We are saddened to learn of the death of Boris Mishkin on November 6 of this year. He was born on November 14, 1929. Our deepest sympathies go to his family and friends.

PARIS (JTA)—Some 200 people gathered under heavy guard at a Paris synagogue to remember the victims of the terrorist attacks in the French capital on Friday night.

Led by chief rabbi of France Haim Korsia, leaders of French Jewry and Israel’s ambassador to France were among those who assembled at the Synagogue de la Victoire Sunday evening.

“Our people, who have been tested more than others, know the healing power of solidarity and unity in the face of the pain of families torn apart, broken couples and orphaned children,” Michel Gugenheim, chief rabbi of Paris, said about the132 fatalities and more than 350 wounded in multiple coordinated attacks.

Embassy of Israel
Vilnius

The Embassy of the State of Israel is very saddened to hear about the passing of Abram Lešč. We would like to express our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Abram Lešč.

Yehuda Gidron
Deputy Chief of Mission

In profoundest sorrow and with our deepest condolences to his survivors, we regret to announce that Abramas Leščius passed away on November 12. The Lithuanian Jewish Community as a whole feels the painful loss of this sincere, honest and intelligent man who served as gabbai of the Vilnius Choral Synagogue minyan for many years.

He was born on April 18, 1932. He will be buried according to Jewish tradition. The burial ceremony is to take place at 11:00 A.M. on November 13 at the Vilnius Jewish Cemetery, located at Sudervės road No. 28. A bus will transport those who want to bid him farewell from the Lithuanian Jewish Community at Pylimo street No. 4 at 10:30 A.M.

Abramas Leščius agreed to share passages from his life on the lzb.lt webpage just six months ago.

It is with great sadness that we inform you of the passing of our dear friend and committed Council Representative, Uri Chanoch, z”l.

 

The funeral will be held today, Thursday, September 3^rd, at the cemetery in Kfar Shmaryahu at 6PM. 

Uri served as a Council Representative of WJRO, and as a Board member of the Good Will Foundation in Lithuania.

 

Uri, a survivor of the Kovno Ghetto, and of Dachau, worked tirelessly as an advocate for survivors.  He dedicated his time to a long list of organizations, and fought for the restitution of private-property for Lithuanian survivors through his work with WJRO and the Good Will Foundation.

 Below is a letter written by Julius Berman, President of the Claims Conference, illustrating Uir’s story and dedication. 

May his memory be a blessing. We extend our deepest condolences to his family.

 

Abraham Biderman, Co-Chair
Gideon Taylor, Chair of Operations
Nachliel Dison, Acting Director General

The last Jew living in Biržai (Birzh), Lithuania, Shevka (Sheftl) Leiba Melamed died Monday, August 31, 2015. He was 89. His death brings to an end over 400 years of Jewish life in the Biržai region. The community there was annihilated during the Holocaust, but by some miracle Leiba Melamed, then still an adolescent, managed to flee to the Soviet Union with his brother Shalom, conscripted into the army, and survived. A little over a month later his family–his father Peisakh, mother Paye and his little brother Hirsh, just turned 7–had been murdered at Pakamponys forest next to Astravas, part of the city of Biržai on its northern outskirts.

The Melamed brothers were sent deep into Russia. Leiba worked on a collective farm. He later attended a Lithuanian arts and crafts school in Kuybyshev, Russia, and later worked at an airplane factory. In 1945 he returned to Biržai but found neither his home nor his friends. He did meet his brother Shalom in Biržai and they both went to live with his brother’s best friend Leonas Jukonis. Later Leiba moved to Klaipėda where he was employed in rebuilding the city. After some time he returned to Biržai and worked in a bakery. Here he met the love of his life, Genovaitė, started a family and had two daughters, Leta and Nelė. He had four grandchildren: Daina, Asta, Petras, Kristina and Dalia.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community mourns the passing of Rachel Margolis, born in Vilnius, a partisan, biologist and author of the book Partisan from Vilna.

She was born on December 28, 1928. As a young Jewish girl she was sent to the Vilna ghetto, were she joined the FPO, the united partisan  underground, and carried out various military missions. She was blonde and blue-eyed, and able to pass “on the Aryan side” as she put it. She also worked at Herman Kruk’s ghetto library on Strashun Street (now Zemaitijos street) where the FPO sometimes held target practice in the cellar.

She was friends with Hirsh Glik, the young poet who penned the words which would become the Partisan Hymn, Sog Niet Keynmol, still sung when Holocaust survivors gather in Israel and throughout the world. Margolis was the first to hear the poem and put it to musical accompaniment.

Her entire family was murdered during the Holocaust, but she married a fellow partisan and started her own family. She is survived by several daughters in Israel. In the post-war period she worked for many years teaching biology at Vilnius University and was the main force in the decyphering and publishing of the Sakowicz diary, an eye-witness testimony of the mass
murder operations at Ponar outside Vilnius. After making aliyah to Israel she used to return to Vilnius during the summers and volunteered her time constructing exhibits at the Green House Holocaust exhibit of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum and leading tours through the Vilna ghetto.

With profound sadness the Lithuanian Jewish Community mourns the loss on Thursday of one its founding members, Josep Levinson (1917-2015). Levinson was a pioneer in Holocaust research after World War II and located Jewish mass murder sites. He also led efforts to mark and commemorate such sites. His memory lives on in the his books “The Shoah: The Holocaust in Lithuania” and “The Book of Sorrow” he compiled and edited, monuments to the lost Lithuanian Jewish Community. The book contains information about and photographs of almost every Jewish mass murder site in Lithuania.

 Josif Levinson grew up in the shtetl Vishéy (Lithuanian Veisiejai) in the Dzūkija ethnographic region of Lithuania. He was graduated from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas with a degree in engineering. In 1941 his father and relatives were murdered in the village of Katkiškė near Lazdéy (Lithuanian Lazdijai). He fought the Nazis as a serviceman of the 16th Lithuanian Division during World War II and was seriously injured.  He was a founding figure of Vilnius’s Green House–the Holocaust exhibit of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum–and was one of the primary historians in the field of Lithuanian Holocaust studies.

We mourn our great loss and offer our condolences to the immediate family of the esteemed scholar and tireless advocate of memory and justice.

Our deepest condolences to Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania chair,
attorney Faina Kukliansky, and to her extended family, upon the death of
her beloved mother, Mrs. Klara Toides-Kuklianskienė.
Mrs. Toides-Kuklianskienė was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania in 1930, and
lived and worked in Vilnius. She spent the last decades of her
life in Israel.

Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania,
Vilnius Jewish Community,
Religious Jewish Community of Lithuania,
Religious Jewish Community of Vilnius,
The Good Will Foundation

The Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania laments the passing of South African Jewish leader Mervyn Smith, a wise leader and a great friend. We extend our most sincere condolences to his children and grandchildren. May his memory never be forgotten.

Faina Kukliansky
Chairperson of the Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania

MEILACH STALEVICH

(1923—2014)

by Dovid Katz (www.dovidkatz.net)

The Jewish Community of Lithuania has just lost one of its most powerful and authentic Litvak personalities, and one of the very last Vilna-born prewar Jews in Vilnius, Meilach Stalevich, who was born on June 28^th 1923. The funeral: Wednesday November 12th, at 2 PM at the Vilnius Jewish cemetery.

Born on June 28th 1923 in the city (then Wilno, Poland; forever in Yiddish: Vílne), Meilach grew up on Kíyever gás (now: Kauno gatvė), opposite the Mishmères-Khéylim (Mishmeres Cholim) hospital which had a kloyz (prayer-house) where his grandfather Avigdor was the gábe (gabbai). Afterwards his family lived in a flat rented to them by a friendly Catholic priest on the grounds of nearby All Saints Church (Visų šventųjų; in local Yiddish: Kolanshómes [from: kol haneshómes ‘all souls’]). Meilach studied at the Yiddish secular Reál-gimnàzye on Rudnítsker gas (today’s Rūdninkų). He is a highly decorated hero of the war against Hitler (the only Jew in a Red Army unit of Cossacks). Most of his relatives were murdered at Ponár (Paneriai). He had received a letter in 1944 (after Vilna fell, but while he was still fighting at the front) that nobody of his family survived.

Yankl-Yosl Bunk (Jakovas Bunka), Famed Wood Sculptor, Last Jew of Plungyán (Plungė, Western Lithuania),

Dies at 91

Was World War II Red Army Veteran of the War Against Hitler

 (13 July 1923 – 30 July 2014)

>> 2011 VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH YANKL-YOSL  BUNK IN PLUNGYÁN

 Bunk’s sculptures; his memoir of Jewish Plungyán; JewishGen Kehila links; Adam Ellick on Bunk; JTA; Bunk’s list of the Jews of Plungyán; “hypothetical” speech at the 2011 Plungyán commemoration.

More at defendinghistory.com

Condolences to Efraim, and all the Zuroff family, on the loss of his dear father, Abraham N. Zuroff, who passed away peacefully at the age of 92 in Jerusalem on Sunday August 3rd. Rabbi Dr. Abraham Zuroff is forever the legendary founding principal of BTA (Yeshiva University High School for Boys in Brooklyn, NY) building one of the very rare educational institutions that was able to synthesize deep authentic Jewish learning with modern cutting-edge and culturally successful American education. In that specific period of American Jewish history, it took the steadfast and uncompromising devotion of the American born Abraham Zuroff to demonstrate that the two could be combined in a way that would attract Jewish youth to the unique fusion of authentic Jewishness and authentic wordliness (rather than a watered down version of either).

Rabbi Dr. Abraham Zuroff was principal of the school for over thirty years (“a life sentence,” he would famously quip) and during that period became the supervisor of all of Yeshiva University’s high schools.

The funeral was held Monday morning at Eretz Hachaim Cemetery near Bet Shemesh.

For his thousands of students, his life was a central inspiration. It is poetically symbolic that he left our world on the eve of the Jewish mourning day Tishebov (Tisha B’Av) that starts this evening, and commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem remembered tenaciously by Jews not only as a day of permanent memory and sadness but at the same time a reminder of the need to rebuild and recreate with a lot of hard work and stubborn steadfastness in the pursuit of quality.

Abraham Zuroff’s original research includes the book “The Responsa of Maimonides” (NY 1966, 804 pp.) on the replies to queries of the 12th century rabbi-physician-philosopher whose life and work demonstrate that same special synthesis of the authentic Jewish and the authentic scientific-worldly-modern.