Holocaust

A Moving Journey

A Moving Journey

Several days ago the global Jewish community marked Yom haShoah, the day of remembrance of Holocaust victims and heroes. A large contingent of Litvaks from the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel travelled to Lithuania to mark this commemorative date. They commemorated Holocaust victims in Alytus and Zarasai, where most of them had family roots.

On Monday the group went to Alytus, commemorating victims at the memorial to mass murder victims in Vizgiris Forest just outside town, where Jews from Alytus and the surrounding areas were killed. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein, German ambassador Matthias Sonn, Alytus mayor Nerijus Cesiulis and Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel director Arie Ben-An Grozdensky whose father’s family came from the nearby shtetl Miroslav honored the victims of the Holocaust there.

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Condolences

With deep sadness we report the death of Markas Zingeris at the age of 76. He had struggled with heart problems for several years. The author of numerous novels, poet, long-time director of the Vilna Gaon Museum and a life-long promoter of Litvak culture, he is survived by his brother Emanuelis Zingeris. We extend our deepest condolences to his colleagues, many friends and family.

Polish President Mentions Ponar at Warsaw Uprising Ceremony

Polish President Mentions Ponar at Warsaw Uprising Ceremony

April 18 marked the 80th anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. Polish president Andrzej Duda invited the presidents of Israel and Germany, representatives of the major global Jewish organizations and others to a commemoration of the historic act of mass resistance during WWII which was held in Warsaw. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky also received an invitation and attended.

In his speech, Duda talked about the largest act of resistance by civilians to the Nazis. They knew they were outnumbered and faced defeat, but fought anyway, he noted. President Duda mentioned Ponar outside Vilnius as one of the main mass murder sites during the Holocaust. Some foreign media noted Duda failed to talk about Nazi collaborators, others said he wasn’t able to because of Poland’s new law forbidding discussion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust.

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Yom haShoah at Ponar

Yom haShoah at Ponar

A ceremony was held to commemorate Yom haShoah, the Israeli Holocaust day of remembrance, on Tuesday at the Ponar Memorial Complex outside Vilnius. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas and Palanga Jewish Community chairman Vilius Gutmanas were joined there by Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein, US ambassador Robert Gilchrist, Japanese ambassador Tetsu Ozaki, French ambassador Alix Everard, Lithuania’s deputy minister of culture Albinas Vilčinskas and U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad chairwoman and attorney Starlet “Star” Jones Lugo. Jones spoke with students from the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium at the event, emphasizing the importance of remembering the victims and preserving the Litvak heritage. Jones is a panelist on the controversial all-female liberal American television talk show “The View” on the American Broadcasting Company or ABC network.

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Mini Klez-Fest at Tolerance Center, National Library

Mini Klez-Fest at Tolerance Center, National Library

The Judaica Research Center at the Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library, the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum and Roma Social Center present their “mini klez-fest” which includes live music and a lecture on klezmer music.

The event will take place at the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon Museum at 6:00 P.M. on Sunday, April 30. The performers decided to call their hour-long concert “From Vizhnitz to Vilne: Klezmer Music from the Carpathians and Beyond.” The program is composed of songs selected by Jewish music researcher, ethnographer and artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University Yale Strom, recorded during ethnographic field work and which were once performed from the Carpathian Mountains to Jonava in Lithuania and locations inside Belarus. Yale Strom currently teaches music at San Diego State.

The lecture component by Strom will take part on at 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, May 3, at the National Library in Vilnius. It is called “Relationship between Romani and Jewish Musicians before World War II: How and Why?”

Premiere of J’Accuse with Lithuanian Subtitles Exclusively on 15min.lt

Premiere of J’Accuse with Lithuanian Subtitles Exclusively on 15min.lt


The Lithuanian news website 15min.lt announced they will be showing the Holocaust documentary J’accuse with Lithuanian subtitles on April 17 and 18. The focus of the film is Grant Gochin whose entire family were murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania, and Silvia Foti who published a biography of her grandfather Jonas Noreika, debunking his lionization by post-WWII Lithuanians and revealing his deep collaboration with the Nazis in Holocaust crimes.

The film documents the personal stories of Gochin and Foti in their search for truth and justice, and how their paths came together several years ago, both now demanding accountability and truth from the Lithuanian state in addressing the genocide committed against the Jews in Lithuania during WWII.

Foti’s book is in its second edition in the United States with translations in various languages around the world. Lithuanian publishing house Kitos Knygos is publishing the Lithuanian version of the book.

In the film Gochin talks about his numerous court cases in Lithuania seeking justice for his murdered family members. He talks about the anti-Semitism inherent in the Lithuanian bureaucracy in the first decade after independence from the Soviet Union when he sought Lithuanian citizenship based on family origin, and some of the strange decisions Lithuanian courts made regarding his numerous cases against the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania to force them to tell the truth about Jonas Noreika. Foti also levels criticism against the Center for hiding the truth about genocide in Lithuania.

The film contains a wealth of photography and stories of Jewish life in Lithuania before the Holocaust. 15min.lt says it is offering its readers the rare opportunity to view the film with the original audio with Lithuanian subtitles for two days exclusively.

Full article in Lithuanian and link to the film here.

Malines

Malines

An excerpt from the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna Ghetto

“Malines were built everywhere: underneath ruined buildings, in cellars, underneath garbage dumps, in caves, and everywhere else imaginable.”

The poet Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) moved into the Vilna Ghetto not long after the Nazis created it in September of 1941 and with his wife Freydke escaped to the forest in September, 1943. During his two years in the ghetto he worked with the theater and youth groups and was part of the legendary Paper Brigade, a group of ghetto inmates and their allies who rescued priceless Jewish books and manuscripts from Nazi destruction.

Full article and translation here.

Passover in Panevėžys

Passover in Panevėžys

The Panevėžys Jewish Community celebrated Passover in common with Jewish communities around the world starting on April 7. Besides the men, women, children and elderly of the community, the Panevėžys Jewish Community also received guests from Vilnius and Chicago at the seder table.

Kobi Katz, wife Rita and daughter Shelly from Israel visited Panevėžys for Passover as well, and spoke with Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman about family roots in the Lithuanian city. They also praised attorney and chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community Faina Kukliansky for her help in locating documents concerning Kobi’s grandparents, and information about the burial of Katz relatives in Vilnius. Kobi Katz was born in Vilnius in 1967. At the age of ten he left for Israel where he resides till now. His grandfather Israel Moshe Kleiman was born in Panevėžys in 1898. The Katz family finally had the chance to visit Jewish locations in Panevėžys and said they would return next year to do the same.

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Why Are Thousands Flocking to a Small Town in Central Lithuania?

Why Are Thousands Flocking to a Small Town in Central Lithuania?

A special place in the center of Lithuania: why does “Jewish” mean “backwards,” and why are packed buses arriving in this small town?

The small town of Krakės in the Kėdainiai region of central Lithuania is a special place. When you get there, you feel as if you’ve stepped into a different world. The community’s café Svetainė [Parlor] looks like an ordinary café, but thousands of people from all over Lithuania come by every year. It’s the Jewish cuisine which draws these people to Krakės.

A small group of enthusiasts from the Lithuanian town came up with a Jewish culinary and cultural education program called “One hundred and fifty years in the Jewish neighborhood: why Jewish means backwards.”

Krakės community center director Daiva Dubinkienė said initially the idea was to establish a cozy café in town, but the idea immediately grew to include an educational program.

The Life section of 15min.lt interviewed community center director Daiva Dubinkienė and the cook Lina Gaučiene, who makes Jewish dishes.

Q. We are meeting at the Svetainė café. When you cross the threshold, it really seems as if you’ve entered a different reality. It’s a cozy spot.

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Yom haShoah

Yom haShoah

Yom haShoah is the date on Nisan 27 when Israelis remember the victims of the Holocaust. This year Nisan 27 corresponds to April 18. The Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel and the Lithuanian Jewish Community have organized a number of events to commemorate this day in Lithuania this year.

There will be a commemoration in Alytus, Lithuania, on Monday, April 17:

11:00 A.M. Commemoration of Holocaust victims at mass murder site in Vidzgiris forest.
1:30 P.M. Commemorative ceremony at Alytus synagogue.
4:15 P.M. Commemoration at Simnas Jewish mass murder monument.
4:45 P.M. Return to Vilnius

There will be a commemoration in Zarasai on April 18:

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Discussion Club on Lithuanian Heroes and Collaborators

Discussion Club on Lithuanian Heroes and Collaborators

The Jewish discussion club #ŽydiškiPašnekesiai will discuss the topic of the lionization of Holocaust perpetrators at 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, April 19 at the Bagel Shop Café located at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. It will be live-streamed as well. Panelists will include the new director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum, Simonas Strelcovas, as well an academic, a media specialist and an historian. It will be moderated by writer, publicist and actor Arkadijus Vinokuras. The discussion will be conducted in Lithuanian.

Meeting in Zarasai

Meeting in Zarasai

Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel deputy chairman Grisha Deitch has met with newly-elected mayor of Zarasai Nijolė Guobienė to discuss the Yom haShoah scheduled there for April 18.

Remembering Rivka Basman Ben-Haim

Remembering Rivka Basman Ben-Haim

by Zelda Kahan Newman
Last updated June 23, 2021

In Brief

Born February 20, 1925. Rivka Basman’s mother died when she was five. Her younger brother was ripped from her hands and murdered by the Nazis, and she escaped from the Nazi death march. After the war, she helped the illegal immigration movement to what was then Palestine. During that time, she met and married the painter Shmuel Ben-Haim, who designed every one of her books. The couple lived on Kibbutz Ha-Ma’apil for sixteen years, where she taught schoolchildren. During the 1960s, she studied comparative literature at Columbia University for one year, and later went to Russia, where her husband was Israel’s cultural attaché. In Russia, she furthered clandestine contacts between Soviet Yiddish writers and the outside world. After her husband died, she added Ben-Haim to her name.

Family and Education

Rivka Basman Ben-Haim was born in Wilkomir (Ukmerge), Lithuania to Yekhezkel and Tsipora (née Heyman) on February 20, 1925. Her mother died in 1930, and her father remarried; he and his second wife had a son, Aharon (Arele).

As a child, Rivka attended a Yiddish-speaking folk-shul, and she and her classmates read and delighted in the poems and stories of the Yiddish woman writer Kadya Molodowsky. Even then, she wrote poems in Yiddish. She continued studying in a Lithuanian gymnasium (academic high school), but in 1941, before she could graduate, her family moved into what later became the Vilna ghetto. She spent two years in the ghetto, where she met the poet Abraham Sutzkever and read him her poems in Lithuanian and Yiddish. He encouraged her to write only in Yiddish and was her mentor and friend till his death.

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News from Kaunas

News from Kaunas

During the last few weeks the Kaunas Jewish Community hosted a number of events looking at history and commemorating significant figures. There was discussion at these events of timeless matters as well: adhering to one’s values, the resolution and choice to be free and preserve humanity, the courage to understand and accept the traumas of the past and being open to the truth however painful or unpleasant it might be.

Tadas Daujotas and the Gyvybės žygis [March of the Living] organization held a meeting with international March of Life/March of the Living founder and author of the book “Breaking the Veil of Silence” [Die Decke des Schweigens] Pastor Jobst Bittner from Germany.

The restored grave of Klaudijus Dušauskas-Duž [aka Kłaŭdzi Duž-Dušeŭski, Клаўдзі Дуж-Душэўскі, Клавдий Степанович Дуж-Душевский, Klawdziy Duzh-Dushewski] was also unveiled in a ceremonial setting. He rescued Jews in Lithuania during the Holocaust and created the red and white Belarussian flag. The ceremony took place on March 25, Belarus Freedom Day, commemorating the first independent but short-lived Belarussian state in 1918.

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Condolences

With deep sadness we announce the death April 3 of Ezra Eta Gurvičiūtė. She was born in 1920 and was preparing to celebrate her 104th birthday this month. She was a member of the Lithuanian Jewish Community from the beginning and served for decades as a volunteer at the Community’s medical consultation center. Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and the entire Community extend our sincere condolences to her son Eduardas Elija, grandchildren Tomas and Julija and her great-grandchildren. Final farewells can be made today, April 4, at 6:00 P.M. at the Nutrūkusi styga funeral home in Vilnius. The burial will take place at the Jewish cemetery on Sudervės road in Vilnius at 12 noon April 5.

Charles Commemorates Child Refugees in Hamburg

Charles Commemorates Child Refugees in Hamburg

BERLIN (AP)–King Charles III commemorated the more than 30,000 people, mostly German civilians, who were killed in the Allied bombing of Hamburg almost 80 years ago as he visited the northern city Friday on the last leg of his first foreign trip since becoming monarch.

The attack in July 1943 carried out by British and American planes using incendiary bombs was a response to Nazi Germany’s deadly aerial raids on Britain. It resulted in a firestorm which destroyed large parts of the city and remains a painful memory in the Hanseatic port’s proud history.

Charles laid a wreath at the ruined church of St. Nikolai, now a memorial site, and listened to Hamburg’s bishop Kirsten Fehrs read the Coventry Litany of Reconciliation written to commemorate the destruction of the English city of Coventry by German bombers in 1940.

Earlier, Charles and Camilla visited a memorial to the Kindertransporte, or children’s transports, when more than 10,000 Jewish children found refuge from Nazi Germany in the U.K. in 1938.

Full story here.

New Book of Names at Yad Vashem

New Book of Names at Yad Vashem

Since its establishment Yad Vashem has endeavored to gather the names of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, one of its central missions. Yad Vashem’s Book of Names is the unique result of meticulous and painstaking work that commemorates 4,800,000 men, women and children whose details have been gathered and uncovered over the years, through Pages of Testimony, the location of various Holocaust-era documents, cooperation with memorial sites and more, which are memorialized in Yad Vashem’s Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names.

The Book of Names actualizes the inconceivable number of Holocaust victims, and displays their names together with their dates of birth, hometowns and places of death, when known. The information is printed on pages measuring two meters high and one meter wide, with the details illuminated by a gentle beam of light that shines from between the pages. The massive dimensions of the Book of Names testify to the enormity of the collective and unimaginable loss for humanity as a whole and for the Jewish people in particular. The last pages of the book are empty, symbolizing the names that are yet to be retrieved, documented and commemorated, and which perhaps never will be.

Designer: Chanan De Lange

The Book of Names was produced with the generous support of Marilyn and Barry Rubinstein, USA.

Opening: March 29, 2023.

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