Faina Kukliansky Interviewed by Lithuanian Media on Yom haAtzma’ut
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky was interviewed by Lithuanian publicist Donatas Puslys on Yom haAtzma’ut, Israeli independence day, and spoke about what the holiday means to Jews in Lithuania, to her personally and to Jews around the world. She also spoke about the Holocaust, Litvaks living in Israel, the promise Eretz Israel held out to Soviet Jews and the country’s progress over the last 72 years. The interview was conducted in Lithuanian but concludes with warm wishes in Yiddish.
Yom haAtzma’ut, Israeli Independence Day
Israelis began celebrating 72 years of statehood this year by greeting medical personnel. A torch-lighting ceremony began without an audience in honor of Israel’s doctors, nurses, care-givers, hospital staff and volunteers who have been fighting the Wuhan virus, with many fireworks displays and hospital fly-overs by the Israeli Air Force canceled.
Most Israelis marked Independence Day at home.
Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu addressed the nation in a video saying “We’ve never celebrated this kind of Independence Day. We are in a physical sense far from one another, but we’ve never been closer.” Praising hospital workers Netanyahu added “The day will come when embraces return… But we still can’t do this because the pandemic is still here.”
Knesset speaker Benny Gantz lit a torch on the eve of Independence Day and spoke of national unity, saying Israelis must prepare for even more difficult days, and called for creating “a new moral face of the country.”
Condolences
Moshe Kukliansky has died at the age of 97 in Israel. He was the head of the Kukliansky family and was the uncle of Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
Our deepest condolences to his children Alexander, Zinaida, Liliiana, niece Faina, the multitude of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and the entire family.
Moshe Kukliansky was a chemist, a witness to Litvak history and a Holocaust survivor. Faina recalls: “Our big family has lost a noble person who survived the Holocaust and was a great witness to Litvak history, a chemist and a just man filled with the law. That’s what he liked to call other people. After my grandmother Zinaida–the mother of Moshe, Samuel and Anna–was murdered and Moshe was forced to work for local farmers, when he came home my father Samuel used to grab his hands and kiss him. Moshe asked ‘What are you so happy about? Our mother is dead.’ My father, who was 11 then, replied ‘I’m happy you’re still here.’ For me, my children and grandchildren, Moshe was like a father and a grandfather, just as all my aunts and uncles were like parents to me, and cousins like brothers and sisters. It is very sad that our last family member of the older generation has passed away.”
Moshe Kukliansky’s telling of the dramatic story of the family’s survival during the Holocaust was immortalized several years back in a film called the Pit of Life and Torment (Gyvybės ir kančių duobė).
Yom HaZikaron, Israeli Memorial Day
Yom haZikaron is the day Israel marks to honor its fallen soldiers, victims of terrorism and all who have died defending the state of Israel. According to the Jewish reckoning of time, it began on the evening of April 27 this year at around 8:00 P.M. and lasts until the evening of the next day.
President Rivlin spoke in the square in front of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and said it was sad there couldn’t be a mass public commemoration because of the virus epidemic. He said while we can’t cry together, we still remember and give honor to the 23,861 soldiers and victims of terrorism.
In Israel the commemorative holiday begins with an air-raid siren. People simply stop whatever they are doing and give honor to the dead. Those driving pull over and get out of their cars. All commercial activity ceases and people at the dinner table stop eating and sit in silence.
Virtual Lectures: Escape from Ponar and Jacques Lipchitz’s Memories of Lithuania
Please note: the ZOOM platform used for the virtual lectures below is widely known to be unsafe and is considered spyware by competent observers, deployed most likely by China. It can usurp control of cameras and microphones on your computer and telephone. Its use is banned by the U.S. military and U.S. government organizations. The Lithuanian Jewish Community takes no responsibility for those infected by clicking the links below.
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The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum is sponsoring two virtual lectures called “Story of Escape from Ponar” and “Lithuania in Jacques Lipchitz’s Reminiscences.”
“I am a sculptor from Lithuania,” Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) used to say to introduce himself at openings of his works in museums and galleries around the world, even though Lithuania had disappeared from the world map when these shows took place. Sculpture and memorial heritage researcher Aušra Rožankevičiūtė talks about Lipchitz’s image of Lithuania and his contacts with Lithuanian artists and thinkers.
Happy 100th Birthday to Eta Gurvčiūtė
Happy birthday to Eta Gurvčiūtė as she turns 100. Lithuanian Jewish Community member Eta Gurvčiūtė turned 100 April 27. Clear of mind, with no health complaints and her beautiful smile, she is busy receiving greetings and congratulations today. She was graduated from the Sholem Aleichem Gymnasium before World War II.
Many of our other seniors remember Eta because she volunteered at the medical center of the LJC for so many years, later becoming a client herself. She spends her time these days at the Social Care House for Seniors in Vilnius now.
To celebrate her milestone, the LJC is planning a Fayerlakh concert for everyone at her senior citizens’ home. ALthough she’s celebrating her birthday under strict quarantine at the senior center, the Lithuanian Jewish Center tried to send her a present anyway. We managed to have a vase of flowers and a card delivered.
True Meaning of Leonard Cohen’s Love Song
by Ruth Reches
Most people probably know the song “Dance Me to the End of Love” written in 1984 by Leonard Cohen. Many people consider it a love song with its up and down melody. Leonard Cohen, however, wrote the song as a hymn to death.
Consider the first line in the song: ”
Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin.”
When prisoners at some concentration camps were selected for and taken to be murdered, a group of prisoners played violins to mask the sounds of people being slaughtered. The classical music performed erased the border between beauty and the horrific, between life and death.
EBRD Awards Grigoriy Kanovich’s Book Devilspel European Literature Prize
From Noir Press:
PRESS RELEASE
April 22, 2020
Lithuanian author wins €20,000 Literature Prize from European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
The UK publishing house Noir Press is delighted Lithuanian Jewish author Grigory Kanovich has just won the €20,000 EBRD Literature Prize, a prestigious award celebrating literature in translation.
The prize, normally awarded at Bank headquarters in London, was awarded virtually this year because of the quarantine announced by the UK Government. The award was announced on Twitter on April 22.
Rosie Goldsmith, chairwoman of the panel of judges for this year’s prize, said the winning novel “is sincere, it is warm, it is generous. It has the feeling of a very great classic.”
Yom haShoah Holocaust Commemoration Day Marked around the World
The traditional air-raid siren will announce the beginning of the Jewish day and the beginning of Yom haShoah throughout Israel at 7:45 P.M. on April 20. Yom haShoah–the Day of the Shoah–is one of several days commemorating the victims of the Holocaust and the most important of the commemorative days in Israel.
At 10:00 A.M. on Tuesday, April 21, the Lithuanian Jewish Community invites all to visit the LJC facebook page to mark the day with us via internet. We are asking everyone to observe a minute of silence for the victims when the siren sounds. The LJC facebook page is here.
Yad Vashem is asking people to take part in international readings of the names of victims and to post video using the hashtags #RememberingFromHome and #ShoahNames. More information on the Yad Vashem initiative here.
March of the Living: the annual march from Auschwits to Birkenau is taking place this year at 7:00 P.M. Lithuanian time on April 21, 2020. It will include recollections by Holocaust victims and an address by Israeli president Reuven Rivlin. The event will be broadcast live here.
The Holocaust Center for Humanity, the Holocaust education center in Seattle, will hold a virtual event at 12 noon Pacific Daylight Time on April 21. More information here.
For more events around the world, see here.
Yom Ha’Shoah: Local EU Statement
Dear friends and colleagues,
On the occasion of Yom HaShoah, let me share with you the joint statement by the Ambassador of the European Union to the State of Israel and the Ambassadors of all European Union member states represented in Israel:
“The Delegation of the European Union (EU) to the State of Israel, together with the 26 Embassies of EU Member States present in Israel, remember and pay tribute to the six million Jews who were murdered, on European soil, more than seven decades ago.
We join Jewish communities worldwide in commemorating the individual lives that were lost in the unimaginable tragedy of the Shoah, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters; in cherishing the survivors among us so that their experiences are not forgotten. As Shimon Peres has said: “We are their eyes that remember. We are their voice that cries out.”
Jewish Vilnius 1990
German TV, also shown on Israel Channel 2, captures the early days of the revival of the Jewish Community in Lithuania in 1990. First Jewish organizations. Grigory Kanovich’s “Jewish Daisy”: to stay or to leave.
Condolences
The Lithuanian Jewish Community extends our deepest condolences to the friends and family of noted writer and producer Felix Dektor who passed away at the age of 89 in Jerusalem. He was born December 21, 1930, in Minsk to a family of Litvaks. He lived there until being evacuated to the Ukraine and then Siberia during the Holocaust.
Graduated from the History and Philology Faculty of Vilnius University in 1955, Dektor continued studies at the Gorky Institute of Literature in Moscow including in Lev Ozerov’s literary translation seminar. Dektor translated a number of Lithuanian writers into Russian, including books by Justinas Marcinkevičius, Juozas Požėra, Alfonsas Bieliauskis and Mykolas Sluckis. His best-known translations were perhaps the novels of Icchokas Meras on Jewish death and valor during the Holocaust (Ничья длится мгновенье (Вечный шах) and На чём держится мир).
Dektor was removed from the Writers’ Union of the Soviet Union in 1975 in response to his publication and distribution of the Jewish cultural and educational magazine Tarbut.
Defiant Zionist Spirit of the Bergen-Belsen DP Camp
by Menachem Z. Rosensaft, associate executive vice-president and general counsel, World Jewish Congress
When the remnant of European Jewry emerged from the death camps, forests and hiding places throughout Europe in the winter and spring of 1945, they looked for their families and, overwhelmingly, discovered that their fathers and mothers, their husbands, wives and children, their brothers and sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins had all been murdered by the Germans and their accomplices. Yet they did not give in to despair.
On the contrary, in Displaced People camps throughout Germany, Austria and Italy, the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, who could easily have given up on humankind, dramatically returned to life–spiritually, physically, culturally, and socially. Instead of allowing themselves to remain the prisoners of a horrific past, they looked toward the future, married, started new families, and proved, if only to themselves, that they had not only remained alive but that they had, in fact, prevailed. I am one of more than 2,000 children who were born in Bergen-Belsen, the largest of the DP camps, between 1945 and 1950.
Simultaneously, the survivors’ affirmation of their Jewish national identity took the form of a political and spiritually redemptive Zionism. The creation of a Jewish state in what was then called Palestine was far more than a practical goal. It was the one ideal that had not been destroyed, and that allowed them to retain the hope that an affirmative future, beyond gas chambers, mass-graves and ashes, was still possible for them.
Full article here.
WJC Yom HaShoah Commemorative Ceremony April 20
Dear Friends,
This year Yom HaShoah will be very different.
For the first time ever there will be no commemorative ceremonies bringing people together physically in solemn reflection held around the world.
Whilst we are of course all preoccupied with the effect that the COVID-19 corona virus pandemic is having on our lives, we still feel that it is important to mark this day and pay our respects to the victims of the Holocaust.
We Did It, We Got Matzo to Our Seniors
Two weeks ago the Community accepted the challenge to distribute and home-deliver more matzo to more than 900 seniors living in Vilnius. Today we can truly say, mission accomplished.
It would have been mission impossible without the help of our volunteers who heeded the Community’s call for help. We had from 3 to 4 teams of Community staff and volunteers on the street daily.
The distribution of matzo took place so very smoothly because we were able to harness so many who offered to help.
A mitzvah should be done quietly and without fanfare, but the Community has a right to know who its heroes are.
Menachem Rosensaft Sends Passover Greetings
Dear Friends,
I want to wish all of you and yours a peaceful and health-filled Pesach. May we all succeed in adapting to the pandemic crisis sufficiently to have meaningful Seders, in many (most) cases connecting remotely to family members who should have been sitting with us.
In advance of Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, I also want to share with you a video that the World Jewish Congress produced, in cooperation with the World Federation of Bergen-Belsen Associations, (WFBBA) about the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the Belsen Displaced Persons camp, and the more than 2,000 children born in the DP camp’s Glyn Hughes Hospital:
https://youtu.be/Jv9M0yvi_J0
I hope that the example of the survivors’ resilience, determination and optimism as they emerged from the horrors of the Holocaust will inspire us at this difficult and anxious time. Please feel free to share the video widely.
I am also pleased to share with you a second video, also produced by the WJC together with the WFBBA, based on the beautiful photography of Debbie Morag featuring daughters of Auschwitz survivors:
https://youtu.be/b_PrrHLp8U4
Again, I wish you and yours a peaceful, health-filled Pesach.
With all warm regards,
Menachem
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Menachem Z. Rosensaft (born 1948 in Bergen-Belsen, Germany) an attorney in New York and the Founding Chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Survivors, is a leader of the Second Generation movement of children of survivors,[1] and has been described on the front page of the New York Times as one of the most prominent of the survivors’ sons and daughters.
Panic and Contempt
by Arkadijus Vinokuras
When the heads of state lack any experience managing crises, panic envelops society. When leaders try to compensate for their lack of ability through dictatorial means, they demonstrate contempt for society. It’s pointless to blame Lithuanian health minister Aurelijus Veryga for changing his directives several times daily. He was appointed by those who have no experience themselves, and who are therefore unable to manage the crisis effectively. It seems they don’t really understand human lives are at stake. And freedom.
On panic. Seeking somehow to demonstrate the abilities he doesn’t have, health minister Veryga even donned military costume. He seems to have wandered into the tragicomic league of Don Quixote by attempting to fight the virus this way. Where you’re not sure whether to laugh or cry. If he had served in the military even at the level of lieutenant, he would know how orders are issued by a military commander. They would be based–and this is the crucial matter–on emergency management scenarios drawn up by the military leadership. But from the very first days of the spread of the virus in Lithuania it was completely clear the Lithuanian Peasants/Green Union Government is not following any emergency management plan.
The minister who has turned himself into a laughing stock with his military uniform should at least understand in a general way that an order by a military commander first indicates the prevailing situation in the theater of war. It indicates the time frame. It also enumerates enemy forces and our own forces, e.g., what we have and what we don’t have. Only then comes the definition of missions.
Genocide Center Wins Case Demanding Retraction of Jonas Noreika Finding
The Lithuanian Telegraphic Agency ELTA reports the Lithuanian Supreme Administrative Court dismissed a suit lodged by US-resident Litvak Grant Gochin against the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania.
ELTA reports said the panel of judges rejected Grant Gochin’s demand the Genocide Center retract an historical finding they issued earlier on the person of Jonas Noerika during a hearing on April 1.
The court’s finding isn’t subject to appeal. The court also obliged Gochin to pay additional court costs to the Genocide Center.
Gochin was appealing a finding issued by the Vilnius District Administrative Court on March 27, 2019, in favor of the Genocide Center.
Full text in Lithuanian here.
Thank You for Helping LJC Seniors
Lithuanian Jewish Community administrative secretary Liuba Šerienė would like to send a big thank-you to Social Department director Michailas Segalas and staff members Ema Jakobienė, Ninel Skudovičiūtė, Rokas Dobrovolskis and Neringa Stankevičienė and colleagues, and to Michailas Tarasovas, Aušra, Snieguolė, Danutė Lena, Žana and Sonia for their great work helping our Social Department clients and senior citizens. Thank you so very much.