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.

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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

Lithuanian PM Proposes Compensating Expropriated Jewish Private Property

Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė proposed the Lithuanian Government set up a 37-million euro fund to compensate the Jewish community for private property expropriated during World War II.

The fund would complement a previous initiative launched a decade ago which has paid out a similar amount of money to Lithuania’s Jewish community in compensation for seized communal property.

Under the Law on Goodwill Compensation adopted in 2011, Lithuania pledged to pay out over 37 million euros over a decade in compensation for the property of Jewish communities nationalized by totalitarian regimes.

Full story here.

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Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel Celebrates 90th Birthday

The Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel celebrated their 90th birthday November 9.

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Litvaks Who Came Back: An Exhibit

Kęstutis Grigaliūnas’s personal exhibit “Litvaks Who Came Back from the Nazi Concentration Camps” will open at the Museum of Photography in Šiauliai at 5:00 P.M. on November 10. Grigaliūnas is a recipient of Lithuania’s Culture and Art Prize.

Natalija Arlauskaitė is the curator of the exhibit. She’s a professor at the International Relations and Political Science Institute of Vilnius University.

The exhibit features photographs of 335 Lithuanian Jews who survived and returned from the concentration camps with brief bios. A book of the same name as the exhibit, actually the source of the exhibit, will be launched at the opening. The exhibit runs till December 18.

2022-11-08

World of Trakai Executed in Varnikai Forest: A Fancy Menorah, a Mad Mob and a Leather Briefcase

Photo: Trakai in 1952. From the personal collection of Algimantas Dočkus courtesy LRT.

by Rasa Kalinauskaitė

“Sir, I report that while inventorying the Jewish property taken to the synagogue I discovered seven fur coats suitable for police service. Three of them are of a yellow and unlined falling to below the knees, four are lined with cloth material, coming down to the knees. I request an order these fur coats be seized for police officers to wear as they perform their duties.”–from report by chief of Trakai police department to chief of district police, October 17, 1941.

I and a contingent of Trakai residents as well as two people who came from further off went on a tour of the Trakai Old Town, visiting sites recalling the Jews who lived here before World War II, stopping at former Jewish homes which are still standing. We became fellow travellers, in that those who toured Trakai in earlier times have shared their memories from many decades ago in the photographs they took, which show a town which has now completely changed. I wanted to share this with those who were not able to come, so I will attempt to describe this trip.

This is a journey through memory, because that same day, September 30, was the day in 1941 when the Jews of Trakai, Aukštadvaris, Lentvaris, Rūdiškės, Onuškis and Žydkaimis, 1,446 people of whom 597 were children, were murdered in Varnikai Forest.

Full article in Lithuanian here.

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Romany Language Day

November 5 is celebrated as International Romani Language Day by UNESCO, Croatia and by Roma and friends around the world. One’s mother tongue is an important element of identity maintaining community cohesion and the sense of belonging. The Lithuanian Jewish Community and partner organizations including Padėk Pritapti will hold a celebration of the international day at 5:30 P.M. on November 8 this year at the Bagel Shop Café at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. There will be readings from the Lithuanian Roma oral history archive and traditional song and dance. Participants will also receive postcards created by children containing a short Romany-Lithuanian vocabulary. The event is free and open to the public.

More information available here.

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Launch of Book about Herman Perelstein

Hermanas Perelšteinas, the founder of the Ąžuoliukas boys choir, is the subject of a new biography which will be launched at an event at the Lithuanian Music and Theater Academy (formerly known more simply as the Music Conservatory) at Gedimino prospect no. 42 in Vilnius at 5:00 P.M. on Friday, November 4.

The author Darius Krasauskas, also a reporter, translator and long-time member of the Ąžuoliukas choir, will present his new biography. He will be interviewed informally by Simonas Keblas, the director of the Vilnius Little Theater and also a long-time member of Ąžuoliukas.

This is the first longer work–about 400 pages–on Perelšteinas, presenting history and archival documents as well as recollections by friends and colleagues to paint a picture of Lithuania’s most famous choir master and his life during the Holocaust and in Soviet exile.

The event is free and open to the public.

2022-10-31

Grant Gochin Delivers Speech in Cape Town, October 27, 2022

Grant Gochin delivered the following remarks to an audience of about 200 people at the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre of the Green and Sea Point Hebrew Congregation in Cape Town in the early evening of October 27.

Hello, chaverim, friends, I am honored and delighted to be on my home soil, speaking to my own people. My Mishpocha. Thank you for coming. My sincere thanks to the organizers and attendees, and those who have kept me going in this cause.

Every Jewish person in this room has ancestry from Lithuania. Most of us here now, are alive because our families got out before Lithuanians were able to murder us. We are all who are left, to remember and speak the truth. Our families’ voices cannot be stilled through apathy or forgetfulness. Our families’ voices must be heard.

I became eager to find out about the “Old Country” from the stories and lessons of my paternal grandfather. More and more, I knew I had to walk those streets and see those forests.

I was the very first Jew to apply to Lithuania for citizenship. Three times, they rejected me for reasons even the Lithuanian Supreme Court ruled to be “absurd.” There were two sets of rules, one for real “ethnic” Lithuanians, and a separate queue for Litvaks. This simplified their process–automatic denial for Jews. I fought back.

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New Film Gives Voice to Lithuanian Holocaust Victims

by Tali Feinberg

When thinking about the Holocaust in Lithuania, some of us can only think about the horror from a distance or in small doses. But filmmaker Michael Kretzmer has made it his duty to look up close in a new documentary that exposes the depravity of the killing, and questions Lithuania’s Holocaust denial.

The documentary, to be released in Australia in November, looks at the “murder of children in front of parents; the smashing of babies’ skulls against trees; girls being loaded onto trucks for deadly rape parties by Lithuanian gangs; the imprisonment of thousands of Jews in their own synagogues and their murder either by fire or starvation and thirst amidst human filth and the stench of their loved ones’ rotting bodies; the beheadings; the immolations; and the thousands of lethal humiliations.”

This is what Kretzmer found over the past three years, during which his life was “entirely absorbed” in the making of the documentary that “attempts to tell the truth about the Lithuanian Holocaust.”

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