, 941, the days on which more than 400 fellow residents, the Jews of Palanga who were hard-working, innovative lovers of life and the sea, became victims of the Holocaust. One out of eight residents of Palanga was murdered during those two days. And that’s not a definite tally, it might be higher.

Friday Palanga mayor Šarūnas Vaitkus, deputy mayor Rimantas Antanas Mikalkėnas, director of the city’s Culture Department Robertas Trautmanas, Palanga Jewish Community chairman Vilius Gutmanas and other members of the Palanga Jewish Community observed a moment of silence at a memorial in the Palanga cemetery to remember the 106 Jews and Lithuanians murdered in the southern part of Birutė Park on June 27, 1941, the majority of whom lived in Palanga.

Candles were lit and the traditional stones were left to honor and remember the city residents who became the first victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Friday also saw a new page of history open with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to mark the site of the former synagogue complex at what is now a supermarket on Vytauto street.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2023-01-31

EJC Warns Holocaust Being Forgotten

Brussels, Wednesday, January 25, 2023–On the 78th anniversary of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, European Jewish Congress president Ariel Muzicant expressed his deep concern the critical lessons of the Holocaust are being forgotten.

“In today’s dangerous political climate where uncertainty and despair cloud our horizon, we need to continue fighting against those that threaten democracy and human rights,” Muzicant said. “We must not lose our determination to fight these forces, because if we refuse to fight, hatred and intolerance will prevail.”

“This year, as we also mark the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, those heroes and their ultimate sacrifice must be an inspiration to us all. Their legacy directs us to continue the fight against those who once again are challenging our societies with their discrimination, racism and anti-Semitism.”

Full text here.

2023-01-262023-01-26

Marc Chagall: World in Turmoil

“The whole history is packing bundles and getting away. Nobody else can be as tender and delicate with bundles. That’s a Jewish man tying a bundle.”

Those lines from Arthur Miller’s Monte Saint Angelo aptly characterizes an unusual exhibit of paintings by Marc Chagall during his period of exile from the 1930s and 1940s which opened in Frankfurt and will run till February 19, 2023. The exhibit is called World in Turmoil.

“A few kilometers from there is a place, more precisely a town, which I haven’t visited for a long time, but I always remember it. So I took advantage of your invitation to go and wander around there a little,” Marc Chagall said at the World YIVO Conference held in Vilnius (Wilno) on August 14, 1935.

This conference is mentioned in the artist’s biography and the catalog for the exhibit at that time. His journey back to Poland (now Lithuania) gave rise to works which appear unusual and dark for Chagall. His oeuvre is usually arranged chronologically, from his native Vitebsk, striving to reattain this magical homeland. In Vilnius Chagall comes as close as possible to actually returning.

2023-01-202023-01-20

International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

To mark the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust instituted by the United Nations in 2005, the Lithuanian Jewish Community will host a presentation of Vytautas Magnus University teacher Linas Venclauskas’s monograph about Lithuanian anti-Semitism and of Vytautas Toleikis’s book about the portrayal of Jews in Lithuanian literature.

The two presentations in Lithuanian begin at 6:00 P.M. on Thursday, January 26 at the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius. Note the United Nations’ International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. more commonly called International Holocaust Remembrance Day, is officially on Friday, January 27, to mark the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex by the Soviet Red Army in 1945.

2023-01-182023-01-18

LJC Chairwoman Attending Conference of European Jewish Leaders in Israel

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky is attending a conference of European Jewish leaders in Jerusalem. The conference agenda includes meetings and discussions on relations between Israel and the Jewish communities abroad, current events and rising anti-Semitism.

Israeli president Isaac Herzog met with the chairwoman at his office and spoke about his Litvak roots, saying his great-grandfather Shmuel Yitzhak Hilman was born in Šeduva in 1868 and studied under his uncles in Pašvitinys outside Šiauliai and in Pasvalys. In 1897 he became rabbi for Berezino in the Minsk region. In 1908 he became rabbi for Glasgow in Scotland. Thousands attended his funeral in Jerusalem in 1953. His great-grandson Isaac was born in Tel Aviv in 1960.

2023-01-17

South African Jewish Report Invites You to Private Internet Screening of J’Accuse!

J’ACCUSE! Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust and its coverup

Date: 8:00 P.M. South African Standard Time (UTC +2, same time zone as Lithuania), Thursday, January 19, 2023

What would you do if you discovered that your grandfather, a national hero in Lithuania, was also a genocidal killer of Jews? Would you keep quiet or expose the truth?

This controversial documentary exposes Lithuania’s policy of Holocaust denial and its celebration of the perpetrators of the genocide of its Jewish citizens.

This is a unique opportunity to view the documentary in full and meet the filmmakers and heroes of this ground-breaking story.

Please note that this is a private screening by invitation only. The recording of this internationally award-winning documentary will NOT be available on YouTube after the event.

2023-01-122023-01-19

Call to Teachers, Youth Workers: Two-Day Introduction to Roma, Jewish Communities

The two days of activities are intended to teach the traditions and customs of the Roma and Jewish communities in Lithuania and to counter stereotypes and fight anti-Semitism and Romophobia at home and abroad in various contexts. This is the first time educators from Lithuania are being invited to meeting with representatives and lecturers from both communities. We believe these teachings will be helpful for teachers working with young people as well as for cultural workers in the towns and cities where Jewish heritage is undergoing restoration. Those who work with young people and representatives from NGOs are invited to attend. The two-day workshop begins in January at the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius with the participation of experts from the Lithuanian Human Rights Center and the Padėk Pritapti organization, and of course the Lithuanian Jewish Community as well. We invite you to share this invitation with your colleagues. For more information, click https://bit.ly/3PXEoTz. To register, click https://bit.ly/3jDbJa5. A program in Lithuanian is available here.

For more information, contact Dovilė Rūkaitė at projects@lzb.lt.

2023-01-09