History of the Jews in Lithuania

Prize Recipients Chosen for Best Final Academic Work on Ethnic Minorities in 2016

Išrinkti 2016 m. Premijos už geriausią baigiamąjį mokslo darbą tautinių mažumų tematika laimėtojai

On September 14 the Academic Council of the Lithuanian Department of Ethnic Minorities selected the winners of a new prize created this year for best final academic work on ethnic minorities.

Department of Ethnic Minorities director Dr. Vida Montvydaitė made the final decision on recommendations from her Academic Council and selected Julijana Leganovič in the first nomination category for her bachelor’s work “Comparative View of the Development of the Vilnius and the Kaunas Jewish Communities in the Interwar Period.”

The second category was for master’s work and the winners were Rūta Anulytė with her “Heritage Protection and Maintenance of Historical Jewish Cemeteries in Lithuania: Practice and Recommendations” and Mantas Šikšnianas with his “Jews of Švenčionys from the mid-18th Century to the mid-20th Century: Shtetl, Sabbath, Shoah.”

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Ponar: Thirty Meter Escape Tunnel Dug by Hand and Spoons

Trisdešimties metrų tunelis Paneriuose,iškastas rankomis ir šaukštais

by Jūratė Juškaitė
manoteises.lt

At the beginning of this century documentary film makers from Israel combed Ponar just outside Vilnius, looking for an answer to the question of why local residents did nothing when they saw columns of thousands being led to firing squads in the forest of Ponar. The filmmakers brought in Mordechai Zeidel. Unlike the locals, in 1943 Zeidel was among those condemned to death at Ponar. He was taken there by the Nazis to destroy evidence of their mass murder, and sometimes also to recognize corpses, including relatives. For more than two months Zeidel and another eighty prisoners hauled corpses out of the pits using cables and burned them. The remains of approximately 100,000 people were contained in those pits. The entire time, the prisoners used spoons and their hands to dig a tunnel thirty meters long, which brought Zeidel to freedom. Although only eleven of the forty escapees in total survived, the story has become the stuff of legend.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

The Bloody Stones of the Towns

by Aras Lukšas
lzinios.lt

On September 23, 1943, the Nazis and collaborators concluded the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. Twenty-two years ago this date was officially made the Day of Remembrance of the Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide. Now let’s remember the Jews of the rural towns and villages whose entire communities were destroyed during the first four months of war. Keydan, Yaneve, Vilkomir, Zager, Shadeve, Nayshtot-Tavrig… What do these strange words mean? Most likely not everyone would know these are the names of Lithuanian towns: Kėdainiai, Jonava, Ukmergė, Žagarė, Šeduva, Žemaičių Naumiestis. This was how the Jews who lived here for centuries called their homes in their native Yiddish language. In many of the locations just mentioned, they constituted half or even the majority of the population. For instance, before the war half the population of Ukmergė was Jewish, and Jonava’s was 80% Jewish, including traders, craftsmen, artisans, butchers and dairymen, attorneys and doctors…

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Lithuanian President Awards 46 Rescuers

VILNIUS, September 26, BNS – Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitė on Monday signed a decree to award Life Saving Crosses to 46 people who rescued Jews from the Holocaust during World War II.

Most of them were honored posthumously.

The president honors Jewish rescuers every year on the occasion of the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, which is marked on September 23 to commemorate the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto on that day in 1943.

The Nazis assisted by Lithuanian collaborators murdered more than 90 percent of the Lithuanian pre-war Jewish population of around 208,000 during World War II.

Around 3,500 Jews currently reside in Lithuania.

BNS_logotipas

Israeli President Sends Condolences over Death of Leonidas Donskis

VILNIUS, September 26, BNS – Israeli president Reuven Rivlin has expressed his condolences to Jolanta Donskienė, the wife of Lithuania’s late philosopher Leonidas Donskis.

“We grieve together with you and all people of Lithuania as the world has lost a remarkable man, a prominent philosopher, a devoted defender of human rights and civil liberties, a true humanitarian and an outstanding political figure, a great person, who always opposed violence in all its forms,” the president said in his letter to Donskienė, a copy of which was shared by the Israeli embassy with BNS.

Rivlin said that as a deputy chairman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Donskis “greatly contributed to preserving the country’s Jewish culture and heritage and promoted the highest human values of tolerance, love and respect toward every individual”.

“Professor Donskis was a great friend of Israel, who has never hesitated to stand together with our country. He will always remain in hour hearts,” he said.

Read more

Vilnius Mayors Change, But None Can Find Suitable Place for Monument to Rescuers

cc1c
photo courtesy BNS

An interview by Nemira Pumprickaitė on the Lithuanian state television program Savaitė, www.LRT.lt

The Day of the Genocide of the Jews of Lithuania is marked on September 23. For long years there was silence on the topic of the Holocaust in Lithuania, and when [former late] Lithuanian president Algirdas Brazauskas apologized to the Jewish people, there was hardly unanimous support. Now even Germans are saying Lithuania is the first country in Eastern Europe to openly raise the question of its own citizens’ complicity. About a month ago the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a feature on Lithuania’s efforts to address the history of the Holocaust. Lithuanians didn’t earn condemnation alone during the Holocaust; there were those who risked their lives of those of the families to save Jews. The appellation Righteous Gentile has been awarded to 889 Lithuanian citizens. Experts say proportionally, according to population size, Lithuania has the most rescuers among the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky on the Lithuanian state television program Savaitė…

Full interview in Lithuanian here.

Holocaust Commemoration at Ninth Fort in Kaunas

Students from the Lithuanian Health Sciences University Gymnasium displayed a sensitive and moving artistic composition called Memory Road at the mass murder site. Kaunas deputy mayor Vasilijus Popovas, Ninth Fort Museum director Jūratė Zakaitė and deputy museum director Marius Pečiulis spoke of the need to remember and never forget painful and even shameful parts of history. Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas said it’s important for young people to get to know a different culture and a different ethnic group personally, because this sort of knowledge allows them to understand someone from a different ethnicity is still a person just like they are. Chairman Žakas thanked the students and teachers of the Health Sciences University Gymnasium and other Kaunas schools as well as school Tolerance Center directors for teaching pupils respect, tolerance, sympathy and historical memory.

Later there was a screening introduced by director of the Polish Institute in Vilnius Marcin Łapczyński of director M. T. Pawłowski’s film Touch of an Angel (2015) which is movingly narrated by a Jewish child in Auschwitz who survived the Holocaust with his family. In the film Polish Jew Henryk Schoenker revisits his childhood where the specter of war still lives, and talks about his family, hiding and tremendous efforts made to survive. Many members of the audience cried.

World Litvak Museum, Return of YIVO Proposed for Vilnius

Vilnius, September 25, BNS–A proposal has been made to establish a World Litvak Museum and reopen the Jewish research institute YIVO in Vilnius, and to commemorate Jews who contributed to the restoration of Lithuanian statehood at the Government, to pay homage to Jewish heritage.

The proposal was made at a conference at the Lithuanian parliament Sunday by the historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis. He said it would make sense to put the museum presenting the history of the Jews of Lithuania at the site of the former Great Synagogue in the center of Vilnius. “The most important goal of all would be to restore the Great Synagogue, the place where Jews, without regard to viewpoints, all gathered, where the most import things were deliberated. This is the place, I think, where the World Litvak Museum should be built,” the professor said at parliament.

Read more

Conference at Lithuanian Parliament: “They Rescued Jews, They Rescued Lithuania’s Honor”

Seime organizuota konferencija „Gelbėję Lietuvos žydus, gelbėję Lietuvos garbę“

Vilnius, September 25, BNS–The Lithuanian parliament held a commemoration of the Lithuanian day of Holocaust remembrance Sunday. The Lithuanian Jewish Community organized a conference there called “They Rescued Jews, They Rescued Lithuania’s Honor.”

LJC chairwoman Fainia Kukliansky, American Jewish Committee international affairs director Andre Baker and US embassy chargé d’affaires ad interim Howard Solomon participated.

Historian Alvydas Nikžentaitis surveyed Jewish life in Lithuania, academic Joachimas Tauberis from Hamburg spoke about Hitler and Stalin’s policies and anti-Semitism in Lithuania from 1939 to 1941, historian Algimantas Kasparavičius gave a presentation about the policies of the Provisional Government of Lithuania and the beginning of the Holocaust in 1941 and recordings of testimonies by survivors and rescuers were played.

The Day of Remembrance of the Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide has been marked in Lithuania since 1994. It is held on September 23, the day the Vilnius ghetto was liquidated in 1943.

Lithuanian Radio To Revisit Litvak Past

lrtradijas

Beginning September 25 Lithuanian state radio will broadcast a series about Lithuanian shtetls. Radio journalists will talk about nine small Lithuanian towns where only a few buildings stand in silent testimony to their once thriving Jewish life, and will interview people now in their 80s who remember that legacy from childhood.

The episodes in the series will be broadcast every second Sunday after the 11 o’clock news and during the Ryto garsai progream on Tuesdays at 9:00 A.M. The first episode for broadcast September 25 is about Molėtai.

Lithuanians and Jews lived in common in the shtetls before World War II and not only made a life for themselves, but contributed deeply to the creation of the Lithuanian state and the economic and cultural development of the towns. War and the Holocaust, which saw the complete destruction of entire Jewish shtetl communities, and the various roles played by Lithuanian neighbors, followed by decades of occupation, have largely pushed this part of history into oblivion.

Not all who remember the time of Jewish prosperity are eager to talk about it. Many people are still steeped in feelings of fear, guilt and shame. At the same time descendants of Holocaust survivors are coming back in ever greater numbers to the birthplaces of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents and making sense of a land which for many years only kindled negative emotions. Some of them are working to strengthen Lithuanian-Jewish relations, others seek to preserve the memory of their ancestors.

This documentary series won’t be easy listening. Even 75 years later, witnesses to the Jewish tragedy aren’t able to quell their tears and many are unable or unwilling to understand this darkest period in Lithuania’s history. On the other hand, they also recall the happy life of Lithuanians and Jews before the war, including childhood friends, the many Jewish shops and the taste of fresh bagels.

Lithuanian national radio frequencies:

Vilnius 89.0 MHz

Kaunas 102.1 MHz

Klaipėda 102.8 MHz

Šiauliai 100.9 MHz

Panevėžys 107.5 MHz

First episode about Molėtai available in Lithuanian here.

Remembering the Holocaust in Panevėžys

Žydų tautos tragedija nepamiršta

Marking the Day of Remembrance of the Genocide of the Jews of Lithuania, in Panevėžys they remembered the Jews who lived here and those who saved them as well as the victims.

Darkest Page

September 23 wasn’t chosen arbitrarily. This was the day in 1943 when the Vilnius ghetto was liquidated. Some of the residents were shot, while others were taken to concentration camps.

Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman noted 75 years had passed since the first group of Jews were shot in the city and the arrests began. Fifty-seven Jews were arrested and then murdered in the Staniūnai Forest.

In July of 1941 a Jewish ghetto was set up in Panevėžys. Kofman said over its 42 days of existence, more than 14,000 Jews “passed through” the ghetto. The Community said initially there were 4,423 inmates. When the ghetto was liquidated, all the Jews were shot: 8,000 in Kurganava Forest and 4,500 in Žalioji Forest. Ninety-five percent of Jews of Panevėžys were murdered during the war.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

LJC Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky Speaks at Ponar September 23, 2016

LŽB pirmininkės F. Kukliansky kalba Paneriuose Holokausto aukų pagerbimo ceremonijoje

Dear participants,

I am sincerely thankful that you have gathered here today together with the Jewish Community to honor the memory of Holocaust victims.

But can we truly speak about honoring Holocaust victims when multiple streets in Lithuania are named after Kazys Škirpa, there is a school named after Jonas Noreika and the monument to Juozas Krikštaponis has still not been torn down?

We don’t have public spaces named after Ozer Finkelstein, Katz Motel or Volf Kagan. How many know the name of Liba Mednikienė, a scout in the Lithuanian battles for independence? Despite her service, she was murdered by Lithuanians during the Holocaust.

This and similar fates awaited the victims at Ponar. Our younger generation still doesn’t know about 650 years of Jewish history in Lithuania, before, during and after the Holocaust. Will the history textbooks teach this to the young citizens of Lithuania someday?

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has more questions than answers. The only sure thing is that an irreversible process has taken place and the country will never again be what it was before the Holocaust. But the Jewish Community is still here, and as long as it is, it will seek justice. But the highest value, truth, can only be restored when Lithuania works up the courage to name the perpetrators of the Holocaust. To remain silent about the Holocaust perpetrators, to forget the victims of the Holocaust and to disregard the living Jewish community is the same thing as killing the Jews again.

Today we mark the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the mass murder of the Jews in Lithuania. Our hope is that the smaller towns of Lithuania will remember their lost Jewish communities all year round, not just during Holocaust commemorations. From sporadic, random and often simply superficial events, memory of the Holocaust needs to become general knowledge, to become an integral part of the worldview of every conscientious citizen of Lithuania.

Thank you all who are not indifferent to the memory of the Holocaust, the Jewish tragedy, Lithuania’s tragedy.

Vilkaviškis Jewish Life before World War I (continued)

Vilkaviškio miesto žydų gyvenimas prieš Pirmąjį pasaulinį karą (tęsinys)
Photo from Ralph Salinger’s archive

Santaka.info (Part II) A Continuation, published in issue no. 103

A Frigid Climate and No Hospitals

There were no hospitals in Vilkaviškis, home to about 8,000 people. There were only two doctors and one midwife. Later, when I was a teenager, a dentist stayed in the community for a while. In cases of the unexpected, for example, appendicitis, the deeply afflicted either got better by themselves, or they died, because there were no surgeons. And there wasn’t even talk of health education. In every courtyard people had their own wells for drinking water which often stood… right next to excrement. So it was no surprise typhoid fever was epidemic. The disease took many lives.

Full story with continuation in Lithuanian here.

Remembering the Genocide of the Jews of Balbieriškis

There is a period in the history of the town of Balbieriškis (Balbirishok) when more than 50 percent of the population was Jewish. It is important for us to know what happened to the Jewish people in occupied Lithuania and Europe during World War II. It’s important we understand the Holocaust was the mass murder of the Jews, not just Ponar, the Ninth Fort in Kaunas or another Jewish mass murder site. The Holocaust is a tragedy, it is the loss of Jews who lived in Lithuania, Lithuanian citizens who lived in Lithuania and built our nation, while maintaining their own traditions and culture.

To mark the 75th anniversary of this tragedy, on September 23 Balbieriškis primary school principal Stasys Valančius gave a civics lesson to students in grades 5 through 10 to remember the Jewish victims of genocide of the town of Balbieriškis. After lighting symbolic candles and after a hush enveloped the auditorium, the names of Jews who lived here and were brutally murdered were read out loud: Sarah, Yitzhak, Chaim, Dora, Tsila, Riva, Gita, Keyla, Jaakov, Aaron…

Students in the art group aided by the teacher Ona Žvirblienė held an exhibit of drawings, using art to help make the pain and the tragic history more understandable. Representatives from grades 5 through 8, each carrying a stone in hand, traveled to Marijampolė and Prienai to join the citizens’ initiative “Memory Road.” The International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania has been marking this day for 12 years now. Symbolically, in our thoughts, we went down the same road along which the Jews of Balbieriškis were sent to their deaths. The stones of memory, warmed by young hands, were placed at the mass murder site.

We hope that by remembering the innocents who were murdered, by revisiting this tragic page of history, we will become more tolerant to one another, that we will not fan the flames of hatred, and that we will come to understand there is no such thing as someone else’s pain.

Reda Valančienė, teacher

Unforgotten Names: Plungė Photographer Movsha-Mendel Berkovich

Nepamiršti vardai. Plungės fotografas Movša-Mendelis Berkovičius

by Jolanta Klietkutė
bernardinai.lt

Looking through surviving photographs of residents of Plungė between the two world wars, we come to realize most of the photographs were taken by M. Berkovich. If you ask old-time residents of Plungė who he was, they’ll tell you he was a famous photographer in town back then, and they’ll take you to show you his home where his studio was. Sadly, that’s the full extent of the information available… everyone knew he was this photographer, but nothing more.

THe biography of Berkovich, one of the most famous photographers in Plungė between the wars, has not been written yet. In his book “Lietuvos fotografijos istorija’ [History of Lithuanian Photography], V. Juodakis only provides a single sentence: “There was a photographer named M. Berkovich (1905-1932) in Plungė.” When we look at surviving photographs by Berkovich in museums and collectors’ archives, however, we see he photographed from 1903 to ca. 1939.

The photographer’s name was even concealed in the stamp, which included only his first initial, M, and which was placed on the back of photographs.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

Seeking Holocaust Reconciliation in Lithuania, from Los Angeles

lith3

The Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, occupies a stately stone building on a large, forested park in the city’s center. It is notably not a Holocaust museum. To find the Holocaust Exposition, look for a small, clapboard wooden building on a narrow side street.

Instead, the museum commemorates atrocities more often spoken of in Lithuania: the lethal brutality of the Soviet regime against citizens of the Baltic country, with Lithuanians as victims rather than perpetrators.

Half a world away, Grant Gochin, a wealth manager in Woodland Hills, has spent the better part of a quarter-century trying to bring about greater recognition for the genocide carried out largely by ethnic Lithuanians against their Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust.

Full story here.

Adam le Adam Concert in Vilnius Today

Israeli vocal ensemble Adam le Adam will perform one concert exclusively in Vilnius at the Old Town Hall square today at 6:00 P.M., September 22. The concert is free and open to the public.

Adam le Adam (Hebrew for “person for person”) is a group of 14 vocalists who perform Israeli and traditional Jewish folk songs in authentic arrangements. The ensemble was established by the late composer Jacob Hollaender in 1978. Under his musical direction the ensemble performed throughout Israel and recorded for radio and TV. Adam le Adam had also participated at International choir festivals in various countries around the globe.

During recent the musical director of the ensemble is maestro David Sebba.

Adam le Adam has won first place in choir competitions and has performed a novel program of choral soul music at the most distinguished festivals in Israel such as the Abu-Gosh Festival and the Vocalize in Acre. The ensemble has performed with the Raanana Symphonette Orchestra and the Israel Sinfonietta Beer-Sheva Orchestra at Nes-Amim Church and in the Bible-Lands Museum. Adam le Adam has also performed with other distinguished artists for the prime minister of Israel.

Vilnius concert song-list:

Farewell by S. Rosen, Y. Hollaender
Holiday Evening Alone by T. Attar, Y. Hollaender
Loved Her by T. Attar, Y. Hollaender
Prisoner No. 9/Thou Shalt Love Thy Neighbor by T. Alyagon, Y. Hollaender
Yom Kippur Prayer by O. Hammama
Bulgarian Folk Song/In the Vineyard of Yemen by N. Alterman,M. Zeira, M. Wilensky
Paneriai by A. Shlonsky, A. Tamir

Kaunas Jewish Community Visit Balbieriškis and Prienai

Kauno žydų bendruomenė lankėsi Balbieriškyje bei Prienuose.

The Kaunas Jewish Community visited Balbieriškis and Prienai, Lithuania at the invitation of Balbieriškis Tolerance Center director Rymantas Sidaravičius on the European Day of Jewish Culture, September 4. The delegation toured a Balbieriškis Tolerance Center exhibit on the history of the Jews of the town and reflecting the center’s current relationships and friendships with Jews from around the world. They also toured the town, where Jewish homes and buildings from before the war still stand, and honored the memory of the dead with a prayer at the old Jewish cemetery in Balbieriškis.

Representatives then went to Prienai and honored Holocaust victims there. In Prienai they attended a museum event dedicated to the European Day of Jewish Culture. The museum event included a stirring presentation of the history of the Jews of Prienai, funny stories from Jewish life from before the war, significant achievements, good relations between Jews and other town residents and the Holocaust. The event included passages in Hebrew and Yiddish. The hosts made the delegation feel right at home at every stop on their visit, as if they were visiting old friends.

Read more

Former Alytus Synagogue to House Museum

Buvusi sinagoga taps muziejumi

lzinios.lt

Renovation has begun on a century-old synagogue in Alytus, Lithuania. The building was used to store salt in the Soviet era and is now set to become a city community center and museum of Jewish culture. The Lithuanian Jewish Community, the Cultural Heritage Department and Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon who visited the town all gave their approval to the plans by Alytus. Support was pledges to secure funding to set up the museum of Jewish culture there and to acquire the necessary exhibit items.

Full story in Lithuanian here.