History of the Jews in Lithuania – Page 23 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Young Jewish, Roma Leaders Visit POLIN Museum

Participants in the project to promote mutual understanding among young future leaders from Lithuania’s Roma and Jewish ethnic communities sponsored by the Goodwill Foundation and Germany’s EVZ Foundation visited the award-winning POLIN Jewish history museum in Warsaw. Besides viewing the interactive exhibits teaching about 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland, the young people and educators engaged in a discussion there among themselves and with educators from the museum

People often say there are two Warsaws, pre- and post-war, not surprising since the entire city was leveled in warfare and especially during the Warsaw Uprising, and painstakingly reconstructed in the post-war period. The female guide for the Lithuanian delegation was a rare original resident of the Polish capital and able to speak something like seven languages.

“This museum is a huge story and we have the moral duty to tell it,” she said. The bright modern museum located in the Warsaw ghetto stands in sharp contrast to the dark granite monument commemorating the heroes of the Uprising. The guide told the group around 80% of world Jewry called Poland home for centuries. The Lithuanian delegation led by the guide viewed multimedia installations, texts, music, paintings, photographs and recreated scenes from Jewish daily life.

2023-02-072023-02-07

YIVO Digitizes Chaim Grade’s Archive, a Yiddish Treasure Trove with a Soap Opera History

Photo: Chaim Grade and his wife Inna Hecker Grade in the United States in 1978. They met in Moscow in 1945. Courtesy YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

by Andrew Silow-Carroll, jta.org, February 5, 2023

JTA–Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.

A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.

As Max explains in his 2008 memoir “From Schlub to Stud” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers–Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982–a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.

Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013 Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s West 16th Street.

2023-02-072023-02-07

US Ambassador Calls on Ukmergė Mayor to Remove Monument to Lithuanian Nazi

Photos: Grant Gochin via Times of Israel

According to an article on the webpage of Lithuanian State Radio and Television, US ambassador to Lithuania Robert Gilchrist did more than just attend events to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to the report, he sent a letter to the mayor of Ukmergė (Yiddish Vilkomir), Rolandas Janickas, asking a a monument be erected at the site where around 10,000 Jews murdered there in the Holocaust, and asking an existing monument to Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator Juozas Krikštaponis be removed from its location at the central park in the small Lithuanian town north of Vilnius.

According to Lithuanian State Radio and Television, copies of the letter were sent to speaker of parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, Lithuanian culture minister Simonas Kairys, Lithuanian foreign minister Garbielius Landsbergis and director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania Arūnas Bubnys.

He also wants the plaque to Jonas Noreika in central Vilnius removed. According to the US embassy’s website, ambassador Gilchrist said the following in an address on Holocaust Remembrance Day at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius:

“I would like to express appreciation to the Speaker, the government, and the Seimas for the recent passage of legislation to provide symbolic compensation for heirless and pending claims on private property lost by Jewish Lithuanians during the Holocaust. I also commend you for the passage of legislation that would direct removal of monuments to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, which includes Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust. I hope this will lead to the swift removal of such monuments, including to Juozas Krištaponis in Ukmergė and Jonas Noreika here in Vilnius.”

Full article in Lithuanian here.
Ambassador Gilchrist’s full address here.
Background here.

2023-02-062023-04-19

Discussion Club: Was Jewish Life Wonderful under Smetona?

The #ŽydiškųPašnekesiai discussion club will address the topic “Was Jewish Life Great during the Smetona Era” at the Bagel Shop Café at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius at 5:00 P.M. on February 8. The discussion will be live-streamed on the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s facebook page.

In the broader public discussion of whether to erect a statue to the interwar Lithuanian president and dictator Antanas Smetona, proponents have begun saying he defended Lithuania’s Jewish population and was even known as “King of the Jews.” Opponents of the monument counter there were no stops placed on anti-Semitism in Lithuania in the period between the two world wars, meaning the entire span of Lithuanian independence, and Jews were banned from public service and elsewhere.

What do today’s Jews and Lithuania’s current crop of historians think about these issues? Attend or tune in to find out.

Moderator and club founder Arkadijus Vinokuras will put the question to Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman, Lithuanian Jewish Community; Žygimantas Menčenkovas, member of the Leftist Alliance, philosopher, teacher and activist and via internet Linas Venclauskas, historian and author of a recent book on Lithuanian anti-Semitism prior to 1940.

2023-02-062023-02-06

Šiauliai Students Learn about the Holocaust

Šiauliai’s Gegužės pro-gymnasium marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a lesson for the combined group of 7th graders there about the Holocaust, taught by Šiauliai Jewish Community member and math teacher Ieva Rafael, religious faith teacher Elvyra Ramoškienė and history teacher Kristina Puzarienė. Other teachers from the school, colleagues at schools in Akmenė and Papilė and members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community observed the lesson.

Ieva Rafael focused on the mass extermination, religious faith teacher Elvyra Ramoškienė spoke about the moral and spiritual issues as well as Jewish symbols and history teacher Kristina Puzarienė talked about the spread of prejudices and stereotypes and abuses of human rights according to teaching methodologies she acquired in professional training in Israel.

The young people heard the story of the Jewish girl Hana who was rescued from a ghetto and discussed the dangers of not speaking out or acting in the face of pressure.

Sixth-graders from the school attended the commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day with members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community at the memorial stone marking the former gate of the Šiauliai ghetto.

2023-02-06

Tolerance Lesson in Panevėžys

On February 1 the Panevėžys Jewish Community held a tolerance lesson attended by students from Panevėžys Gymnasium No. 5. Participants spoke about how to encourage tolerance among people of different ethnic backgrounds.

Gymnasium No. 5 is one of the leaders in Lithuania in terms of teaching the Holocaust to young people, mainly in the upper grades. It has its own Tolerance Center directed by history teacher Beata Viederienė. In fact it’s become a sort of tradition for students in the upper grades to make posters about the Holocaust and to display them in Panevėžys, leading to greater public awareness of the Holocaust.

“Learning about the Holocaust is important both as history and overall in general education. We have to understand this better to insure it doesn’t happen again,” Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman said.

He provided the visiting students with a brief overview of the Jewish history, culture and traditions in Panevėžys, and the reputation local Jews had for higher religious learning.

2023-02-032023-02-03

Remembering Saulius and Silvija Sondeckiai

A concert and discussion will be held at the Stasys Vainiūnas House at Goštauto street no. 2-41 at 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, February 8, in memory of the remarkable Lithuanian musical couple Saulius and Silvija Sondeckiai. Professor Leonidas Melnikas is to speak and students from the Saulius Sondeckis Art Gymnasium in Šiauliai will perform. The event is free and open to the public.

February 3 marked seven years since the death of renowned Lithuanian musician, conductor and professor Saulius Sondeckis. In the run up to that sad anniversary, his widow, cello player and professor Silvija Sondeckienė, passed away on January 21.

2023-02-032023-02-03

Review of BBC Documentary How the Holocaust Began

Photo: Historian James Bulgin at the Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin, Poland Credit: Benjamin Holgate/BBC

James Bulgin’s BBC Two documentary contains horrifying footage, showing how ordinary people facilitated the Nazis in murdering Jews

What springs to mind when you hear the word “Holocaust?” This was the question which opened James Bulgin’s film “How the Holocaust Began” (BBC). Most likely you will think of somewhere like Auschwitz, and the Nazis presiding over processed mass murder. But Bulgin, an historian from the Imperial War Museum, wanted to show us something different.

Large-scale executions of Jews began in 1941 as the Germans made their way across Eastern Europe. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out many of these murders. But the chilling truth presented here was that they did not, in fact, could not, act alone. They needed not just the tacit support of the civilian population, but their active participation. Ordinary people facilitated and sometimes carried out the mass killings of men, women and children.

The documentary contained horrific footage, a “home movie” shot by a German soldier of people being marched into trenches and shot in the head. Spectators gather round, smoking and talking, to watch. It was a terrible thing to see. But equally unforgettable were the words of Faina Kukliansky, whose grandmother had been rounded up in Alytus, Lithuania, and taken to a forest along with 2,500 others to be murdered. Kukliansky had discovered that this was done by local townsfolk and even school children: “That confirms what my uncle used to tell me… That probably his classmates killed his mother.”

Full review here.

2023-02-022023-02-02

LJC Asks Conservative Party to Look Into Member’s Anti-Semitic Remark

Photo: Old cemetery in Nemakščiai

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has asked Gabrielius Landsbergis, the leader of the conservative Homeland Union/Lithuanian Christian Democrats Party, to look into remarks made by fellow party member Remigijus Laugalis.

“If you don’t vote for me, then you can bury yourself in the Jewish cemetery,” Laugalis allegedly remarked.

Remigijus Laugalis is currently the alderman of the town of Nemakščiai and is seeking to be elected to the town council of Raseiniai, Lithuania.

The LJC has asked Landsbergis to undertake actions to educate residents of the Raseiniai district about the consequences of uncontrolled anti-Semitism and racism. The LJC has offered to help hold educational meetings with historians, cultural experts and writers in a spirit of cooperation based on mutual respect.

Update: The politician apparently made a glib comment as a joke in response to a question posed by a reporter which he found ridiculous. The questions was, is it true you said if people didn’t vote for you, you wouldn’t allow them to be buried in the local cemetery?

2023-02-022023-02-15

Ona Šimaitė Bio Better Known in US, Israel, France than Lithuania

Rimantas Stankevičius utilized Holocaust Remembrance Day to present again his biography of Lithuania’s first recognized Righteous Gentile Ona Šimaitė on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The book was published back in 2021 by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania. He gave an interview about his book to the news website delfi.lt.

“… at the intersection of Stiklių and Didžiosios street [in Vilnius] there was a false-flag operation intended to show Jews had attempted to kill a German officer. … Men, women, children and the infirm were sent en masse [from the nieghborhood] to the prison. One elderly woman was carried. Women marched cradling babies and with small children who clung to their mothers’ skirts. Many children from the orphanage were marched there along with their teachers. I saw a cobbler with a limp from Stiklių street whom I knew well. He wasn’t able to walk without a walking stick. They took his cane at the entrance to the prison and began beating him with it. Then they threw the stick through the prison gate whistling, guffawing and cursing the prisoners. On the other side of the prison I saw a Jewish woman in a white hospital gown. She appeared to have become completely lost. I looked for my 11-year-old daughter who was taken from home to no one knows where when she was supposed to be on duty at the hospital. I advised the woman to go home quickly so she wouldn’t end up in the prison. I wrote down her name and address and promised to do everything I could. The well-known Lithuanian public figure Marcelė Kubiliūtė and I went to the home of Buragas, the director of Jewish affairs. I went to Lithuanian security. I looked over lists there but didn’t find the girl’s name. I shrugged my shoulders and asked, ‘Is it worth getting all worked up about a Jewish girl?’ When I inquired where the girl might be, they suggested I go to the Lithuanian Special Squad which was shooting Jews. There was no sense going there at all,” Ona Šimaitė, librarian at Vilnius University from 1940 to 1944, stated.

2023-02-012023-02-01

First Plaque Commemorating Jews of Palanga

International Holocaust Remembrance Day reminds residents of Lithuania’s sea-side city of Palanga of June 27 and October 12, 941, the days on which more than 400 fellow residents, the Jews of Palanga who were hard-working, innovative lovers of life and the sea, became victims of the Holocaust. One out of eight residents of Palanga was murdered during those two days. And that’s not a definite tally, it might be higher.

Friday Palanga mayor Šarūnas Vaitkus, deputy mayor Rimantas Antanas Mikalkėnas, director of the city’s Culture Department Robertas Trautmanas, Palanga Jewish Community chairman Vilius Gutmanas and other members of the Palanga Jewish Community observed a moment of silence at a memorial in the Palanga cemetery to remember the 106 Jews and Lithuanians murdered in the southern part of Birutė Park on June 27, 1941, the majority of whom lived in Palanga.

Candles were lit and the traditional stones were left to honor and remember the city residents who became the first victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Friday also saw a new page of history open with the unveiling of a commemorative plaque to mark the site of the former synagogue complex at what is now a supermarket on Vytauto street.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2023-01-31

Condolences

Roza Bieliauskienė has died. She was born in 1956 in Vilnius to Holocaust survivors from a shtetl just outside the city. She grew up speaking Yiddish at home and hearing it on the street. Trained as an engineer, she eventually immersed herself in research, writing and teaching about the Holocaust, Yiddish and Jewish topics. She worked at the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Community from its inception for 20 years and taught at the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius. She worked on the translation of the Grigori Shur Holocaust diary, numerous other books published by the Vilna Gaon Museum, translated a number of children’s books, translated genealogies in Yiddish and was working on a book about the Jewish history of Lithuania at the time of her death. Our deepest condolences to her many friends, colleagues and family members.

2023-01-302023-01-31

Šiauliai Marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day

“We remembered one of the most horrific and violent crimes in the history of humanity January 27 with thousands of other people around the world.

“Marking the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on January 27, 1945, we remembered the more than six million men, women and children brutally murdered by the Nazis only because they were Jews. It is difficult to conceive this shocking number, but it contains millions of lives destroyed, of dreams shattered, unutterable pain, hopelessness and horror.

“We are very grateful to have with us today as the Šiauliai Jewish Community remembers the victims of the Holocaust this January 27 students and teachers who have joined us from the Gegužės Gymansium and the Romuva Gymnasium in Šiauliai. We are also grateful for the presence of Šiauliai deputy mayor Egidijus Elijošius,” the Šiauliai Jewish Community reports.

2023-01-302023-01-30

Memory Is Our Shared Duty

The Lithuanian Jewish Community and six foreign embassies to Lithuania held an event called “Seventy-Eight Years Later: Honoring, Learning and Seeking Justice” Friday to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. This took the form of a panel discussion. The group who held the event included Japanese ambassador Tetsu Ozaki, Israeli ambassador Had Wittenberg Silverstein, US ambassador Robert Gilchrist, German ambassador Matthias Sonn, Dutch ambassador Tim van Gulijk, the European Commission representative in Lithuania and LJC chairwoman Faina Kuliansky.

Chairwoman Kukliansky said it is our shared responsibility to remember the past.

“Statues to specific people are treated respectfully in Lithuania, people visit them, they are maintained and aren’t forgotten. The situation is completely different with monuments to the victims of mass murder,” she noted.

2023-01-30

Holocaust Remembrance Day in Palanga

Residents of Palanga are invited to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day this Friday, January 27, with a candle-lighting ceremony at the Old Cemetery in Palanga at 11:00 A.M. followed by the unveiling of a new plaque commemorating the town’s synagogues destroyed during World War II at Vytauto street no. 98 at 11:30 A.M.

2023-01-26

Our Home Town Vilne Is 700

Today Vilnius begins celebrating its 700th birthday with a series of events over the coming year. Over its entire 700 years of history the Jewish people have lived, built, created, started families, studied and achieved major milestones in culture, medicine, business, the arts and many other fields of human endeavor.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky remarked: “Today there remains only a very small Vilna Jewish community, but the contributions made by many generations of Jews to the success and thriving of this city called the Jerusalem of the North won’t allow us to forget.”

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has published a calendar to mark Vilnius’s 700th anniversary with a special Vilnius 700 logo and collages from old Jewish Vilne. The designers of the calendar were Victoria Sideraitė Alon and Albinas Šimanauskas from the creative group JUDVI & AŠ.

“The 700th anniversary of the founding of the city of Vilnius is a wonderful and significant day for all residents of the city and beyond. Sadly, in the excitement in preparing for this holiday, few remember who built the capital of Lithuania, who contributed so significantly to giving birth to this pearl of UNESCO,” chairwoman Kukliansky commented.

2023-01-252023-01-27

Lithuanian Prime Minister on the Death of Grigoriy Kanovich

Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė expressed her condolences on the death of the writer, dramaturg and translator Grigoriy Kanovich.

“Grigoriy Kanovich’s work gave a voice to entire generations of Litvaks who died and raised the curtain for the painful 20th century for a view into the profound, rich culture fostered for centuries in Lithuania, and at the same time, by presenting the agonies society experienced from the Holocaust, he formed the modern reader’s understanding and sympathy. Grigoriy Kanovich will remain in our memories as a person who carried the light through his works and through his always penetrating, respectful and hope-filled way of seeing. We have lost one of the great writers who was just as concerned with the present as with the past, with being able to live in harmony, in the emergent commonality, in what is shared rather than the categorical. I extend my sincere condolences to Grigoriy Kanovich’s loved ones during this difficult time of loss,” the Lithuanian prime minister wrote in her letter of condolence.

Full statement in Lithuanian here.

2023-01-232023-01-23

Israeli Duet to Perform Again

The family duet of Vera Vaidman on violin and Vera Emanuel Krasovsky on piano will perform works by Beethoven and Schubert at the Organum Concert Hall in Vilnius at 7:00 P.M. on Friday, February 3. Tickets are available here and if you enter the code LZB you’ll get a 10% discount. Krasovsky was born in Vilnius and attended Vilnius University among other institutions of higher learning. The couple live in Tel Aviv currently

2023-01-23

Condolences

Silvija Sondeckienė passed away Saturday morning at the age of 80. She was a cellist, a professor and a friend of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Her father-in-law was the Righteous Gentile Jackus Sondeckis and her late husband the renowned conductor Saulius Sondeckis was also a great friend of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. We extend our deepest condolences to her sons and their families.

2023-01-23

Condolences

The writer Grigoriy Kanovich has passed away at the age of 93. Our deepest condolences to his sons Sergejus and Dmitrijus, wife Olga and his many friends and fans around the world. He served as chairman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community from 1989 to 1993, when he moved to Israel.

2023-01-222023-01-23