Heritage

Volunteers Clean Up Sudervės Road Jewish Cemetery in Vilnius

Lithuanian Jewish Community members and staff gathered to clean up the Jewish cemetery on Sudervės road in Vilnius on Sunday, September 10.

Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon pitched in, as did LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky with her grandchildren. Community members, administrative staff and rabbis all came out to perform a small mitzvah in the run-up to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. They raked up leaves, gathered garbage and sorted it for recycling, tended abandoned graves and cleaned and beautified the only working Jewish cemetery in Vilnius.

Thank you to all the volunteers for your good work!

Thank You

A week has passed during which Lithuanian remembered her shtetlakh. The fourteenth celebration of the annual European Day of Jewish Culture has taken place in Lithuania, this year with the theme “Diaspora and Heritage: The Shtetlakh.” Lithuanian towns which used to be called shtetlakh hosted events, tours of surviving old towns and Jewish residential sections, interesting talks on the former life of Litvaks there. The word shtetl was heard much in Lithuania after the Holocaust, with the loss of the former Litvak world and the Yiddish language.

This year the European Day of Jewish Culture was observed in more than 20 towns and cities, including Alytus, Jurbarkas, from Kaunas to Žasliai and Žiežmariai, Kelmė, Klaipėda, Kretinga, Molėtai, Palanga, Pakruojis, Pandėlys, Pasvalys, Pikeliai, Šiauliai, Šilalė, Jonava, Joniškis, Kupiškis, Darbėnai, Šeduva, Švėkšna, Ukmergė, Zarasai and Želva.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community thanks all the participating cities and towns for remembering the shtetlakh and the Jews who lived, traded, created and built there. They deserve to be remembered. Many cities and towns held lectures, conferences, exhibits, concerts and film screenings this year.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky also thanks the organizers of the events at the Jewish Community for their interesting program, and thanks the participants and speakers who spoke about the remaining traces of the shtetlakh in Lithuania. We thank Fania Brancovskaja, Vytautas Toleikis, Sandra Petrukonytė, Ilona Šedienė, Rimantas Vanagas and Antanas Žilinskas not just for their interesting presentations, but also for their own work, books and research on Jewish history, contributing to making the shtetlakh part of the heart of our country, without which Lithuania is impossible to imagine.

Thank you also to the Bagel Shop Café for the tasty Jewish dishes, the Sabbath ceramics exhibit and the holiday atmosphere, and to the Fayerlakh ensemble for the wonderful concert!

Our sincere thanks to everyone.

World Jewish Congress Hosts Meeting of Lithuanian Foreign Minister and Ambassadors in Jerusalem

“This year Lithuania and Israel mark the 35th anniversary of diplomatic relations. We value what our countries have in common and seek to become even closer,” Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius said at the function.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky traveled with the Lithuanian delegation to Israel and met with Litvaks living there, who congratulated her on her re-election as chairwoman and wished her the highest success. The meeting was warm and hospitable with home-made dishes made by Litvaks. They agreed in discussions to work together with the Jews of Lithuania and in the near future to discuss broad possibilities and goals in that cooperation.

The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry reported meetings with Israeli leaders included positive assessments of growing bilateral economic cooperation, growth in trade, increases in tourism and successful cooperation in research and development. They also discussed security threats in their respective regions and agreed to push for more cooperation in the fields of energy, defense and cyber-security.

Most Important Event in Sugihara Week: Discussion of Sugihara’s Lessons, Applicable Today

Svarbiausiame „Sugiharos savaitės“ renginyje – pokalbiai apie Č.Sugiharos pamokas, pritaikomas ir šiandien

15min.lt

For Japanese people he is a hero, known to all, from the youngest child to the oldest person. The diplomat Chiune Sugihara is also well known in Lithuania. Even so, greater attention to his life and deeds is only know being paid. A group of scholars, public figures, politicians and diplomats from Lithuania and Japanese discussed Sugihara’s extraordinarily heroic deed at a conference in Kaunas September 6.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Sugihara Week Continues in Kaunas

Events for the Sugihara Week being celebrated in Kaunas are scheduled from September 2 to 8.

Sugihara Week is a series of events to commemorate Japanese diplomat and Righteous Gentile Chiune Sugihara’s life and deed. From 1939 to 1940 Sugihara and Dutch consul Jan Zwartendijk saved over 6,000 Jewish lives from the Holocaust by issuing so-called visas for life.

“Consul Sugihara has become ever more known in the world and I am happy ever new ways to commemorate his heroism are appearing. It is significant that this wonderful initiative for a Sugihara Week came from Kaunas, which is the epicenter of the entire Sugihara story,” Toyoei Shigeeda, Japan’s ambassador to Lithuania, said.

Read more

Japanese Restorers of Sugihara House Arrive

Kaunas, September 4, BNS–A group of painters dressed in white just arrived from Japan gathered at the residence and now museum of famous interwar Japanese diplomat and Righteous Gentile Chiune Sugihara Monday to help in the renovation of the building.

Tokon International chairman Keiichi Yasuda, whose company sent the painters, told BNS the painters wanted to help and make people happy.

“There are many companies which do everything for money, but money doesn’t bring happiness, the meaning of life is not money, but happiness, and we wanted to do something to help make people happy,” Mr. Yasuda said.

Read more

Lithuanians and Jews during the Nazi Occupation

by Ona Šimaitė
translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freund

At the time of the Second World War, Lithuanian-Jewish relations took on a sharply tragic form that could not have been imagined in earlier times. As a Lithuanian woman, it is bitter for me to assert that during the years of the worst torture of the Jews by the Germans, not all of the people in my country showed an elementary, humane sympathy to their Jewish neighbors of many generations and the worst of the Lithuanians–to my great pain!– even had their hand in the extermination.

The Lithuanian Special Squad (Ypatingasis Bûrys) together with the Nazis murdered Jews in a series of places. Such scoundrels as Babialis, Piragius and others will remain accursed not only by Jews, but also by Lithuanians.

Lithuanian police divisions not only carried out Hitler’s orders to kill Jews, but in many localities they themselves asked to do the mitzvah [commandment, usually translated as “good deed”) of murdering Jews or they randomly initiated various persecutions. I had more than one occasion to watch how Lithuanian policemen fined Jews for trifles and how hard-hearted and malicious they were during the deportations of Jews in the ghetto. Even leading the Jews to death, deeply degenerate Lithuanian policemen did not have the elementary tact not to show–during the last tragic hours of thousands of lives–their animal-like fury.

Read more

The Global Face of the Holocaust, or, What Must Happen for Me to Begin to Act?


Jews in the Radom ghetto, May, 1941. Photo courtesy German Bundesarchiv.

by Ieva Elenbergienė

“The Holocaust is not just a horrible story which happened a long time ago and to someone else. If we want humanity never to experience genocide again, we must understand that this is our history, not just ‘theirs,’ which happened not ‘somewhere’ but right here, to us,” political science professor Dovilė Budrytė said during our interview. Budrytė teaches at Georgia Gwinnett College, part of the higher education system of the US state of Georgia, which awarded her for best teaching within the state college and university system. Her list of publications includes books on traumatic experience, memory and multiculturalism.

Presenting the events of history in a human context, they become closer to us, they become visible through the prism of personal experience. So in teaching the Holocaust, is it possible to speak very emotionally about human nature?

“Now, as the world faces war and ecological crises, it’s popular to research how people act in catastrophes, how they resist, how human dignity is preserved. The history of the Holocaust is the basis for so-called resilience studies. It’s interesting to look at, for example, how some Jews entered into armed resistance while others were passive, believing they needed to be patient and wait for the situation to improve. But how would I act in that sort of situation? What does it mean to be not just a victim or a perpetrator, but an observer? After all, that category of people was the largest in Lithuania during the Holocaust. Is the role of witness innocently guilty? This is a very broad question which applies today to us as well. In the US, for example, we and the students talk about elected senators and presidents whose policies, let’s say, some people really don’t like and even seem threatening. The students think about ‘what will I specifically do now? Will I even lift a finger? What must happen for me to act? And what will I do? And why?'”

Read more

Kaunas Native Bella Shirin Says Sugihara Week a Bridge Between Peoples

The parents of artist Bella Shirin (formerly Bela Šifrisaitė) miraculously survived the Dachau concentration camp. They moved to Kaunas after the war where Bella was born. At 17 she and her parents moved to Israel, in 1963, but she says she always missed her hometown.

She came back to Kaunas in 2004, and last year moved permanently to Lithuania’s second largest city. She says she felt happy again following the move. Now the artist lives next to the street of her childhood, Freedom Alley, and makes a daily practice of trying to bring Jews and Lithuanians closer.

Kaunas residents will soon have several opportunities to get to know the life story of the Kaunas: European Capital of Culture 2022 ambassador. On September 2 celebrations of Sugihara Week began in Kaunas and the Litvak Photography Center will present a photo-collage of Shirin’s family history there. The artist herself was to appear the same day at the opening concert for Sugihara Week at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, and was to speak at the Sugihara symposium scheduled for September 6.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Great Synagogue Listed on Cultural Treasures Registry


information from the Cultural Heritage Department under the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and other sources

A commission for assessing cultural heritage real estate from the Cultural Heritage Department has provided legal protection to the remains of the Great Synagogue in Vilnius. The Great Synagogue of Vilnius was one of the largest religious institutions in Eastern Europe. It was renowned as an important Jewish spiritual and educational center and put Vilnius on the map as a center of Jewish scholarship. The Cultural Treasures Registry lists the construction (fragments of brick wall dating from the 18th century and entrance to the synagogue, southwest wall fragment with niche for the aron kodesh and eastern wall fragment), architectural features, remains of the former building complex including mikvehs dating from the late 19th century, a utility trench on Žydų street and cultural strata as valuable and protected features of the synagogue complex.

Originally the site hosted a wooden synagogue, believed to have been built around 1573. It burned down and was replaced at least once. In 1630 and 1633 royal grant was issued to allow a brick and mortar synagogue to be built there.

Read more

Monument Commemorates Jewish Community of Žagarė, Lithuania

Paminklas Žagarės žydų bendruomenės atminimui

A metal apple tree was “planted” at the Litvak Commemorative Garden in the Žemaitija National Park by the Jakovas Bunka Charity and Sponsorship Fund to commemorate the former Jewish community of Žagarė, Lithuania. The metal sculpture was made by Artūras Platakis. Rabbi Kalev Krelin, Jewish rescuer family member Leonas Levinskas and Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon attended the ceremony in mid-August in Medsėdžiai village near Plungė, Lithuania.

Read more

Events for September at the Panevėžys Jewish Community

September 20

Competition “Who? What? Where?” for students at the Panevėžys Jewish Community, Ramygalos street no. 18, Panevėžys. The theme of the contest is Holocaust events in Lithuania. The competition starts at 2:00 P.M. There will be six teams from schools and gymnasia in the area. Each team will have 5 members and 1-2 teachers from each educational institution. In total 35 participants will compete.

September 22

Rosh Hashanah celebration at the Rojaus paukštė café, Respublikos street no. 4a. Starts at 6:00 P.M. Please register by September 12 with Zinaida Zaprudskaja to attend this event.

September 23

Commemoration of Jewish Genocide Day: at 1:00 P.M. there will be a commemoration at the statue of the Jewish mother on Atminites square; at 1:30 P.M. there will be an excursion to the Holocaust mass murder site in the Kurganava forest; at 2:00 P.M. there will be an excursion to the Holocaust mass murder site in the Žalioji forest; at 2:30 P.M. there will be a screening of a documentary film about Auschwitz at the Panevėžys Jewish Community, Ramygalos street no. 18, Panevėžys.

Please register with Zinaida Zaprudskaja by September 12.

A bus will carry visitors to the sites, departing from Atminities square at 1:30 P.M.

All events are supported by the Goodwill Foundation.

Lithuanian Jewish Community Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky’s Address to Conference on Commemorating Great Synagogue of Vilnius

Executive director of the Lithuanian Jewish Community Renaldas Vaisbrodas delivered the following address by chairwoman Faina Kukliansky to a conference called “How Should We Commemorate the Site of the Great Synagogue of VIlnius?” on August 4, 2017:

Dear participants of the international conference How Should We Commemorate the Site of the Great Synagogue of VIlnius?”,

Thank you to the organizers for the opportunity to deliver a keynote speech in the name of the chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community.

I’d like to use this opportunity to address the conference and ask: who could answer the question posed by this conference better than the Jews of Lithuania? Thanks to the initiative and active efforts of the Lithuanian Jewish Community recently, important Litvak heritage monuments and symbols of culture again enjoy the possibility of being restored in our country, recalling the great past of the Jerusalem of Lithuania and preserving it for future generations.

Read more

Lithuanian Shtetlakh: European Day of Jewish Culture Celebration September 3 at LJC

Press release

The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites the public to attend an event dedicated to the Jewish shtetls of Lithuania to commemorate and remember together this period of Lithuanian history, interesting and dear to us but cut short by the Holocaust and which has become a subject of academic interest and heritage protection.

The theme of this year’s European Day of Jewish Culture on September 3 as confirmed by the Cultural Heritage Department to the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture is “The Diaspora and Heritage: The Shtetl.” This is an intentional, mature and topical choice for a country where the life of the largest ethnic and confessional minority, of the Jews, thrived namely in the Lithuanian shtetlakh until 1941.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community will host an event called “Shtetlakh of Lithuania” on the third floor of the community building at Pylimo street no. 4 on September 3 to celebrate the European Day of Jewish Culture in 2017.

The event will kick off with a bagel breakfast and a presentation and tasting of authentic Jewish recipes at the Bagel Shop Café on the first floor at 9:00 A.M. Following that everyone is invited to attend a short Yiddish language lesson. A brunch awaits the graduates at the Bagel Shop Café. At 2:00 P.M. guest speakers will begin delivering free public lectures on the shtetlakh of Aniksht (Anykščiai), Eishishyok (Eišiškės), Sheduva (Šeduva) and Vilkovishk (Vilkaviškis) and what remains of them. A challa-baking lesson and presentation of the Bagel Shop Café’s new ceramics collection begins at 4:00 P.M. The Jewish song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh will perform a concert at 6:00 P.M.

The Rakija Klezmer Orkestar will also perform a concert at 3:00 P.M. in the Šnipiškės neighborhood of Vilnius.

More information available here.

“The reality in Lithuania is that If you want to learn more about the material and immaterial cultural heritage of a given town in Lithuanian (including the architectural features and aura of buildings, demographic changes and consequent changes in the structure of the town, changes in political structure and the ensuing canonization of ideologized development patterns), you will, unavoidably, run into the word ‘shtetl.’ You will find no better opportunity to understand what this is and to discover the shtetl in the features of buildings still standing in the towns than the events for the European Day of Jewish Culture on September 3,” director of the Cultural Heritage Department Diana Varnaitė said.

The word shtetl is an old Yiddish diminutive for shtot, city, meaning town. The towns of Lithuania where Jews comprised half or the majority of the population, characterized by Litvak energy and the bustle of commercial activity, are often called shtetlakh, the plural of shtetl. It’s thought shtetls evolved into their modern form in the 18th century. Malat, Kupeshok, Zosle, Olkenik, Svintsyan, Vilkomir, Gruzd, Eishyshok, Utyan–these are just a few of the surviving Lithuanian towns.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky recalls her parents’ shtetl:

“We didn’t travel to my grandparents’ village in the summer. We didn’t have any ebcause they were murdered in the Holocaust, or had moved from their shtetlakh to Vilnius or Kaunas because they could no longer live there without their loved ones and friends lying in the pits together with the bodies and souls of the other unfortunates.

“The Kuklianskys who survived, however, my father, my uncle who hid in trenches from the Nazis near the shtetl of Sventiyansk, were rescued by local village people, but for their entire lives longed for their home on the banks of the Ančia River in Veisiejai, Lithuania. There was no place happier or more beautiful than their native shtetl. Perhaps because their mother hadn’t been murdered yet.

“The eyes of my mother, who was born in Keydan (Kėdainiai) and spent her childhood in Shavl (Šiauliai), her eyes used to just shine when she remembered how they used to go to the ‘spa town’ of Pagelava near Shavl in horse-drawn cart.

“The shtetls… are no more. Now there are cities and towns, but they have no rabbis, no yeshivas, synagogues or Jews… all that remains is love for the place of one’s birth, but love is stronger than hate. The memories remain, too, and without them we wouldn’t be commemorating the shtetls and their inhabitants.”

Those who seek to find the traces of the lost and concealed presence of the Jews only have to find their way to the center of a Lithuanian town, to the old town, where the red-brick buildings still stand. All of the old towns of the small towns were built by Jews. The same goes for the former synagogues, schools, pharmacies and hospitals.

Cultural heritage experts tell us market day and the Sabbath were the main events of the week in the Lithuanian towns. Both were observed. After the Holocaust the shtetlakh were empty, the Jewish homes stood empty even if they still contained family heirlooms and the items acquired over lifetimes. Non-Jewish neighbors often moved into these houses and took over the property. Now no one uses the word štetlas in Lithuanian, it sounds exotic and needs to be translated to miestelis.

On the Competition Which Took Place in 1990 for Commemorating the Great Synagogue

I report the information about the international tender held in 1990 for rebuilding the Great Synagogue, the architect Tzila Zak’s project being recognized the best and her winning the tender is false.

Honorary Lithuanian Jewish Community chairman Grigory Kanovich (the following document incorrectly spells his surname Konovich), Grigorijus Alpernas and I did not participate as judges in the commission and the use of our names is wrong.

It is possible other alleged members of the jury commission have been listed without their knowledge as well.

Daumantas Levas Todesas

0 monument competition announcement

Kaunas Jewish Community Marks 76th Anniversary of Mass Murder of Jews of Petrašiūnai and the Intellectuals Aktion at the Fourth Fort

The Kaunas Jewish Community marked the mass murder of the Jews of Petrašiūnai and the Kaunas ghetto intellectuals’ aktion/mass murder at the Fourth Fort in Kaunas August 28. Members of the KJC, residents of Petrašiūnai, including some living eye-witnesses, and deputy Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Efrat Hochstetler, US assistant ambassador Howard Solomon and other US embassy staff, director of the Cultural Heritage Department of the City of Kaunas Saulius Rimas and representatives of the Kaunas Forts associations assembled to honor the victims of the Holocaust.

KJC chairman Gercas Žakas and embassy staff spoke of our duty to remember the Holocaust and the great loss not just to Jews but all Lithuanian citizens, the loss of possibilities and of people who might have achieved much in their home country and the need to remember the victims by name, not as statistics.

Read more

The Price of Disunity


Insights into the destruction of the Second Temple
by Rabbi Yonason Goldson

It was in the year 3826 (66 CE) that the excesses of Roman governance over the Land of Israel finally drove the inhabitants of Jerusalem to the breaking point. On the 17th day of the month of Iyar, the taunts and jeers of Roman soldiers provoked an uprising by the city’s populace more violent than either Jew nor Roman could have imagined. By the end of the day the Jews had retaken control of their capital. The Great Revolt had begun.

The victory in Jerusalem came at a painfully high price. Thousands of Jews across the region were massacred or sold into slavery as citizens in Hellenized cities of Caesaria, Alexandria, and Damascus responded to the Jewish uprising with riots and pogroms. But the official response from Rome was more calculated. To impress upon other nationalities throughout its empire the folly of rebellion, the Roman Senate dispatched a massive army to crush the revolution in Judea.

Faced with the approach of four Roman legions led by Vespasian, one of Rome’s most successful generals, it seems unimaginable that the Jews could have held out any hope of victory. But unlike secular history, the Talmudic record incorporates spiritual, as well as political, cause and effect. Just as the Roman occupation of Israel had been decreed on High in response to the Jews’ spiritual shortcomings, so too did the fate of the Jerusalem ultimately rest in the Jews’ own hands. Spiritually, as well as militarily, it was the Jewish people’s internal divisiveness that left them vulnerable to the power of Rome.

Read more

Jewish Solidarity

by Rabbi Berel Wein

One of the hallmarks of the story of the Jewish people over the millennia of our existence has been the fact that Jews, no matter what their political persuasion or level of religious belief and observance, always seem to care for one another. Though there always were divergent interests and different agendas present in the Jewish world, when Jews were in mortal danger the Jewish world somehow rose to attempt to help and defend our brethren who were threatened.

Many times our efforts were too little and too late. That certainly was the case regarding European Jewry during World War II. Till today, there is much controversy and bitterness, academic dispute and political debate regarding what was done and what more could have been done to rescue Jews from the jaws of the Holocaust.

It is a topic that gives us no rest and provides no proper solution. I remember how my own family personally anguished over the destruction of my uncles, aunts and cousins. They always asked themselves if more could have been done to somehow extricate them from Lithuania before 1940.

Read more

Conference “Jews of Palanga” in Palanga, Lithuania

The Palanga Spa Museum is hosting on September 4 an academic conference called “Jews of Palanga: A Lost Part of the City Community.” The museum is organizing the conference with the Baltic Regional History and Archaeology Institute of Klaipėda University. The event will begin at 10:00 A.M. on Monday, September 4 and the address is Birutės alley no. 34a, Palanga, Lithuania.

Organizers ask those who wish to participate to register by calling 8 4 605 7216.