Heritage

NATO 2023 in Lithuania: Rife with Political Pitfalls

NATO 2023 in Lithuania: Rife with Political Pitfalls

Photo: Outer wall of so-called Genocide Museum on Vilnius’s main street near parliament. Personal collection.

by Grant Gochin

One of the greatest public relations catastrophes of president Reagan’s tenure was his May, 1985, visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, which contained numerous members of the SS. Today, nearly four decades later, the visit is still remembered with anger, amazement and mostly, for America, embarrassment.

NATO has announced that the next meeting of NATO heads of state and government will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12, 2023. There are, unfortunately, obvious parallels to Reagan’s “goodwill” visit to Bitburg.

In World War II, and primarily in the second half of 1941, about 200,000 Lithuanian Jews–about 96%–were systematically expelled from their homes, robbed, starved, tortured, and brutally murdered primarily by ethnic Lithuanian death squads euphemistically referred to as “auxiliary police” units. Lithuania does not acknowledge the fact that most of the mass murderers were ethnic Lithuanians. To the contrary, Lithuania in many cases has elevated the stature of many of those who led the Lithuanian Holocaust, arguing that they were anti-Soviet. This itself is an echo of the Nazis’ canard conflating Jews with Communism.

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Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto

Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto

Photo: Exterior of YIVO building in Vilnius, ca. 1933. Courtesy YIVO.

by David E. Fishman

ABSTRACT
In this essay David Fishman draws a comparison between yidishe visnshaft, or Jewish studies scholarship, and Judenforschung, the Nazi field of anti-Semitic Jewish studies used to justify the persecution and extermination of Jews in scientific terms. He examines the work of Zelig Kalmanovitch, who had been a well-known scholar and co-director of YIVO before World War II, during the time when he was forced to produce scholarship as a member of the Jewish slave labor brigade assigned to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Vilna. Fishman notes the remarkable scholarly accomplishments Kalmanovitch was able to achieve in a time of enormous adversity. He also demonstrates several junctures in which Kalmanovitch, a meticulous scholar, omitted facts or altered scholarship in order to save lives. These dual impulses of preserving historical truths about Jewish communities and a willingness to obscure facts over which people could be killed contribute to Fishman’s assessment that Kalmanovitch’s scholarship emerged from erudition, love and dedication to the Jewish people about whom he wrote, the very opposite of the purposes for which his scholarship was obtained by his Nazi slave masters.

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On June 16, 1942, Herbert Gotthardt, a staff member of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Vilna, instructed Zelig Kalmanovitch to prepare an essay and bibliography on the Karaïtes. Kalmanovitch, a well-known scholar and co-director of YIVO before the war, was a member of the Jewish slave labor brigade assigned to the ERR which segregated Jewish and other books, manuscripts and documents into two categories: valuable items to be sent to Germany, and valueless items to be destroyed. The former YIVO co-director was an expert bibliographer in this work brigade, nicknamed the paper brigade, based in the YIVO building at 18 Wiwulskiego Street. The brigade was headed by librarian Herman Kruk and consisted of twenty physical laborers and twenty intellectuals, including the Yung-Vilne poets Abraham Sutzkever and Szmerke Kaczerginski.

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Holocaust and Home: The Poetry of David Fram from Lithuania to South Africa

Holocaust and Home: The Poetry of David Fram from Lithuania to South Africa

Cover: Hazel Frankel, “Holo­caust and Home: The Poetry of David Fram from Lithuania to South Africa.” Legenda, 2021. 230 pp.

My mother started learning Yiddish late in life. I felt as if she was reaching out to her dead parents, trying to connect with them. Both her mother and her father were immigrants to South Africa from Lithuania, one from the town of Shadova, the other from Pokroy. My grandfather, Abe, who came from a long line of yeshiva bochers, attended the famed Telz yeshiva. Intellectually curious, he read War and Peace in the original Russian. Later, at the Claremont shul in Cape Town, he gave many of the Saturday afternoon shiurim, written in Yiddish but delivered in English.

His wife, Anne, for who I am named, was nine years his junior. They owned a dress shop in Cape Town and, before the war, Abe went on business trips to Europe to buy the latest fashions, often with specific customers’ needs in mind. Both Abe and Anne died in their fifties, several years before I was born. I know them only from photographs. Their sepia-toned wedding photo hung in our breakfast room, where we ate all our meals. Abe was short, wore glasses, and gazed solemnly at the camera. Anne seemed softer, gentler, and had a twenties-style headdress that looked like a shower cap. There were odd flecks of white on the image that I always imagined was confetti but must have been blemishes on the photographic paper or the camera lens.

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Lithuanian PM Says Plans for Litvak Museum at Sports Palace Bogged Down

Lithuanian PM Says Plans for Litvak Museum at Sports Palace Bogged Down

Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė told Baltic News Service the idea to establish either a museum or a memorial dedicated to the history of the Litvaks at the Vilnius Palace of Sports complex could turn out to be a long and difficult process.

“It’s on-going, but in order to create a truly meaningful and thus memorable site about the Jews of Lithuania, we’ll have to work hard. The commission will select ideas to be adopted by consensus,” she said.

She cautioned decision-making on the concept could become bogged down and generally difficult. She said this commission will include academics, rabbis, historians and others from Lithuania and other countries and is scheduled for formation by the end of 2022. The idea since 2015 when the Lithuanian state privatization bank Turto bankas acquired the property has been to turn the Palace of Sports built in 1971 and now falling into ruin into a conference center. Different Jewish groups have opposed that plan because the Palace of Sports was built inside the old Jewish cemetery in Vilnius.

Yiddish Concert in Kaunas

Yiddish Concert in Kaunas

The Kaunas Jewish Community invites you to their concert “Yiddish Heard Again in Kaunas: Inspired by Grandma’s Songs” at 5:00 P.M. on Sunday, November 27 at the Kaunas Artists’ House located at V. Putvinskio street no. 56 in Kaunas.

Alejandra Czarny of Argentina and more recently the United States with firm family roots in Kaunas will sing accompanied by Michel Gonzales on guitar, including Litvak Yiddish from different periods and Yiddish songs from Argentina and South America. Besides singing Yiddish her entire life, she also has her own radio program and is a cantor for synagogues located in South Florida, where she lives.

The concert is free and open to the public, but prior registration is required by filling out the form here:

https://forms.gle/nkT9Ww3oouyf1RyC8

Lithuanian PM Proposes Compensating Expropriated Jewish Private Property

Lithuanian PM Proposes Compensating Expropriated Jewish Private Property

Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė proposed the Lithuanian Government set up a 37-million euro fund to compensate the Jewish community for private property expropriated during World War II.

The fund would complement a previous initiative launched a decade ago which has paid out a similar amount of money to Lithuania’s Jewish community in compensation for seized communal property.

Under the Law on Goodwill Compensation adopted in 2011, Lithuania pledged to pay out over 37 million euros over a decade in compensation for the property of Jewish communities nationalized by totalitarian regimes.

Full story here.

World of Trakai Executed in Varnikai Forest: A Fancy Menorah, a Mad Mob and a Leather Briefcase

World of Trakai Executed in Varnikai Forest: A Fancy Menorah, a Mad Mob and a Leather Briefcase

Photo: Trakai in 1952. From the personal collection of Algimantas Dočkus courtesy LRT.

by Rasa Kalinauskaitė

“Sir, I report that while inventorying the Jewish property taken to the synagogue I discovered seven fur coats suitable for police service. Three of them are of a yellow and unlined falling to below the knees, four are lined with cloth material, coming down to the knees. I request an order these fur coats be seized for police officers to wear as they perform their duties.”–from report by chief of Trakai police department to chief of district police, October 17, 1941.

I and a contingent of Trakai residents as well as two people who came from further off went on a tour of the Trakai Old Town, visiting sites recalling the Jews who lived here before World War II, stopping at former Jewish homes which are still standing. We became fellow travellers, in that those who toured Trakai in earlier times have shared their memories from many decades ago in the photographs they took, which show a town which has now completely changed. I wanted to share this with those who were not able to come, so I will attempt to describe this trip.

This is a journey through memory, because that same day, September 30, was the day in 1941 when the Jews of Trakai, Aukštadvaris, Lentvaris, Rūdiškės, Onuškis and Žydkaimis, 1,446 people of whom 597 were children, were murdered in Varnikai Forest.

Full article in Lithuanian here.

Yiddish Again Heard in Kaunas

Yiddish Again Heard in Kaunas

The first concert in the Kaunas Jewish Community’s Yiddish song project was called “The Jewish Nightingale from the Provisional Capital,” dedicated to the late Yiddish songstress Nehama Lifshitz’s 95th birthday, ended with the promise made by everyone to meet again five years from now to celebrate Nehama’s 100th birthday, perhaps with a two-part concert, perhaps even with an orchestra.

It’s not enough to say this was a wonderful concert, that would be an understatement. It was an extraordinary evening with so much love, inspiration, light, humanity and the victory of life, overcoming all the world’s misfortunes. The entire experience was good and those special emotions will remain with us for a long time. At least this morning the music heard yesterday evening is still echoing through mane hearts and minds.

We are so thankful for this concert, for this miracle created, to Svetlana Kundish for her thanksgiving and hymn to her teacher, and to the accomplished team of musicians including Patrick Farrell, Rasa Vaičiulytė, Dainis Buika and the young female soloist Ramunė Buikaitė.

The spirit of Nehama, fragile and gentle, firm and fearless singing of life, truly visited the Kaunas State Philharmonic concert hall last Monday evening.

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Grant Gochin Delivers Speech in Cape Town, October 27, 2022

Grant Gochin Delivers Speech in Cape Town, October 27, 2022

Grant Gochin delivered the following remarks to an audience of about 200 people at the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre of the Green and Sea Point Hebrew Congregation in Cape Town in the early evening of October 27.

Hello, chaverim, friends, I am honored and delighted to be on my home soil, speaking to my own people. My Mishpocha. Thank you for coming. My sincere thanks to the organizers and attendees, and those who have kept me going in this cause.

Every Jewish person in this room has ancestry from Lithuania. Most of us here now, are alive because our families got out before Lithuanians were able to murder us. We are all who are left, to remember and speak the truth. Our families’ voices cannot be stilled through apathy or forgetfulness. Our families’ voices must be heard.

I became eager to find out about the “Old Country” from the stories and lessons of my paternal grandfather. More and more, I knew I had to walk those streets and see those forests.

I was the very first Jew to apply to Lithuania for citizenship. Three times, they rejected me for reasons even the Lithuanian Supreme Court ruled to be “absurd.” There were two sets of rules, one for real “ethnic” Lithuanians, and a separate queue for Litvaks. This simplified their process–automatic denial for Jews. I fought back.

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New Film Gives Voice to Lithuanian Holocaust Victims

New Film Gives Voice to Lithuanian Holocaust Victims

by Tali Feinberg

When thinking about the Holocaust in Lithuania, some of us can only think about the horror from a distance or in small doses. But filmmaker Michael Kretzmer has made it his duty to look up close in a new documentary that exposes the depravity of the killing, and questions Lithuania’s Holocaust denial.

The documentary, to be released in Australia in November, looks at the “murder of children in front of parents; the smashing of babies’ skulls against trees; girls being loaded onto trucks for deadly rape parties by Lithuanian gangs; the imprisonment of thousands of Jews in their own synagogues and their murder either by fire or starvation and thirst amidst human filth and the stench of their loved ones’ rotting bodies; the beheadings; the immolations; and the thousands of lethal humiliations.”

This is what Kretzmer found over the past three years, during which his life was “entirely absorbed” in the making of the documentary that “attempts to tell the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust.”

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Three Days with Rabbi Nathan Alfred

Three Days with Rabbi Nathan Alfred

Lectures:

“Raising Children in the Jewish Family,” 7:00 P.M., November 3, Conference Hall, Lithuanian Jewish Community, Vilnius.

“Sabbath for the Whole Family” under the tenets of Progressive Judaism, 6:30 P.M., November 4, prayer upstairs followed by kiddush at the Bagel Shop Café. Cost is 10 euros, young people 16 and under enter free.

Morning Prayer Service:

Shakharit, 10:30 A.M., November 5, at the site of the former Great Synagogue, Vokiečių street no. 13A, Vilnius.

To attend any or all of these events and for more information, please register by contacting Viljamas at viljamas@lzb.lt or by calling +37067250699.

Lithuanian Magazine Covers Leonard Cohen Statue’s Movement in Vilnius Old Town

Lithuanian Magazine Covers Leonard Cohen Statue’s Movement in Vilnius Old Town

The Lithuanian magazine Žmonės has covered the move of a Leonard Cohen statue from a restaurant courtyard to a more prominent location in the Vilnius Old Town.

“The sculpture dedicated to world-famous performer with Lithuanian roots Leonard Cohen has been moved to a new location, the square [triangle] at the intersection of Ligoninės and Pylimo streets.

“Sculptor Romualdas Kvintas’s statue to the world-famous Canadian performer with Jewish roots was unveiled in the courtyard of the Gabi restaurant, a temporary location, in August of 2019.

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News from Kaunas

News from Kaunas

Several weekends ago some members of the Kaunas Jewish Community travelled to Alytus. On the way, they stopped in Butrimonys, once a thriving Jewish town, where local school teacher Danutė Anušauskienė provided a guided tour of her hometown.

In Alytus they visited bonzai gardener Kęstutis Ptakauskas who created the Morning Dew Japanese garden there. They toured an exhibit of Litvak artists at the restored synagogue, now a museum, after which they went to the Dzūkijos dvaras restaurant to try the traditional dishes from the Dzūkija ethnographic region of Lithuania.

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Leonard Cohen Statue Appears in Vilnius Old Town

Leonard Cohen Statue Appears in Vilnius Old Town

An official unveiling of a new metal statue of Leonard Cohen will take place in the courtyard at Pylimo street no. 38 in Vilnius at 3:00 P.M. on October 21. The statue was made by the late sculptor Romualdas Kvintas and it has found a temporary home on Šv. Mykolo street until now. The courtyard at the corner of Pylimo and Ligoninės streets will be a more permanent home. The triangular block formed by Pylimo, Ligoninės and Rudininkų streets once housed the main Jewish hospital in Vilnius, which was incorporated in the Vilnius ghetto and then destroyed. Kvintas, an ethnic Lithuania, did a whole series of statues on Jewish themes later in life. Leonard Cohen will now join Kvintas’s other works in the immediate neighborhood, including the metal sculpture of Tsemakh Shabad with cat and child, and a metal statue of Tevye the milkman which appeared without fanfare several years ago on Lydos street. All three of these statues by Kvintas are located inside the Vilnius ghetto territory.

Jewish Partisan Who Fought Nazis Battles to Preserve Forest Fort Where Resistance Group Lived

Jewish Partisan Who Fought Nazis Battles to Preserve Forest Fort Where Resistance Group Lived

by Felix Pope and Karen Glaser, Jewish Chronicle

Fania Brantsovsky, now 100, escaped the Vilna Ghetto to join the Avenger group. Now she’s fighting to save their woodland camp so the next generations can learn of their struggle

in 1943, 21-year-old Fania Brantsovsky escaped from the Vilnius Ghetto through a gap in a wall and fled to a forest 12 miles away. For the next year, she lived with 100 other Jews in a wooden bunker deep in the woods, from where they launched attacks against the Nazis.

Today, Mrs Brantsovsky, who turned 100 in May, is the only surviving member of the group of partisans led by the poet Abba Kovner who called themselves the Nokmim, Hebrew for “Avengers”.

Now Mrs Brantsovsky has called for the now rapidly disintegrating fort in the swampy Rudnicki Forest to be preserved as an international Jewish heritage site.

Full story here.

Katharina von Schnurbein Calls for More Attention to Litvak Cultural and Historical Sites

Katharina von Schnurbein Calls for More Attention to Litvak Cultural and Historical Sites

Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s coordinator for implementing strategies to combat anti-Semitism and foster Jewish life in Europe, visited the Vilnius ghetto and other memorial locations Wednesday, the Lithuanian Jewish Community reported.

She called attention to the poor state of monuments during the tour and called for more care and maintenance of such sites in Lithuania.

LJC staff member and guide Viljamas Žitkauskas provided the guided tour and told the visiting official about the 700-year history shared by Lithuanians and Jews, the importance of Vilnius as the Jerusalem of the North and the ruins left in the wake of the Holocaust.

LJC chairwoman Fainia Kukliansky accompanied von Schnurbein on the walking tour and said: “Vilnius is special in that it’s not enough to just see it. The buildings, the statues, even the paving stones have a deep and significant history. You have to hear Vilnius. I am pleased von Schnurbein found time in her busy schedule to visit the most important sites and to learn about our history, culture and traditions.”

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Parliamentary Committee Approves Funding to Keep Sugihara House Open

Parliamentary Committee Approves Funding to Keep Sugihara House Open

On August 5 the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Lithuanian parliament approved the idea of providing the Sugihara House in Kaunas 150,000 euros annually to keep the museum open.

This followed a plea by museum director Ramūnas Janulaitis, appointed in the wake of the death of the museum’s founder and director Simonas Dovidavičius in December of 2019, for help maintaining the museum after a steep reduction in tourist visits because of the virus panic and the Ukrainian war.

Ambassadors from Japan, Israel, the United States, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland to Lithuania responded to the plea with a joint letter to Lithuania’s minister for culture and minister for science, education and sports. In their letter they said Chiune Sugihara’s legacy was important for building democracy, tolerance and human values.

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Recent Workshops and Events

Recent Workshops and Events

We are pleased to share some snapshots from the dance class held on the last Sabbath of summer at the Cvirka Park space next to our Israeli street food kiosk. Julia Patašnik led the dance group. Also, we have snapshots from the gefilte fish workshop and the opening of seniors’ club Abi Men Zit Zich’s 25th season.

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