History of the Jews in Lithuania – Page 60 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Traditions of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year

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The most iconic image of the Rosh Hashanah or Jewish New Year celebration is the blowing of the shofar horn. It is a ram’s horn and it is difficult to blow it correctly. The shofar reminds believers of the coming Day of Judgment. Jews gather at synagogue and read prayers for two days during the holiday.

An important Rosh Hashanah tradition is to take clothing to a body of water and shake the pockets out, symbolically ridding oneself of remaining sin. A special prayer is read for this. The ritual is called tashlikh (Hebrew “cast off”).

The main holiday treat on Rosh Hashanah is the pomegranate. This is replaced by apples and honey in Lithuania where the fruit doesn’t grow to maturity. The honey is intended to make the coming year sweet. In fact the salutation “sweet year” is a requisite part of the well-wishing involved in the holiday.

Often guests are served fish and it must have a head, because Rosh Hashanah literally translates as “head of the year.” A round loaf of challa bread is baked for the dinner table symbolizing the cyclicity of the year. On Rosh Hashanah G_d decides a person’s destiny for the coming year, in this case 5780. There is a Rosh Hashanah greeting, “khatima tova,” which is a wish for success you will be written into the Book of Life.

The tenth day of Rosh Hashanah is Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement. The Torah tells us not to do anything on that except reflect on our actions over the preceding year. It is the time when a final decision will be made regarding the destiny of the individual over the coming year. Jews wish one another “gmar khatima tova,” good luck with the final inscription.

The Vilnius Jewish Religious Community, the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Goodwill Foundation greet you with “shana tova u’metuka,” or “sweet new year,” and hope to see you at synagogue!

Simas Levinas, chairman
Vilnius Jewish Religious Community

2019-09-272019-10-03

Time, Neglect, Disregard Responsible for Ruinous State of Jewish Cemetery in Kaunas, Not NATO Tanks from Germany

A website claiming to represent the Kaunas Jewish Community published Wednesday a wholly incorrect report that German tank forces under NATO had desecrated a Jewish cemetery in Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city, and that swastikas had been painted on gravestones there.

Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Žakas Gercas said the website was not affiliated with the Kaunas Jewish Community and that his community always publishes its news and announcements at www.lzb.lt

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky commented: “This
was a shock to me. After checking what was reported, I can say this is fake news and an informational attack. We have reported this to the Lithuanian institutions which deal with this and have asked that this be stopped. I call upon all people not to submit to this provocation and not to sign this so-called petition. It is a great shame that on the eve of the Jewish new year our Community is being exploited for these sorts of provocations. All the more since at this time the president and foreign minister of Lithuania are visiting the US.” Chairwoman Kukliansky refused to speculate who might be behind this fake news, but cautioned that “no one does these sorts of things for no reason at all.”

2019-09-262019-10-03

Launch of Russian Translation of Book about Veisaitė

The Vilnius, Jerusalem of Lithuania Jewish Community invites you to the launch of the Russian translation of Aurimas Švedas’s book of interviews with Irena Veisaitė, “Gyvenimas turėtų būti skaidrus” [Life Should Be Transparent], at 3:00 P.M. on September 26 on third floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Both Veisaitė and Švedas’ will be there and discuss the book with the audience, with Olga Ugriumova and Daumantas Todesas moderating. The event will take place in Russian.

2019-09-252019-09-27

Kaunas Jewish Community Honors Active Members

For years now the Kaunas Jewish Community has been giving thanks to our active members who take part in activities and help make them possible.

In earlier years this has mainly taken the form of a dinner party with live music, but this year we decided to take the volunteers on a tour in and around Kaunas.

Members learned about the town of Kačerginė, its history and cultural legacy, listening to the enthusiastic narrative of Lina Sinkevičienė while taking in the rural beauty of the place. Members were received warmly at the headquarters of the Kačerginė aldermanship. The beautiful landscape conceals a bloody history and Kaunas Jewish Community members paid their respects to the Holocaust victims in Šakiai, Lukšiai, Zapyškis and surrounding areas.

2019-09-252019-09-26

Remembering the Litvak Genocide: Let’s Remember Who Stands behind the Numbers

by Gediminas Kirkilas

September 23 is the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Genocide. On this day in 1943 the Vilnius Jewish ghetto was liquidated [sic, the ghetto was liquidated over several weeks–trans.]. Behind this fact hides the unusually complex and tragic history of the Jews of Lithuania (Litvaks), the unimaginably painful and tragic personal fates of Jews and their families. Of about 208,000 Jews resident in Lithuania, about 195,000-196,000 were murdered. Every year as we mark dates important to Litvaks, each time, let’s think hard about what hides behind these numbers.

We must continue to learn and teach and learn and teach more about the history of the Litvaks and the Holocaust, to increase our consciousness and sharpen our critical thinking, and to nip in the bud all kinds of right-wing extremism, so that there would be no place for xenophobia, racial and ethnic hatred and everyday domestic anti-Semitism in Lithuanian.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-25

Panevėžys Jewish Community Tours Historic Jewish Sites in Liepāja

Early in the morning on September 14 we went to the Pakruojis synagogue, where we were met by a cultural worker who received us warmly and spoke about the wooden synagogue built by the local Jewish community in 1801. Its function changed and it became a primary school as well as a house of prayer. After the Holocaust the synagogue was nationalized. During the Soviet period it was a theater, then an athletics gymnasium. The unique building fell into disrepair and ruin. In 2017 the synagogue was restored with its authentic interior, according to period photographs, which show playful drawings on the ceiling. Currently the synagogue serves as a space for cultural and other events. The second floor–the women’s gallery–houses an exhibit on the Jewish past, along with examples of the original walls.

Pakruojis was just the first part of the tour and we travelled on to the land of wind, Liepāja [Libave] on the Latvian coast. It is also a land of amber, a port and a holiday destination. The rustling and smell of the lime trees [liepos in Lithuanian, a folk etymology–trans.] give the city its name. But we weren’t there just to look at the pretty town, we were there to visit the largest Holocaust memorial in Latvia. About 7,060 Jews including about 3,000 Jews from Liepāja were murdered in the dunes around the town of Šķēde on the Baltic Sea. In total about 19,000 people of different ethnic backgrounds were murdered here. The site recalls one of the worst breakdowns in humanity in the preceding century. The memorial occupies a territory of 4,120 m² and is arranged in a menorah shape with contours formed of natural rocks and granite slabs, with the “lights” of the menorah represented by granite steles resembling gravestones with inscriptions in Hebrew, English, Latvian and Russia from the prophet Jeremiah. Members of the Panevėžys delegation honored the dead and left a wreath there.

2019-09-252019-09-25

Let Us Pray: Never Again. A Homily on the Lithuanian Day of Jewish Genocide

by archbishop Gintaras Grušas, bernardinai.lt

A shared legacy and joint work intimately united the Jews and Christians living in Lithuania over many long centuries. Then as now the Ten Commandments have united Christians and Jews, demanding we worship one God and to honor the individual human and his life, to protect the family and not to bow to unfairness.

Exactly one year ago Pope Francis preparing to visit a monument to Holocaust victims called for in the Prayer to the Angel of the Lord to work together, to celebrate our friendship and to confess together in the face of the challenges of the world: “Let us ask the Lord to provide us the gift of insight so that we may in time recognize those pernicious knots and atmosphere from which the heart of unexperienced generations atrophies, so that they would not give in to the allure of the songs of the sirens.”

On September 23 we mark the destruction of the Vilnius ghetto and of thousands of Jews who lived with our compatriots in Lithuania. Some members of the Church, due to human weakness, fear or even for the sake of personal gain, came to terms with the occupational regimes and even served their slave masters. A significant number of Christians, however, guided by Christian love, saved the persecuted Jews. Today we mark their graves with the signs and symbols of Righteous Gentiles. We believe that the prevailing climate of friendship and dialogue today will help the Christian and Jewish communities to better understand one another and to work more closely together in areas important to both communities such as the defense of human rights and human life, family values, social justice and the fortification of peace in the world, so that God’s love would be seen and seen more explicitly by humanity. This is a common foundation and a common way forward.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-242019-09-25

Andrius Navickas: Hate Is Always the Cowardly Choice

On September 23 we mark the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide, honoring the victims of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto in 1943. This was a blood-curdling day when the last surviving Jewish residents of Vilnius were either murdered or sent to concentration camps [sic, the liquidation took place over several weeks–trans.].

From that day onward there were officially no Jews left in Vilnius, only those who hid with families who dared preserve humanity, and also those remained who joined the Soviet partisans in the forests. The Jerusalem of the North had been strangled and we were all left the poorer.

Christians know the resurrection is impossible without the crucifixion. To raise the history of the Holocaust on the cross of our memory, first we have to confess in our hearts that it wasn’t THEIR agony and tragedy but OUR agony and tragedy. This is not the story of an oppressed people who demand vengeance.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-242019-09-24

Ponar 2019 by Sergejus Kanovičius

Memory cannot survive from one commemoration to another. Members of the Commission of Historical Memory are laid here and in pits in another hundred small Lithuanian towns and villages. To them it’s completely clear: no one defended them then. However strange it might seem, they have to be defended today, too. At that point in time one group chose to save people, while the other chose the path of Satan. They told my people in 1941 they would be safe in the ghetto. They lied. Today, eight decades later, as then, again they are telling us persistently that the ghettos were good, and those who helped set them up were heroes, or almost saints. Is there anyone today who will speak up and say clearly and without ambivalence that this is immoral? Who, where, when did they say this?

“History can never be left to the politicians, whether they be democratic or autocratic. History is not the property of a certain political doctrine or regime. History, when it is understood truly, is the symbol of our daily moral choices.” And I would add to these words of the late professor Leonidas Donskis: our attitude towards this tragedy, towards its victims, the rescuers, the desk murderers, its direct perpetrators and their unlimited worship–these reflect the state of our ability to remember. And today there are clear signs there is an attempt to make our memory and our moral choices sick. There is only one way to heal our memory: to tell the truth finally. If we want THEM to not just rest in peace, but in honor and dignity.

I wrote this poem 30 years ago:

2019-09-232019-09-26

Lithuania’s Jewish Victims of Genocide Remembered in Ponar

Lithuania’s Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Genocide was marked at Ponar September 23 in a March of the Living event. Although some of the traditional March of the Living Litvaks resident in Israel attended, they were far outnumbered by Lithuanians and especially by Lithuanian high school students.

As usual, people gathered on the west side of the railroad tracks in the town of Paneriai or Ponar just outside Vilnius to march the kilometer or so into the Ponar Memorial Complex for the ceremony at the central monument there. This year, however, hundreds of students arrived by train and walked in on the pedestrian overpass over the railroad. Also new this year was the Lithuanian honor guard who led the procession.

Poles, Russians, Lithuanians and Soviet POWs were also murdered at Ponar, albeit in significantly lower numbers than Jews. This year a Polish delegation and Catholic priest awaited the procession at the Polish monument at the entrance to the memorial complex.

2019-09-232019-09-25

Town of Darbėnai Deciding How to Commemorate Jewish Past, Some Ideas Divisive

by Jovita Gaižauskaitė, LRT TV

Residents of the town of Darbėnai in the Kretinga region are deciding how to commemorate the former Jewish population of about 550. The proposals so far have stirred up division in the town: no one wants to showcase that Jews were murdered there.

About 550 Jews lived in Darbėnai before World War II. Now the marked mass murder sites witness to their fate.

There is a plaque commemorating the Zionist Dovid Volfson, considered the inventor of the Israeli flag and the man who gave the modern shekel its name, on one of the houses in the Lithuanian town. Local residents keep coming up with more ideas to commemorate other Jews who lived there.

2019-09-18

On Photography and Memory: Antanas Sutkus Exhibit Pro Memoria to Mark the 7th Anniversary of the Destruction of the Kaunas Ghetto

by Paulius Jevsejevas

Šiaurės Atėnai (No. 17, 2019)

Antanas Sutkus has photographed a wide variety of people over his career, from famous figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jonas Mekas and Marija Gimbutienė to deaf and blind children living on the margins of society.

Even so, the photography in Pro Memoria disturbed me and wouldn’t allow me to build on earlier experience. Not because of some characteristic of the people portrayed, not because of the artistic choices the photographer made, and not because of my own attitudes as viewer. I am disturbed probably because I don’t have any definite words at hand to describe the general photographic situation I found myself in standing in from of these portraits. As I stood looking at those faces at least two different inner voices appeared and engaged in an unnerving inner dialogue.

On one side, we all now know that the people portrayed in this photographs along with hundreds of thousands of others for several long, seemingly endless years were placed beyond the bounds of society, intentionally separated and finally condemned to death. So these people, unlike other Lithuanian people photographed by Sutkus, these people didn’t have any social status at all. The people in the portraits survived, but I cannot forget all those who were murdered, even if I can’t see them: Every face, hand, glance in the series of portraits stands before me like a living body and at the same like a text which contains a story of the dead.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-18

On Contexts

by Sergejus Kanovičius
Photo by Paulius Peleckis/BFL © 2019 Baltijos fotografijos linija

Ghettos are good. Herding people into them was an attempt to save the Jews. Honoring the herders is nothing special, just good etiquette. As is the division of property of the murdered.

The installation of plaques commemorating false heroes is a classic of the rule of law. The silence of almost all political leaders is a sign that all of this is to be tolerated and acceptable. Vilnius is decorated with hundreds of portraits of those who wished the Jews well in the ghettos, posters proclaiming Vilnius shouldn’t be the Jerusalem of the North, those wearing white armbands marching from the President’s Office towards the erection of the plaque guarded by the police, Holocaust denial and the revision of history on the lips of politicians and staff from the Genocide Center. Or maybe someone wants a t-shirt bearing pictures of these doers of good to the Jews? They’re not expensive. Patriotism is cheap, just thirty euros apiece. A swastika with flowers in front of the Lithuanian Jewish Community going extinct is just the logical continuation of this.

Everything, acts of good and evil, require favorable circumstances. Those flowers on that swastika are just flowers. They do not differ from those who silently tolerate this entire context, nor from those actively creating it. The dead cannot vote. But this silence regarding the living is telling.

2019-09-172019-09-23

Lithuania Does Not Tolerate Hatred and Vandals

lrv.lt

“Ethnic and religious tolerance always were and will remain important to the Lithuanian state and Lithuanian society. Special attention will be given this in the future as well,” Lithuanian prime minister Saulius Skvernelis said in response to an act of vandalism at the headquarters of the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius.

“These kinds of attacks not only do internal damage to intercultural dialogue traditions fostered over several decades, but do great damage to Lithuania’s reputation in the world.

“Therefore we can say confidently that actions sowing hatred and discord will never be tolerated, and both the organizers and executors of such actions will be brought to account in accordance with the standards of law, international legal norms and the laws of the Republic of Lithuania.

“The Government of the Republic of Lithuania calls upon law-enforcement institutions to investigate this incident quickly, responsibly and fully,” the statement from the Lithuanian Government said.

2019-09-17

US Diplomat Tells Lithuania Not to Glorify Holocaust Collaborators

Photo: Protesters reinstall controversial Noreika plaque in Vilnius. Photo by J. Stecevičius/LRT

US diplomat Cherrie Daniels has warned the glorification of Holocaust collaborators in Lithuania undermines the country’s reputation and the memory of its true heroes, and promotes anti-Semitism.

“Lithuania has been shaped into the proud democracy it is today because of the valiant actions of countless heroes throughout its history,” Cherrie Daniels, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the US State Department, tweeted Monday. “But every country has its dark moments”.

“When confronting difficult issues of the past, it’s important to objectively review the actions of historical figures to determine the impact of their actions, both positive and negative,” she said.

2019-09-172019-09-20

Exhibit on Tadeusz Romer and Jewish Refugees in Far East

The exhibit “Polish Ambassador to Japan Tadeusz Romer and Jewish Refugees in the Far East” will open with an event in the Jascha Heifetz Hall on the third floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community at 6:00 P.M. on September 19.

This mobile exhibit from the Polish Institute was first shown last March at the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas. The authors of the exhibit Dr. Olga Barbasiewicz and Barbara Abraham are to take part in this opening. The exhibit will run till October 19.

2019-09-17

Children’s Safety Questioned after Swastika Appears at LJC

Children’s events, workshops, clubs and so forth are held often at the Lithuanian Jewish Community, as are Hebrew lessons, chess matches and Jewish holiday events attended by children. The safety of children attending events at the LJC is being called into question by the appearance of a swastika just meters from the front door. Its appearance coincided with the Peoples Fair inside, where children were preparing to give a concert. The goal of the Peoples Fair is to bring together the ethnic minority communities who call Lithuania home.

While the children were getting ready for the concert upstairs, down at the Bagel Shop Café a group of 43 elderly religious Jews from Jerusalem were holding prayers and waiting for breakfast when the swastika appeared, even closer to the front door of the kosher food outlet.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliaksy said there should actually be reverse discrimination for the Lithuanian Jewish Community considering how small it is now following the Holocaust.

No other state in Europe fails to provide protection and security for its Jewish community.

2019-09-152019-09-17

Swastika at the Lithuanian Jewish Community

A week before Lithuania marks its Day of Remembrance for Jewish Victims of Genocide in Lithuania, a swastika appeared on the sidewalk close to the main entrance of the LJC at Pylimo street no. 2, where some LJC security cameras are pointed.

Who did it and why? As Sergey Kanovich has written:

“It’s not really bad now is it? After all good come quickly after… and it was created by heroes. What after this, a broken window, a match? When the authorities remain silent, evil doesn’t sleep.”

There is no other Jewish community in Europe where the state doesn’t provide protection and security.

2019-09-152019-09-18

Meeting with Students from the Viltis Pre-Gymnasium in Panevėžys

The month of September is marked by a painful historical tragedy and is the month we mark the Day of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide. The Vilnius ghetto was liquidated over the course of the month of September.

Every year the Panevėžys Jewish Community organizes commemoration ceremonies at the mass murder sites in the Kurganava forest, the Žalioji forest, Krekenava, Raguva and other villages in the Panevėžys region.

The plan this year is to hold a quiz with students on September 24, show a film about the Holocaust from Yad Vashem and to introduce young people to Holocaust survivors. This meeting took place at the Panevėžys Jewish Community in early September with students from the Viltis Pre-Gymnasium.

Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman told the painful history of the Jews of the Panevėžys area.

Local Nazi collaborators murdered Jewish men, women and children throughout Lithuania, in Ukraine and in so many other European countries. Jews will never forget those people who helped and rescued them from the Holocaust.

One wonders why today a small group of Lithuanians is attempting to return to the past and to commemorate the collaborators who murdered and destroyed their fellow citizens.

2019-09-12