History of the Jews in Lithuania

Makabi Fall Tennis Tournament 2016

LSK „Makabi“ rudens teniso turnyras 2016

The fall tennis tournament of the Makabi Lithuanian athletics club was held November 27 at SEB Arena in Vilnius, with 10 athletes (7 male, 3 female). The matches were held with a minus 2 handicap. Danielius Merkinas was the overall winner. In the women’s group promising young professional tennis player Alisa Gaivaronskytė took first place. Valentina Finkelšteinienė and Tatjana Podkolzina took second and third in the women’s.

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In the men’s, the brothers Kęstas and Norbertas Faktorovičius took third. The best player among veterans was Grigorij Khiterer, followed closely by Faktorovičius and Eduardas Gurvičius. All contestants received participation prizes and the women got flowers as well. The awards ceremony and dinner followed the competition.

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US Embassy Reps Visit Kaunas

Kaune viešėjo Amerikos ambasados Lietuvoje atstovai

Two weeks ago representatives from the United States embassy in Vilnius visited Kaunas. They toured the Seventh Fort and met at the Sugihara House museum with Sugihara Foundation founders Ramūnas Garbaravičius and Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas and reporter Birutė Garbaravičienė. Ted Janis of the American embassy expressed satisfaction the Kaunas and Lithuanian Jewish Communities, the Kaunas municipality, the Seventh Fort collective and Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon had combined forces to commemorate the Holocaust victims of the Seventh Fort at the mass grave site. They also spoke about the situation regarding Holocaust education in Lithuania, the importance of the Sugihara museum and Jewish life in Kaunas.

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Cyclopedia on Holocaust in Žemaitija Published

holokaustas-zemaitijoje

Aleksandras Vitkus, Chaim Bargman. Holokaustas Žemaitijoje. – Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijos institutas, 2016. – 488 p.

The book’s authors go into fine detail in their descriptions of the mass murders in Žemaitija (the historical Samogitia, western Lithuania), having collected testimonies from witnesses several years ago. Žemaitija is composed of 6 districts plus the Klaipėda region (historical Memel). They collected information about Kretinga (12 rural districts), Mažeikiai (8 rural districts), Raseiniai (12 rural districts), Tauragė (13 rural districts), Telšiai (9 rural districts) apskritis, the western section of the Šiauliai district (10 rural districts) and the Klaipėda region. The cyclopedia includes about 70 locations where mass murders took place and monuments now stand.

bernardinai.lt

Full story here.
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Sixth Annual Litvak Days Focus on Jewish Languages

On December 1 the Lithuanian Embassy in the UK in cooperation with University College London invited the public to the annual Litvak Days in London.

The program of the sixth annual Litvak Days included an evening of Yiddish song performed by Polina Shepherd at University College London and a conference on Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) in Lithuania held at the Lithuanian embassy.

“Lithuania puts a lot effort into promoting and preserving the rich heritage of Lithuanian Jews. We regard the Litvak Days events in London as a platform which facilitates cultural links between the UK’s British, Lithuanian and Jewish communities”, Lithuanian ambassador Asta Skaisgirytė said.

Litvak Days in London were attended by Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community and Arkady Rzegocki, ambassador of Poland. Dainius Junevičius, ambassador-at-large, conveyed a message from the Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius.

Full story here.

Barbed Wire at Synagogue

We’ve received some angry emails about the barbed wire which has appeared on the synagogue fence. The main point seems to be that it’s not aesthetic. Of course it’s not. And it doesn’t fit in with our unique synagogue built in 1903 with its architectural authenticity.

Many students and teachers from Vilnius and Lithuania visit our synagogue. Tourists also visit. This year more than 5,000 guests visited the synagogue.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community celebrates all the traditional Jewish holidays at the synagogue. Our guests also celebrate with us, including foreign ambassadors and members of the Lithuanian Government and members of parliament. We are working actively with public organizations in the European Union which are involved in insuring the security of Jewish communities around the world. The security system at the Vilnius Choral Synagogue was set up based on their recommendations and continues to be improved. In Europe armed professional security service personnel guard synagogues.

Because of security concerns, we are asking everyone to adhere to rules for visitors at the Choral Synagogue, which are posted in three languages on the LJC website, lzb.lt, and will be posted at the synagogue in a visible location.

Concerning the barbed wire, we thought about it deeply, and of course we don’t like it, but we decided the most important consideration is safety. For that reason this quick and inexpensive temporary solution was adopted. At the same time, plans for a new fence are being drafted, one that doesn’t clash with integrity of the architectural style but does meet security requirements. The project will be a prolonged process, because we must ask permission from and harmonize the project with the Cultural Heritage Department to remove the old fence and build a new one. We hope to complete it next summer. We are in charge of the synagogue and we are concerned for the safety of worshipers and guests, and we don’t want events to repeat here in Vilnius which have occurred elsewhere. Here are some examples.

In Copenhagen a killer attempted to gain access to a Jewish event with about 80 participants, mainly children. No one knows what would have happened if not for the man who sacrificed his own life to stop the killer.

Over one week last July there were eight attacks on synagogues in Paris. In the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, a crowd of 400 watched as one synagogue was fire-bombed.

During the attacks in Paris a kosher food market was heavily damaged and looted, as was a pharmacy. There were signs with the inscriptions “Death to Jews” and “Cut the throats of the Jews.”

A synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany, which had been rebuilt after being destroyed in Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht in 1938, was attacked with Molotov cocktails.

In Mumbai (Bombay) in 2008 a group of terrorists walked through the city shooting people in cafés and hotels as they made their way to the Chabad Lubavich Center, where they killed the young rabbi and his pregnant wife.

Once I was flying back from Israel to Vilnius, and my fellow passenger complained the entire trip about how security checks at Ben-Gurion International Airport were an affront to his human dignity. No argument could convince him that it was for his own safety. So we apologize to those who are offended by the barbed-wire fence. I know no arguments will convince them that this is for your own security, just as my fellow passenger on the airplane could not be convinced.

Simas Levinas, chairman
Vilnius Jewish Religious Community

More Work To Do on Holocaust in Lithuania

by Efraim Zuroff

Lithuania is a country known for the great reverence and care with which family graves are treated. Earlier this month, on All Saints’ Day, all the cemeteries in the country were full of visitors bringing flowers and lighting memorial candles, and there were huge traffic jams near the larger ones in the major cities. Yet, unfortunately, this praiseworthy sensitivity does not extend to all the graves in Lithuania, and certainly not to many of the more than 200 mass murders sites of Holocaust victims scattered along the length and breadth of the country.

One such neglected mass murder site is that of Vėliučionys on the outskirts of Vilna (Vilnius). I had visited the grave together with Lithuanian writer Rūta Vanagaitė in the summer of 2015 as part of our research on Lithuanian complicity in Holocaust crimes and the sad state of some of the murder sites, for our book, Mūsiškiai, which was published earlier this year.

Although a marker on the road pointed to a mass grave, it was misplaced, there was a large garbage dump right nearby and we never would have found the location without the help of a local resident who often picked mushrooms in the forest and knew where the murder had taken place.

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Exercise in Democracy, or Futility?

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by Geoff Vasil

The “discussion” organized by the Vilnius city council on November 29 on whether to change an earlier decision to name a street after a Lithuanian Nazi leader in the center of Vilnius was an unmitigated disaster.

In fact, there was no evidence the Vilnius municipality organized anything at all. The main force and the only real announcer of the event was Vilnius City Council member Mark Adam Harold, aka Mark Splinter, a British expatriate who has been trying to get the street renamed to no effect for some time. Harold himself denied he was the organizer, but he was the main speaker and spoke bravely and forthrightly in favor of changing the street name.

The whole point seemed to me to be to shame Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius with media attention into relinquishing his blocking the proposed change. Unfortunately only scant and local media attention was shed, the event having been all but suppressed until one day before it happened, leaving interested parties believing they had been excluded from the supposedly public forum.

Readers will recall mayor Remigijus Šimašius promised in writing to specify a location in Vilnius by October 20, 2016, for erecting a monument to Holocaust rescuers. No such site has been named to date. Instead the Vilnius municipal body claims work is going forward behind the scenes on creating the actual monument. One assumes they will place it in a dark forest far from public sight, as things stand now, sometime in the summer of 2047.

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Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky’s Statement on Renaming Kazys Škirpa Alley in Vilnius

Because of the short notice given, the Lithuanian Jewish Community was unable to send a speaker to the Vilnius municipality’s discussion renaming Kazys Škirpa Alley held in Vilnius on November 29. Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky sent a statement which was read out loud at the discussion which follows.

The discussion initiated by the municipality of Vilnius being held today, “Should We Change the Name of Kazys Škirpa Alley?,” might have been called something else. Why not ask the citizens of Lithuania if they want to have public spaces in Vilnius named after suspected Holocaust perpetrators instead?

On the one hand, the very concept of the discussion appears strange. Does Lithuania have no one of whom to be proud, so that we can only lionize a person famous for his anti-Semitic statements, his vision of a Lithuania free of Jews and his idealization of Hitler’s Germany?

On the other hand, for most of society Kazys Škirpa doesn’t signify much, and the forum being held should theoretically at least shed some light on different aspects of his personality. Hopefully historians unafraid to express their positions and not subservient to the right-wing have been invited to participate. Were state institutions which use the word “Jew” in their titles invited to participate? Probably not.

When we marked the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust in Lithuania, there was a conference at the parliament where the historian A. Kasparavičius said all of the “power” in the Provisional Government of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Activist Front was in Škirpa’s hands. The historian noted Škirpa made no attempt to hide his enchantment with Germany and spent more than 10 years there, working as consul and later as military attaché. It was during this period, between 1933 and 1934, when Škirpa’s documents sent from Berlin to Kaunas show how enthralled he was with the policies being carried out by Germany. “He had many problems because of this. President Antanas Smetona even raised the question of relieving K. Škirpa from diplomatic service at the end of the winter in 1939,” Kasparavičius said. But Škirpa wasn’t fired. He created the Activist Front in Berlin. Members of the Front sought to liberate Lithuania from Soviet occupation and organized the uprising in 1941. They foresaw a free Lithuania without Jews. It was Škirpa’s idea to create the Tautinio darbo apsaugos batalionas [TDA, National Labor Security Battalion] who shot thousands of Jews without trial at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas.

After the Soviets occupied Vilnius in 1940, Kazys Škirpa organized the nucleus of the Lithuanian Activist Front in Berlin. LAF propaganda followed official fascist propaganda, which led to Lithuanians’ active involvement in perpetrating the Holocaust. He was named [Lithuanian] prime minister in the uprising of June 23, 1941. In accepting the post of prime minister, Škirpa included in his government Rapolas Skipitis and Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis. His government included 11 ministers: 4 from Vilnius (Vytautas Bulvičius, Vladas Nasevičius, Vytautas Statkus, Jonas Masiliūnas), 6 from Kaunas (Juozas Ambrazevičius, Jonas Matulionis, Adolfas Damušis, Balys Vitkus, Juozas Pajaujis, Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis), resident of Berlin Rapolas Skipitis, plus comptroller Pranas Vainauskas. [Prevented from leaving Berlin, his minister Juozas Ambrazevičius was appointed acting prime minister in Kaunas.]

The position of the Lithuanian Jewish Community regarding the question posed by the discussion is clear: the name of Kazys Škirpa Alley must be changed. If only to honor all Lithuanian citizens.

As this discussion takes place, the Lithuanian Jewish Community yet again reminds readers there is still no monument to rescuers of Jews, to Righteous Gentiles, in Vilnius. Neither are there public places in the city named after famous Litvaks who contributed to establishing Lithuanian statehood and strengthening democratic institutions. Lithuanian history textbooks still make no mention of 600 years of shared Lithuanian and Litvak history. What sort of priorities is the Lithuanian state setting for itself?

Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman

Pasvalys, Lithuania Commemorates Kazys Škirpa

Pasvalys įamžino K. Škirpos atminimą
lzinios.lt

Namajūnai in the Pasvalys region of Lithuania, where Kazys Škirpa was born 121 years ago, has erected a stone monument to commemorate him. Namajūnai is a village with one house right on the Lithuanian border with Latvia. Kazys Škirpa, the first Lithuanian volunteer soldier, politician and public figure, was born there in 1895. He died in 1979. Alderman Algimantas Mašalas of the Saločiai aldermanship where Namajūnai is located said the wise people of Pasvalys had been calling for years for commemoration of the birthplace of their most famous [sic, infamous] native son, Kazys Škirpa.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Rimvydas Valatka on Changing the Name of Škirpa Alley

Rimvydas Valatka on changing name of Škirpos alley

Stupidity so bravely jumps upon the soap-box in Lithuania now that there is nothing left to be surprised at, except perhaps that there are people still surprised at stupidity. But there are worse things than stupidity. This happens when politicians instead of making a decision attempt to hide cowardly behind political discussions.

This happened in Vilnius yesterday when the city municipality held a discussion called “Should We Change the Name of Kazys Škirpa Alley?” The municipality announced the discussion was being held because “arguments have arisen in society about the name of Škirpa Alley.”

What can this sort of political discussion change, except that Lithuania as a European state will attract greater shame? Do we really need to discuss whether only an anti-Semite who personally shot innocent people is bad or whether those who inspired him to the act might also be bad, in the 21st century in Vilnius, on whose city limits is the Ponar mass grave where all the Jews of the city were shot?

It’s beyond absurd to hold this sort of political discussion. Colonel Kazys Škirpa began his career as a hero, he was the first volunteer soldier, and later became ambassador to Berlin. Kazys Škirpa would have remain a hero forever if he hadn’t been the leader [sic, founder] of the anti-Semitic Lithuanian Activist Front which called for the murder of Jews.

No political discussion can deny this fact. As with other facts in our painful 20th century history.

Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius instead of making a decision to change the name of the street is hiding behind a political discussion by several people especially selected by the city. This draws 21st century Lithuania into yet another shameful conflict. With our own history just as much with the values which Lithuania adopted entering the European Union and NATO.

Commentary broadcast on Lithuanian National Radio.

For Your Freedom and Ours?

by Sergejus Kanovičius

For our freedom and yours, we heard this motto during the independence movement in 1990 inviting everyone–Lithuanians, us Jews, and others–to rally to fight for independence. And we rallied, believing that in that Lithuania–the Lithuania of today–we would all be equal, and not just before God. We thought we’d be equal before memory, and before our history. As brothers and sisters. Are we equal in memory? Are we equal before history?

What about today, when discussion has come up whether it is worth honoring with a street name a volunteer soldier who fought for Lithuanian independence, the first to raise the tricolor on the castle tower almost a century ago, a man who commanded a different sort of movement, one which systematically and openly called for freedom only for some, before and after the June Uprising.

His ideology and that of his organization, the Lithuanian Activist Front, was inseparable from that of the battle for independence. For independence without Jews–without me, without my father, my grandparents and of those for whom there are annual bureaucratic gatherings to feel ashamed beside the larger pits, or beside those for whom the television cameras await.

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Remove Indecent Monuments of a Painful Past

by Robert van Voren

In the summer of 2015 Vilnius municipality removed four Soviet statutes on the Green Bridge linking the suburb Šnipiskes with the city center. The statutes represented farmers, students, industrial workers and “defenders of peace”, depicting Soviet soldiers who liberated the city from the Nazis in 1944 and subsequently imposed the second Soviet occupation. The statutes were a prime example of Soviet realism and for Soviet standards quite innocent: there was little heroism to be seen, no images of political leaders like Lenin or Stalin, just examples of four classes of Soviet citizens being part of Soviet life. Yet for Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius they depicted a lie and for that reason should not be retained: “The statues represent a lie. Their heroic portrayal of the Soviet people – that is all a lie … The statues are a mockery of the real people who had to live during the Soviet period.”

I remember some 6-7 years ago an exhibition of Soviet design was held in one of Vilnius’ museums. My stepson was then a young adolescent, and walked around in a world that had ceased to be and images of which had almost disappeared from every day life. A brand new Moskvich was standing in one of the halls, household tools that were dysfunctional yet in a strange way beautiful, and in one corner a television screen showed a clip of residents receiving their brand new flats in Fabioniškės. People were smiling, dancing, happily receiving their key and entering the flat for the first time. “That is all fake, right?” my son asked, “of course they were not happy, they are acting.”

The fact is that people were happy, very happy even, finally being able to move in a brand new flat, often coming from a noisy crammed kommunalka, and have their own private environment. What is a lie is to pretend that people were not happy. Soviet life was maybe much more grey than life in an open society based on the rule of law, but millions of Lithuanians led happy lives, even if alone because they knew no other.

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Vilnius City Council Seeks Public Comment on Street Named after Holocaust Perp

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Vilnius City Council member Mark Adam Harold is part of a municipal event at the Vilnius Old Town Hall for Tuesday, November 29, 2016, to seek public comment on a proposal to rename the street named after Lithuanian Holocaust collaborator and chief of the Lithuanian Activist Front based in Berlin in 1941, Kazys Škirpa.

Harold’s facebook page contains the instructions: “If you would like the opportunity to speak during the public forum at Rotušė, Didzioji g. 31, on November 29th at 18:00, please tick this box. The first twenty applicants will be given one minute each from the podium.”

A separate post by a South African Litvak living in the United States contains more detail:

“220,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered at the instigation of Škirpa and his cronies. The country of Lithuania is littered with honors for Škirpa, and for other murderers of Jews. Multi-year efforts to have a main Street in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, currently named named to honor the Škirpa, is now culminating in public hearings by the Vilnius City Council.

“The Vilnius City Council was unable to decide for themselves if honoring Jew murderers is appropriate.

“Here is a link to a comment form where you can provide your opinion to the Vilnius City Council. It is in English, you just need to answer and hit submit. Please try to be somewhat respectful:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSddIXIxTDEj5He6Qjh4pv_KjB1X1KlNlmOww9S76IF3Nr7fbA/viewform?c=0&w=1
“

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The event is advertised as a discussion with Vytautas Landsbergis, Sergey Kanovich, Darius Udrys, Lithuanian historians and others. Public comment will be sought afterwards. Conspicuously absent from the speakers’ roster: any representative of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, the International Commission on Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania or even Vilnius mayor Remgijus Šimašius, who hasn’t kept his earlier commitments in writing to name a site in Vilnius by October 20 for erecting a statue to commemorate the heroes of World War II in Lithuania, those who rescued Jews. The Lithuanian Jewish Community is to issue a statement to be read out loud at the event.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites members of the public and representatives of interested institutions to submit their comments per the form linked above and to attend the event.

More event information here.

priemimas-pas-hitleri-1939-0421-k100Škirpa with Hitler celebrating the latter’s 50th birthday

April 21, 1939

An Unusual Story of Jewish Rescue

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The Vilnius-based publishing house Kitos Knygos has published in Lithuanian a book by Yochanan Fein called Berniukas su smuiku [Boy with a Violin].

Yochanan Fein: Boy with a Violin

History, memoirs; 2017; ISBN 978-609-427-253-0 (printed edition), ISBN 978-609-427-296-7 (e-book); 304 pages; hardcover

translated by Ina Preiskel (Finkelšteinaitė) and Arvydas Sabonis, edited by Asta Bučienė

In the distant Kaunas neighborhood of Panemunė on the high banks of the Nemunas there once there stood a large wooden house with a stairwell inside. It was built by Lithuanian military volunteer and Šančiai railroad carpenter Jonas Paulavičius, who was called behind his back “father of the Jews” during World War II, having rescued 16 people from the clutches of death. He and his wife Antanina were recognized as Righteous Gentiles because of their heroic acts.

Among the fortunate was 14-year-old Yochanan Fein, who knew how to play violin, hiding in a pit dug in the garden together with a Russian POW and an Orthodox Jew. In his dotage he wrote a book of memoirs called “Boy with Violin” in which he explained the tragic stories of the lives of those rescued and presented an authentic painting of wartime and post-war Kaunas in many colorful details. The book was first published in Amsterdam in 2006 and two years later in Tel Aviv.

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The Residents of Darbėniai Who Saved Their Doctor Jochveda

After the army of Nazi Germany invaded Soviet-occupied Lithuania on June 22, 1941, they soon began to carry out macabre repression turning into genocide against Jewish Lithuanian citizens.

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J. Marijampolskaitė (right) with her friends from
Darbėniai and children in Palanga, ca. 1935

Although a small portion of local residents became staunch Nazi supporters and contributed to the repressions, the majority felt sorry for their Jewish neighbors and tried to help them. Even now old-time Darbėniai residents remember the almost legendary story of the ultimately tragic rescue of the doctor of Darbėniai, Jochvedas Marijampolskaitė, discovered by this author [Romualdas Beniušis] as he browsed through the case of the deportation to Siberia of Būtingė village residents Katerina and Benediktas Bagdanavičius.

Jochveda Marijampolskaitė was born to a Jewish family in Vilkaviškis on April 23, 1898. It wasn’t possible to learn more about her family and childhood. The Lithuanian Central State Archive conserves documents concerning Jochveda Marijampolskaitė’s studies from the Medicine Faculty of the Lithuanian University, which they have shared with US-resident professor of history E. Goldstein, revealing some new information about her life. This includes a certificate showing she was graduated with a silver medal from the Tambov Women’s Gymnasium in 1917. It appears she was evacuated to Russia during World War I together with the students and staff of the Marijampolė [Staropol] Girls’ Pre-Gymnasium who moved to Trakai in February of 1915 when the Germans occupied Marijampolė, and then as the front drew near withdrew eastward to the town of Tambov in western Russia. She soon matriculated at one of the oldest schools of medicine in the Russian Empire, the medical faculty of Kharkov University, established in 1804. Female Jews were allowed to study medicine in Russia beginning in the late 19th century and many girls dreamed of pursuing this prestigious career with a steady salary and insuring social status. Students from Lithuania had studied at Kharkov University for a long time, and a Lithuanian Students Association was established there in 1894.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Attend Unveiling of Plaque Commemorating 1927 Lithuanian Table Tennis Champions in Kaunas

makabi-tenisininkai1927

Photo of 1927 Lithuanian table tennis champions. Sitting: O.Gurvičaitė, champion in women’s group. Standing from right: I. Šimensas (first place), I. Keperis (second place), B. Podzelneris (director of the table tennis section of Makabi), I. Godas (third place), Ch. Šimensas (fifth place).

A plaque will be unveiled at 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday, November 29, on the western façade of the A. Martinaitis Art School in Kaunas located at Šv. Gertrūdos street no. 33 with the inscription:

“In this building on March 12 and 13, 1927, the first LITHUANIAN TABLE TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIP took place, organized by the Makabi athletics club.”

Makabi Athletics Club
Lithuanian Table Tennis Association
Kaunas Jewish Community

Professor Sofya Gulyak Discovers Documents about Her Family in Lithuanian Central Archive

Professor Sofya Gulyak of London visited the Panevėžys Jewish Community during her trip to Lithuania to find out more about her family’s roots. Many Jews from around the world are currently looking for their roots in the Lithuanian archives. The documents they are finding reveal interesting family histories.

Sofya learned from the Central Archive her ancestors lived in Panevėžys. She received copies of the passports of her great-grandfather Meier Gelvan, great-grandmother Keila Ringaitė-Gelvan and grandmother Rocha Gelvan from the archives in 2013.

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Leonard Cohen, Litvak, Dead at 82

Canadians, Israelis and fans around the world continue to mourn the loss of one of the world’s great songwriters and singers, novelist and poet Leonard Cohen, born in Montreal in 1934 to Litvak mother Masha Klonitsky, daughter of Talmudic writer Rabbi Solomon Klonitsky-Kline, and father Nathan Cohen, whose father came from Lithuania.

Cohen passed away at his home in Los Angeles on the night of November 7, 2016. He was buried in the family plot before his death was announced publicly.

Cohen’s fourteenth and final album, You Want It Darker, was released just two weeks before his death, on October 21, 2016.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community extends our deepest condolences to his family during this time of grief.

International Tolerance Day in Panevėžys

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In 1996 the General Assembly of the United Nations passed resolution 51/95 inviting member-states to observe November 16 as the International Day for Tolerance. The day has been observed in Lithuania for over a decade now. Each year’s commemoration has featured a different symbol. This year it was a bird. More than 700 cultural and educational institutions marked the day. Tolerance birds decorated schools, kindergartens, private educational agencies and daycare centers.

The Šviesa special education center organized Tolerance Day events for November 14 through 16 in Panevėžys, in which the Panevėžys Jewish Community participated. Also participating were representatives from the Panevėžys primary school for the deaf and hearing-disabled and students and teachers from other primary and secondary schools. Sign-language interpreters conveyed speech to deaf members of the audience.

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Vilnius: In Search of the Jerusalem of Lithuania

The Lithuanian Jewish Community this week hosted the launch of the second corrected and expanded edition of Irina Guzenberg and Genrikh Agranovsky’s book in Russian about Jewish Vilna.

The new edition has been reorganized with a new structure and better indices of names and sites.

Author Irina Guzenberg has done exhaustive research to provide authentic street names from the period and the book is graced with attractive period photographs. Much of the history is unknown to modern residents of the Lithuanian capital, which was not very Lithuanian before the 1950s. Before the war one heard Yiddish, Polish and Russian spoken on the street.

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