US Calls on Lithuania to Recognize Holocaust Crimes Committed by National Heroes

The Lithuanian telegraph agency ELTA reports US State Department special envoy for Holocaust issues Ellen Germain said Lithuanian authorities must recognize the involvement of so-called Lithuanian heroes in Holocaust crimes.

She said some Lithuanians who fought the Soviet regime are lionized and commemorated even though they were Nazi collaborators and committed war crimes and genocide. She called on Lithuanian politicians and society to admit the facts. As an example she pointed to Jonas Noreika, a Lithuanian Activist Front commander directly responsible for the ghettoization and mass murder of Jews in the Šiauliai (Shavl) district. She also pointed to Juozas Krikštaponis, part of a punitive unit who murdered Jews in Belarus. Noreika was awarded the Lithuanian Cross of Vytis posthumously and has a commemorative plaque hanging on the Lithuanian Academy of Science. There is a monument to Krikštaponis at the city park in Ukmergė (Vilkomir).

Germain said the United States is asking Lithuania to recognize the involvement of a number of alleged national heroes in Holocaust crimes.

2022-12-14

Community Hanukkah Events

In addition to all the other events already announced, the Lithuanian Jewish Community is offering a walking tour of Jewish Vilna with guide Viljamas Žitkauskas and an Israeli dance marathon with Rikudim.

The tour begins at 2:00 P.M. on Saturday, December 17, meeting at the bell tower at the Arch-Cathedral in Vilnius. Program: Tour, avdala ceremony, dinner at the Bagel Shop Café, performance by the children’s section of the Fayerlakh Jewish song and dance ensemble. Registration required. Send an email to zanas@sc.lzb.lt or call +37067881514 on weekdays between 10:00 A.M. and 6:00 P.M.

The Rikudim Israeli dance marathon will be held in the Jascha Heifetz Hall at the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius from 11:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. on Sunday, December 18. To register send an email to Julija at Juliradv@gmail.com.

2022-12-14

US Envoy Welcomes Lithuanian Government’s Jewish Private Property Restitution Proposal

VILNIUS–Ellen Germain, special envoy for Holocaust issues at the US State Department, welcomed the Lithuanian Government’s proposal to compensate Jews for lost private property when she visited Vilnius on Monday, the Foreign Ministry said.

“Germain welcomed the draft law submitted by the Lithuanian government to the Seimas, which aims to address the outstanding issues of the unreturned property of Jewish persons who lived in Lithuania before or during World War Two, stressing that ensuring justice for Holocaust survivors and their heirs is an important issue of human rights and the rule of law,” it said in a press release.

The bill calls for transferring 37 million euros to the Goodwill Foundation in 2024 to 2030 as compensation for expropriated private Jewish property. The foundation would pay out the money to property owners and their heirs based on the claims received.

Under the existing law adopted in 2011, Lithuania committed to paying 37 million euros over a decade in compensation for seized Jewish communal property. The process should be completed by next March.

Full story here.

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Menora Program on Lithuanian Television: A Story of Love and the Struggle to Survive

Lithuanian Radio and Television presents the story of Kaunas ghetto inmates Margarita Štromaitė and Juozas Kaganas, two inmates of the Kaunas ghetto who fell in love and survived.

Click here.

2022-12-13

LJC Members and Friends Recognized on International Human Rights Day

To mark international Human Rights Day on December 10, Lithuania’s Department of Ethnic Minorities held an awards ceremony at the M. K. Čiurlionis School of the Arts in Vilnius and recognized the work of a number of members and friends of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, including architect and designer Victoria Sideraitė-Alon, LJC executive board member and president of the Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club Semionas Finkelšteinas, chairman of the Klaipėda Jewish Community Feliksas Puzemskis, Vilnius Jewish Public Library director Žilvanas Bielauskas, violinist and member of the Fayerlakh Jewish song and dance ensemble Boris Kirzner, Fayerlakh chairwoman Larisa Vyšniauskienė and documentary filmmaker and television producer Lilija Kopač.

The Ethnic Minorities Department awards are distributed to members of ethnic communities, the media and NGOs for their work increasing ethnic harmony, encouraging cultural diversity and unifying multicultural Lithuania.

We sincerely congratulate all prize recipients on the recognition of their work forging a better future for the Lithuanian Jewish Community and Lithuania.

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Condolences

The Lithuanian Jewish Community and LJC chairwoman extend our deepest condolences on the death of Adolfas Šleževičius to his many friends and relatives. The Lithuanian prime minister from 1993 to 1996 was born February 2, 1948 and his parents rescued Jews from the Holocaust. His Government stabilized the Lithuanian economy not least of all through the re-introduction of the Lithuanian currency the litas, and through improved relations with neighboring countries in the aftermath of the break-up of the Soviet Union. He is the author of over 50 articles and two books. Both his parents were recognized as Righteous Gentiles in 1994 by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Commemoration and Education Institute in Jerusalem.

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Upcoming Vilnius Jewish Public Library Events

The Vilnius Jewish Public Library presents a lecture by Oleksii Chebotarov called “Topography of Pogroms: Spatial and Social History of Anti-Jewish Violence on the Imperial Peripheries” on December 15.

On December 22 the library will feature an evening of poetry and music by Leonard Cohen.

On December 29 the library will screen the made-for-tv documentary film “The World Was Ours” (2007) about the pre-WWII Jewish community of Vilnius. According to imdb:

“A documentary chronicling the rich, vibrant history of the Jewish community of Vilna (then Poland, now Lithuania) known as ‘The Jerusalem of Lithuania’ before its destruction in World War II.”

For more information, send an e-mail to vzvbvjpl@gmail.com or call 8 604 15765.

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NATO 2023 in Lithuania: Rife with Political Pitfalls

Photo: Outer wall of so-called Genocide Museum on Vilnius’s main street near parliament. Personal collection.

by Grant Gochin

One of the greatest public relations catastrophes of president Reagan’s tenure was his May, 1985, visit to a cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, which contained numerous members of the SS. Today, nearly four decades later, the visit is still remembered with anger, amazement and mostly, for America, embarrassment.

NATO has announced that the next meeting of NATO heads of state and government will be held in Vilnius, Lithuania, on July 11-12, 2023. There are, unfortunately, obvious parallels to Reagan’s “goodwill” visit to Bitburg.

In World War II, and primarily in the second half of 1941, about 200,000 Lithuanian Jews–about 96%–were systematically expelled from their homes, robbed, starved, tortured, and brutally murdered primarily by ethnic Lithuanian death squads euphemistically referred to as “auxiliary police” units. Lithuania does not acknowledge the fact that most of the mass murderers were ethnic Lithuanians. To the contrary, Lithuania in many cases has elevated the stature of many of those who led the Lithuanian Holocaust, arguing that they were anti-Soviet. This itself is an echo of the Nazis’ canard conflating Jews with Communism.

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Vilnius Jewish Public Library Showing Israeli Film Testament

The Vilnius Jewish Public Library will screen the Israeli film Testament (2017) at 6:00 P.M. on Thursday, December 1. The library is located at Gedimino prospect no. 24 in Vilnius. The film is in Hebrew with Lithuanian subtitles.

The film won a special prize in the Horizons program at the Venice film festival in 2017, and was awarded first prize for best film at the Haifa film festival.

The screening is free and open to the public, but prior registration is requested by sending an e-mail to vzvbvjpl@gmail.com or by calling 8 604 15 765.

According to imdb:

“Yoel, a meticulous historian leading a significant debate against Holocaust deniers, discovers that his mother carries a false identity. A mystery about a man who is willing to risk everything to discover the truth.”

The screenplay is loosely based on a true story about the mass murder of Jews at a specific location near the end of World War II. It becomes personal for Holocaust researcher Yoel when he discovers his mother’s testimony among the others. Encompassed by the silence of his mother regarding her life on the one hand and the silence of Holocaust deniers on the other, Yoel decides to press on with his duty to find and reveal the truth, no matter at what cost to his professional and personal life.

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Split Identity: Jewish Scholarship in the Vilna Ghetto

Photo: Exterior of YIVO building in Vilnius, ca. 1933. Courtesy YIVO.

by David E. Fishman

ABSTRACT
In this essay David Fishman draws a comparison between yidishe visnshaft, or Jewish studies scholarship, and Judenforschung, the Nazi field of anti-Semitic Jewish studies used to justify the persecution and extermination of Jews in scientific terms. He examines the work of Zelig Kalmanovitch, who had been a well-known scholar and co-director of YIVO before World War II, during the time when he was forced to produce scholarship as a member of the Jewish slave labor brigade assigned to the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Vilna. Fishman notes the remarkable scholarly accomplishments Kalmanovitch was able to achieve in a time of enormous adversity. He also demonstrates several junctures in which Kalmanovitch, a meticulous scholar, omitted facts or altered scholarship in order to save lives. These dual impulses of preserving historical truths about Jewish communities and a willingness to obscure facts over which people could be killed contribute to Fishman’s assessment that Kalmanovitch’s scholarship emerged from erudition, love and dedication to the Jewish people about whom he wrote, the very opposite of the purposes for which his scholarship was obtained by his Nazi slave masters.

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On June 16, 1942, Herbert Gotthardt, a staff member of the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR) in Vilna, instructed Zelig Kalmanovitch to prepare an essay and bibliography on the Karaïtes. Kalmanovitch, a well-known scholar and co-director of YIVO before the war, was a member of the Jewish slave labor brigade assigned to the ERR which segregated Jewish and other books, manuscripts and documents into two categories: valuable items to be sent to Germany, and valueless items to be destroyed. The former YIVO co-director was an expert bibliographer in this work brigade, nicknamed the paper brigade, based in the YIVO building at 18 Wiwulskiego Street. The brigade was headed by librarian Herman Kruk and consisted of twenty physical laborers and twenty intellectuals, including the Yung-Vilne poets Abraham Sutzkever and Szmerke Kaczerginski.

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Holocaust and Home: The Poetry of David Fram from Lithuania to South Africa

Cover: Hazel Frankel, “Holocaust and Home: The Poetry of David Fram from Lithuania to South Africa.” Legenda, 2021. 230 pp.

My mother started learning Yiddish late in life. I felt as if she was reaching out to her dead parents, trying to connect with them. Both her mother and her father were immigrants to South Africa from Lithuania, one from the town of Shadova, the other from Pokroy. My grandfather, Abe, who came from a long line of yeshiva bochers, attended the famed Telz yeshiva. Intellectually curious, he read War and Peace in the original Russian. Later, at the Claremont shul in Cape Town, he gave many of the Saturday afternoon shiurim, written in Yiddish but delivered in English.

His wife, Anne, for who I am named, was nine years his junior. They owned a dress shop in Cape Town and, before the war, Abe went on business trips to Europe to buy the latest fashions, often with specific customers’ needs in mind. Both Abe and Anne died in their fifties, several years before I was born. I know them only from photographs. Their sepia-toned wedding photo hung in our breakfast room, where we ate all our meals. Abe was short, wore glasses, and gazed solemnly at the camera. Anne seemed softer, gentler, and had a twenties-style headdress that looked like a shower cap. There were odd flecks of white on the image that I always imagined was confetti but must have been blemishes on the photographic paper or the camera lens.

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Warsaw Book Fair Features Anti-Semitic Titles

Crudely anti-Semitic books promoting Holocaust denial and depicting Jews as usurers have been showcased at a prestigious book fair in Poland which enjoys the backing of the Polish president.

Titles published by the far-right Polish imprint 3DOM–a play on the word freedom–were on display at the Historical Book Fair in Warsaw, an event officially supported by the office of Polish president Andzrej Duda.

Describing itself as a patriotic, Catholic and “the most politically incorrect” publishing house in Poland, 3DOM advertises more than 80 blatantly anti-Semitic works on its website, according to research carried out by the Never Again Association, a Polish NGO.

2022-11-30

Condolences

Righteous Gentile Janina Vansovičiūtė-Grigaliūnienė has died. We extend our deepest condolences to her friends and family members.

Janina Vansovičiūtė-Grigaliūnienė, then Janina Vansovičiūtė, lived in an apartment in Kuršėnai which her parents had rented with Sofia Vashkevitch, who was using forged documents showing she was Janina’s sister. After the war both girls returned to the Vansovičius home in Raseiniai. Janina and her parents Jonas and Natalija were recognized as Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust authority in 2011.

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Condolences

Uogė Ieva Dargienė, a member of the Union of Former Ghetto and Concentration Camp Prisoners, has passed away. She was born in 1931. We extend our deepest condolences to her sister Jadvyga and niece Rima.

2022-11-23

Happy Birthday to Yosif User

We wish Yosif User, founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly Pensioner and former editor-in-chief of the Obzor Russian-language news site in Lithuania as well as a member of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, a very happy birthday. Dear Joseph, with all our hearts we wish you good health, energy, optimism, joy and warmth! Mazl tov. Bis 120!

2022-11-22

Genocide Center Sets Up Information Signs for Visitors

The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania erected three information signs for visitors to Holocaust sites at three locations in Lithuania in later October and early November, according to their website.

The first sign was set up in the small town of Gelvonai in the Širvintos region in late October, followed by a visitors display in the town of Musninkai in the same region also in late October. On November 9 a sign appeared at the old Jewish cemetery in the town of Pušalotas in the Pasvalis region.

More information available in Lithuanian here.

2022-11-21

Germany’s National Day of Mourning

Germany’s National Day of Mourning was marked Sunday, November 13, at the military cemetery in Vingis Park in Vilnius.

In Germany, the second Sunday before Advent is known as Volkstrauertag, or the National Day of Mourning in English. This holiday commemorates everyone who has served in the armed forces of all nations, as well all of the civilians who have died during armed conflicts and oppression.

It’s a holiday that was first observed in its modern form during the 1950s but actually comes from a much older Prussian tradition. Although it’s a public holiday in Germany, it’s also categorized as Stiller Tag or a Day of Silence. That means that there may be restrictions on concerts, dances, and other such activities.

2022-11-15