An autobiography in Lithuanian by noted Lithuanian attorney Samuelis Kukliansky who miraculously survived the Holocaust is available at the Vilnius Book Fair. His story is about maintaining human dignity and keeping alive that core of humanity in every person. The book “Samuelis Kuklianskis- teisininkas” [Samuelis Kuklianskis, Attorney] is for sale at the Vilnius Book Fair at the Adrena booth, booth no. 5D01, in hall 5.
This year’s annual Vilnius Book Fair will feature some interesting presentations involving Jewish topics.
At 3:00 P.M. on Thursday, February 20, Moi Ver’s “Ghetto Lane in Wilna” album will be presented by Dr. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lolita Jablonskienė, Nissan N. Perez, Yossi Raviv and Sigutė Chlebinskaitė in Hall 3. The discussion will be held in Lithuanian and English.
At 12 noon on Friday, February 21, Matilda Olkinaitė’s book “Atrakintas dienoraštis” will be presented by editor Dr. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas with Dr. Irena Veisaitė, Laima Vincė and Neringa Danienė participating.
At 6:00 P.M. on Friday, February 21, Dr. Lara Lempertienė, Dr. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas and Rimantas will present “Dešimt eilėraščių/Ten Poems,” a selection of poems by Abraham Sutzkever, at the Writers’ Corner.
At 3:00 P.M. on Saturday, February 22, the book “Žydų kultūra paveikslėlių knygose: Karaliaus Motiejuko karalystė (pagal Januszą Korzcaką)” will be presented by Anna Czerwińska and Iwona Chmielewska at conference hall 5.3. The discussion will be held in Polish and English.
The executive board of the Lithuanian Jewish Community congratulated Community members who had received state awards on the eve of February 16, the pre-war Lithuanian Independence Day.
Vocalist Rafailas Karpis, named soloist of the year by the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theater and Linas Vildžiūnas, editor of the Seven Days of Art weekly newspaper and recipient of the Leonidas Donskis prize, were recognized. Daumantas Levas Todesas, an active cultural figure, supporter of culture and long-time member of the LJC, who was elected chairman of the Ethnic Communities Service for the term between 2020 and 2024, was also recognized.
Journalist and public figure Eugenijus Bunka, named Tolerant Person of the Year, was also recognized and sent a greeting to the audience on the eve of February 16. His brief address follows.
Information from the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry, URM.lt
A new exhibit called “Lithuanian and Irish Jewish History” opened in Dublin February 3 to mark 2020, the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Vilna Gaon, declared the Year of the Vilna Gaon and Lithuanian Jewish History by the Lithuanian parliament.
The exhibit covers Jewish life in Lithuania from settlement in the Lithuanian Grand Duchy in the 14th century to the present and the history of Lithuanian Jews in Ireland.
Lithuanian ambassador to the Republic of Ireland Egidijus Meilūnas said at the opening ceremony next year will mark the 30th anniversary of the opening of diplomatic relations between the two republics, although Litvaks had brought the two countries together 150 years ago.
The event attracted a large audience, including members of the diplomatic corps, representatives of the Irish and Lithuanian Jewish communities, politicians, cultural and academic figures and reporters.
Students, staff and teachers of the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius marked Lithuanian Independence Day February 16 with a full day of events.
The program included song and dance in the late morning and afternoon Friday to celebrate the day in 1918 102 years ago when the modern state of Lithuania was born. Pupils performed Lithuanian folk dancing and sang the national anthem.
Acting principal Ruth Reches said: “Children of different nationalities attend our gymnasium and one of our aims is to teach them citizenship, and to teach both the children and young people dates and holidays important to both Jewish and Lithuanian families. The day of the restoration of Lithuanian statehood celebrated on February 16 is very important to all of us, to our freedom and self-expression, and we, the entire school community, celebrated this independence day enthusiastically and ethnically.”
A commemorative event was held in honor of Righteous Gentile Ona Šimaitė February 12 in the Vilnius University library where she once worked.
As a librarian, Šimaitė carried books back and forth into and out of the Vilnius ghetto, and also messages. She also hid Jews and Jewish cultural treasures. Risking her life every day to help others, she was eventually discovered, arrested and tortured, but survived. She was one of the first Lithuanians to receive Yad Vashem’s Righteous among the Nations award in 1966.
Those attending the commemoration included Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Julija Šukys, poet, writer and translator Marius Burokas, editor Saulius Repečka, Judaica Studies Center director Dr. Lara Lempert, poetess Aušra Kaziliūnaitė, writer Saulius Stankevičius, literary critic Virginija Cibarauskaitė, members of the Jewish community and numerous others. Modestas Saukaitis, who does art restoration professionally, unveiled his own portrait of Šimaitė in the antechamber of the Lithuanian Studies Reading Room at Vilnius University during the commemoration.
Eugenijus Bunka was named Tolerant Person of the Year February 2 in Kaunas. Bunka is the creator of the Litvak Memorial Garden, a regional historian, writer and journalist. At the awards ceremony he said he was carrying on the work of his father, Jakovas Bunka. The Bunka welfare and support fund finances children’s camps, meetings at schools and other events.
The award comes from the Sugihara Foundation/Diplomats for Life, which has been giving the award since 2001. They said Bunka received the distinction for his many years directing the Jakovas Bunka fund and carrying out civic and educational initiatives, commemorating the Jews of Plungė, Žemaitija and Lithuania both in his own region and around the world.
The foundation said Bunka in 2019 undertook active educational work, refuting the wartime and postwar stereotype of Jews as Communists specifically in the administration in Plungė using arguments and facts. They also noted his research into Louis Armstrong’s Litvak foster parents in America, Leiba and Tilė Karnovskiai from Vilkija, Lithuania.
Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Yossi Levy visited Kaunas at the end of January, where he visited the Ninth Fort Museum and honored Holocaust victims there. He also visited Sugihara House, the museum where Japanese diplomat and Righteous Gentile Chiune Sugihara lived and worked.
Ambassador Levy also paid his respects at the memorial at the Lietūkis garage site where Jews were tortured and murdered on June 27, 1941. After that he went to the site of the former residence of Litvak poetess Lea Goldberg in whose courtyard is an art installation commemorating former Jewish life.
Ambassador Levy and deputy ambassador Adi Cohen-Hazanov met with Kaunas mayor Visvaldas Matijošaitis and the mayor’s team. Later the Israeli delegation met Daiva Citvariene and her team from the Atminties biuras [Office of Memory] group working on the Kaunas 2022 European Cultural Capital program. They discussed ways to commemorate the history of the Jews of Kaunas together.
LRT.lt
The Leonidas Donskis prize was awarded this year to Linas Vildžiūnas, the director of the “7 meno dienos” [Seven Days of Art] weekly newspaper, by the board of directors of the Sugihara Foundation/Diplomats for Life and Jolanta Donskienė.
On February 2 the Sugihara Foundation/Diplomats for Life announced their annual award for Tolerant Person of the Year at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. This year that person was Eugenijus Bunka. They also awarded the Donskis prize to Linas Vildžiūnas. Leonidas Donskis was a philosopher, professor, the author of numerous books, a television personality, an advisor to the Lithuanian president and an important voice in the modern Republic of Lithuania.
Vildžiūnas was awarded the distinction “for his meaningful presence on the cultural scene which was unaffected by regime changes and fashion, and for his continuous reminder culture is a fundamental value whose quality is enriched by supporting dialogue and discussion. [And] for his long-time battle against forgetfulness, reminding us that only the maintenance of memory, however uncomfortable it might be, strengthens dialogue and empathy, that the memories of our grandparents and great-grandparents is of value for the younger generation rather than a fading memory. [And] for his belief and the example he set, showing that a strong civic attitude is able to withstand tendentious attacks, manipulations and efforts to ‘nationalize’ it.”
This is the speech Linas Vildžiūnas gave on acceptance of the Donskis prize:
§§§
Dear Mrs. Jolanta Donskienė, honored members of the board of directors of the Sugihara Foundation/Diplomats for Life, ladies and gentlemen,
In accepting from your hands this honorable award in recognition of my humble efforts, I am deeply moved and at the same time disturbed. The Leonidas Donskis prize set a very high standard, bearing in mind his irreplaceable role in our public life and academic discourse and his novel insights which have added to our lexicon of philosophy and sociology (take just for example his and Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “liquid evil” in the final book coauthored by both thinkers). We all feel that void which appeared in public life on the loss of Leonidas Donskis, who was the most remarkable and sometimes the only voice of our intellectual elite.
Photo: Antokolskio street, 1940/Mečys Brazaitis
The spacious square by Žydų (Jewish) Street in central Vilnius now contains little else than a children’s playground, parking lots and a derelict kindergarten, but it was densely packed with houses before World War Two. Most of the houses were occupied by Jews and the area was the center of the city’s Jewish quarter.
Lithuania has dedicated the year 2020 to the Vilna Gaon and the History of the Jews of Lithuania. LRT English together with Vilnius University and Jewish Heritage Lithuania bring you a series of stories exploring Litvak history.
The official beginnings of the Jewish quarter of Vilnius date back to the 17th century when king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania Wladyslaw Vasa granted a privilege [charter] to the Jews to reside in this quarter. Jewish Street had this name even before that, so it is likely Jewish residents already lived there.
Full story here.
In 2005 the UN General Assembly proclaimed January 27 the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. On that day in 1945 the Red Army liberated the prisoners at the Auschqitz-Birkenau death camp.
All survivors were invited to invited to come to the commemoration at the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
An exhibit of paintings by Levas Saksonovas called Holocaust was unveiled on the third floor of the LJC, at the initiative of active LJC member, doctor and photo artists Robertas Skalskis and social programs director Žana Skudovičienė. The artist’s son Danilias and art historian and researched Vera Kalmykova presented the exhibit.
On January 28 the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry and the Lithuanian Jewish Community held a commemoration of International Holocaust Day at the ministry.
“The Holocaust is a horrid scar on humanity, on the face of Lithuania. It is a wound which likely will never heal. Let’s hope and try so that humanity never experiences this again. We are endlessly grateful to all the survivors of the Holocaust who are with us here today. In celebrating the 300th anniversary of the birth of the Vilna Gaon, we hope Vilnius will again become a center of gravity for the Jews of the entire world, as the Jerusalem of Lithuania once was,” foreign minister Linas Linkevičius said after presenting red roses to Holocaust survivors attending the event.
A student choir from the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium performed three songs in Yiddish and Lithuanian.
Photos: Dr. Andrejus Aron from Vilnius, resident in Israel
Litvaks held a protest January 24 at the Lithuanian embassy to Israel in Ramat Gan, a neighborhood of Tel Aviv.
The Association of Lithuanian Jews Living in Israel under the leadership of former Vilnius resident Arie Ben-Ari Grodzenskis sponsored the protest, which was mainly attended by elderly Litvaks, most of whom were born after the war, their grandparents having been murdered in Lithuania in the Holocaust.
Despite cold weather and rain, they gathered to remember the 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania before the Holocaust and built the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
The picket was aimed specifically against Lithuanian MP Arūnas Gumuliauskas, the chairman of the Lithuanian parliament’s Battles for Freedom and State Historical Memory Commission who announced in mid-December he was drafting a parliamentary resolution proclaiming the Lithuanian state and nation innocent of participating in the Holocaust, because the state and the people were under occupation, first by the Soviets and then by the Nazis.
One of the signs at the protest read: “Gumuliauskas: no law can wash away Jewish blood.”
by Grant Gochin
Many South African Jews are descended from an immigration wave from Lithuania in the 1920s. Our grandparents seldom explained the context; here it is.
During World War 1 when the current territory of Lithuania was part of Russia, the Tsarist army conducted a mass ethnic cleansing of Jews. During that period, especially in the spring of 1915, a number of Lithuanians took an active part in murdering old Jewish men, women, and even children, and plundering Jewish assets. Lithuania claims the Russians were entirely responsible for the actions of ethnic Lithuanians. Lithuanians retained the stolen Jewish property.
Betrayal after betrayal followed and Jews began to leave for greener pastures. It was the lesser-educated and unemployed Jews who left Lithuania, while the intelligentsia stayed on, hoping life would improve. Instead, they were slaughtered.
The world knows of the genocide perpetrated in Lithuania in 1941 in which Jonas Noreika was responsible for the murder of about 14,500 out of the 200,000 murder victims (including my own family). The sharing of Jewish property was widespread and once again Lithuanians were enriched by Jewish property.
by Pinchos Fridberg, Holocaust “historian”
My slogan my whole life:
lakhn iz gezunt.
Laughter is health.
Who Are You, Dr. Gumuliauskas? Fat Strokes for a Portrait of the Chairman of the Parliament’s Freedom Battles and State Historical Memory Commission
Introduction
I’m forced to repeat that Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty called me an Holocaust historian (in an article in Russian). I won’t pretend the appellation isn’t soothing to the ear, but it is not true, unfortunately. That’s why I put the word “historian” in quotation marks after my name.
Unlike me, professor Arūnas Gumuliauskas is a “professional historian.” I’ll explain the use of quotation marks below.
His lucky star rose at exactly 12:59 P.M. on December 28, 2019. That’s the moment when his sensational article appeared on the website 15min.lt, whose daily audience is almost one half of a million readers:
And so it began... the professional historian's name began popping up (along with the name of the country, Lithuania) on foreign media, e.g., Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Algemeiner and others.
I don't know why, but the thought consumed me that only an historian who had been inculcated in the methods of Marxism-Leninism could have thought up such a thing. Skipping ahead a bit, I have to say I wasn't wrong.
Who are you, Dr. Gumuliauskas?
In my semi-humorous autobiography published by the Russian-language international magazine Мы Здесь, I haven't hidden the fact that, in 1959, I became a candidate for membership in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, where "the true Marxists" always taught me to "dig" down to the "primary source."
I began searching for information on Gumuliauskas on Lithuanian wikipedia:
[translation] lt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arūnas_Gumuliauskas
Arūnas Gumuliauskas Arūnas Gumuliauskas (born August 10, 1958, Kaunas) is a Lithuanian pedagogue and historian.
Biography He was graduated from Vilnius Univeristy in 1981. From 1984 to 1987 he did post-graduate work at this university. [highlighted text:] In 1987 he defended his doctoral thesis "The Activity of the Lithuanian Communist Party in Developing the Dramatic Arts in the Republic (1966-1980)" and received the degree of doctor of the liberal arts. [end of translation]
It doesn't appear unusual at first glance: he was graduated from university, worked three years in the job assigned him and then voluntarily, on his own volition and consciously embarked upon post-graduate studies. He defended his dissertation "Activity of the Lithuanian Communist Party in Expanding the Dramatic Arts in the Republic (1966-1980)" and became a doctoral candidate in history.
But that's just at first glance.
That information wasn't sufficient for this "Holocaust historian" so I decided to find out what lay beyond the bounds of this brief biography, to wit:
--the name of the faculty or cathedral where the dissertation was written; --the exact title of the discipline under which it was defended; --the full names of the opponents; --the goal of the research and tasks for achieving it; --the publications where the basic findings were published.
My innate curiosity drew me to the professors' reading room of Vilnius University on January 16. The staff there quickly discovered the code number for the abstract (F76-3004) of the dissertation in the data base and 35 minutes later that abstract was delivered from the archives.
(Vilnius University isn't just my Alma Mater, but also where I began my post-doctoral candidacy in 1965 and where I defended my dissertation in 1974.)
Here are the documents which contain the answers to all the questions of interest to me (and I hope to you, too, dear reader):
Translation
Gumuliauskas, Arūnas
Activity of the Lithuanian Communist Party in Expanding the Dramatic Arts in the Republic (1966-1980)
Specialty: History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Abstract of dissertation for the academic candidate's acquisition of the degree in history.
Work performed at the Cathedral [Faculty] of History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Primary official opponent: professor Mykolas Burokevičius *
Translation
Goal and research tasks
The main goal of the work was a multifaceted examination of the activity of the Lithuanian Communist Part in developing the Republic's dramatic arts (1968-1980).
The following tasks were defined for achieving this goal:
--to show how, using Marxist-Leninist theory, by employing the progressive legacy of the past and under the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Soviet government, the Lithuanian Communist Party is creating a national theater.
--to investigate the activity of the Lithuanian Communist Party and the republican government in expanding and improving the network of theaters, strengthening their material base, selecting, allocating, preparing and teaching an ideologically significant concept and the civic consciousness of cadres.
--to summarize the organizational ideological work of the republican Communists in forming repertoire and raising the ideological and artistic quality of theater plays. To demonstrate the activities of the main Party organizations and their increasing influence on the creative process.
--to show the activity of the Lithuanian Communist Party in bringing the broad masses to the spiritual values of the dramatic arts, forming a Marxist-Leninist proletariat people's worldview, [. to show] the significance of theater in the process of internationalizations and [to show] the multifaceted cultural enrichment of the peoples of the USSR.
--to demonstrate problems and errors which have arisen in expanding Lithuania's socialist theater, revealing the Party's battle on how to overcome these.
The main points of the dissertation are laid out in these publications:
Lietuvos komunistų partijos veikla, stiprinant ryšius su respublikos darbo liaudimi (1966-1980) [The Activity of the Lithuanian Communist Party in Strengthening Ties with the People's Theater of the Republic (1966-1980)]
Lietuvos komunistų partijos istorijos klausimai [Problems in the History of the Lithuanian Communist Party], 1987, vol. 39. pp. 38-49
In Soviet times post-graduate candidates doing regular, full-time studies were considered cathedral [faculty] staff. But, as I understand it, staff of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union cathedrals [faculties] had an additional requirement: they had to be members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (or at least candidates for membership).
In trying to determine whether this suddenly world-famous professional historian had been a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, I visited the reading room of the Lithuanian Communist Party documents department (the Lithuanian Communist Party documents department is a section of the Lithuanian Special Archive).
At my request senior archivist Milda Ladietaitė searched for documents in which the surname Gumuliauskas/Гумаляускас occurred.
She didn't find any!
I went home and continued my search on the internet. I found the form Arūnas Gumuliauskas had filled out as a candidate for the Lithuanian parliament on the webpage of the Supreme Elections Commission of the Republic of Lithuania, www.vrk.lt Here is a passage from there:
Read more
The Lithuanian Foreign Ministry and the Lithuanian Jewish Community held a commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 28. Markas Petuchauskas, the noted theater expert, art historian and professor as well as Holocaust survivor, spoke. Here is a translation of the speech he delivered to the overflow audience of Foreign Ministry staff, diplomats and members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community at the hall at the Foreign Ministry.
Perhaps the smallest of all is small group of former Vilnius ghetto inmates who survived. As a member of that group, I thought it would be best here today to share with those gather how I feel today and how I sense things. I feel good now. Because here prevails the solid principles of foreign minister Linas Linkevičius and his great spirit of courage. Linkevičius has never bent with the changing “line”…
Five years ago the Foreign Ministry, not the Culture Ministry, hosted the presentation my book in English, “Price of Concord.” From here it spread to the largest public and prestigious university libraries across Europe and all the continents. Beginning in North and South America and ending in the Republic of South Africa and Japan… Last spring the German translation was launched at the Leipzig International Book Fair and then it was presented in Berlin, again, at our embassy there. I’m not saying this to brag. The book preserves for the future the heroic spiritual resistance of many famous Litvak artists who ended up in the Vilnius ghetto. They opposed Hitler in their artistic work and his desire to tread upon the human dignity of the ghetto inmates.
Lithuanian public radio and television posted an article on their news website containing what appears to be the speech Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda would have delivered at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum commemoration at Yad Vashem in Israel Thursday. The Lithuanian president canceled his trip there at the last minute apparently in solidarity with Polish president Andrzej Duda, who declined the initial invitation to the event saying it was strange he wouldn’t be allowed to speak there while Vladimir Putin would. Lithuanian public radio and television or LRT quoted the Lithuanian president from “a book published by Yad Vashem.”
“I want to express the deepest respect for the millions of Jews murdered in the Shoa. I bow my head in honor and memory of the two hundred thousand who were my countrymen. The tragedy of the Jews of Lithuania is Lithuania’s tragedy.
“We don’t have the power to raise from the dead the innocent victims, the men, women and children. We probably cannot ease the pain of those who lost their family members and loved ones. Even 75 years after the suffering is still felt, it is alive. There is only one thing which we can and must do. That is honoring the memory of the victims of the Shoa. Each of us can do that in his own way, by lighting a candle and saying a prayer. We can pledge to discover the historical truth. The only way to come to terms with history is to find the truth and to proclaim it loudly.”
Miša Jakobas has retired as principal of the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius. Lithuanian public radio and television conducted the following in-depth interview with him about education, life and his thoughts about the future.
Miša Jakobas Talks about Problems in Lithuanian Education after Leaving Jewish Gymnasium
by Aida Murauskaitė, LRT.lt
At the beginning of January the former Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium principal and mathematics teacher took on a new job having nothing in common with the school, except that it does have something in common with Jews and math. He is now the executive director of the Lithuanian-Israeli Chamber of Commerce.
After half of a century you have left your job as teacher and the gymnasium which you yourself established three decades ago. How did you come to this decision?
by Mindaugas Klusas, LRT.lt
The Vilna Gaon, the 18th-century sage from the Jerusalem of the North, has left behind a significant legacy of Jewish scholarship as well as many legends about his erudition and idiosyncratic devotion to the study of religious texts.
Lithuania designated 2020 the Year of the History of Jews of Lithuania, and 2020 is also the 300th anniversary of the Vilna Gaon. Lara Lempertienė, an historian and the head of the Judaica Department at the Lithuanian National Library, spoke with LRT.lt about the 18th-century sage from Vilnius.
While other nations are proud of battles and glorious buildings, Jewish history is about writing and books, Lempertienė quoted a modern rabbi. The Vilna Gaon and his town Vilnius, often dubbed the Jerusalem of the North, played a crucial role in this history.
Full text here.
In two months the Lithuanian parliament will recess. Prior to that MP Arūnas Gumuliauskas, chair of the parliament’s Commission on the Fight for Freedom and Historical Memory, will propose a parliamentary resolution declaring Lithuania has no responsibility for the murders and extermination of Lithuanian Jews during World War II because it was occupied by the Soviets and then by Nazi Germany. His resolution is to absolve Lithuania from the horrors of the Holocaust because it was occupied by Russia and Germany!
Member of parliament Gumuliauskas is not clearly anti-Semitic (compared to those living in Lithuania), he is a professor of history. His primary research during the Soviet era showed positive impact of the Communist Party on the Lithuanian theater. Apparently in 1987 he didn’t think that three years hence everything would be turned upside down. Instead of praising Communism a change had to be made: to stand out and to pave his way to the parliament, Jews can always be accused of something. Anti-Semitism has always been popular in Lithuania at all times. In 2016 the learned professor was elected to parliament. At the end of this year there will be another parliamentary election and an opportunity for him to stand out by proposing a parliamentary resolution which releases Lithuania and Lithuanians of involvement in the Holocaust, for the murder of 95% of Jewish citizens of Lithuania who had lived as good neighbors with Lithuanians for over 400 years.