Jewish Cuisine – Page 18 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Businessman with Litvak Roots Has Successful Chain of Restaurants

The first time South African Litvak Robert Brozin came to Lithuania, he was most surprised by the fact it was in color. It sounds funny, one of the creators of the large restaurant chain Nando’s says, but that his first impression of the land of all four of his grandparents because he’d only seen Lithuania in black and white photographs before. When he cam back again for the fifth time in late March, he already had a number of interests going here, both business and representing the Litvak community in South Africa.

“Most Jews in South Africa have roots in Lithuania. There is a total of about 80,000 Jews here and I think about 95 percent have Lithuanian roots. It’s an interesting fact that the Jewish community in South Africa is very tight-knit, and the majority of Jews who have remained living in South Africa marry Jews from the community. My son is also married to a Litvak girl. We still maintain many Litvak traditions in the family and even have dishes from Lithuania…”

Purim in Panevėžys

The Panevėžys Jewish Community kicked off their Purim celebrations in the events hall of the Panevėžys Community Center March 20. Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman greeted a large party of guests from Vilnius, Ukmergė, Šiauliai and Panevežys and read an excerpt from Magilat Ester.

Artūras Taicas, deputy chairman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and chairman of the Ukmergė Jewish Community, greeted guests as well and passed on the good wishes of LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky. Panevėžys city deputy mayor Petras Luomanas and city council member Alfonsas Petrauskas also gave wonderful addresses.

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2016-03-23

Bagel Shop Café Purim Holiday Schedule

The kosher Bagel Shop Café of the Lithuanian Jewish Community is in full gear getting ready for the Purim holiday. There are several new pastry items the chefs there have cooked up, including the “red velvet” pastry taking the Jewish culinary internet by storm. Their special hamantashen recipe passed down through the generations uses yeast as well.

Senior chef Riva Portnaja says her family calls hamantashen “omentashen,” and that her mother always put yeast in the dough. According to her, Litvak hamantashen only contain poppy-seed fillings, and the triangular pastry is made so that is almost closed.

2016-03-23

What Would Queen Esther Eat Today?

Esther, the star of the Purim story, is one of the bravest heroines for so many reasons–she not only strategized to save the Persian Jews from certain death (breaking social norms in doing so), but she also maintained a kosher diet as an undercover Jew in the Persian palace. Wait, what?

Legend has it that like many Jews today, Esther kept kosher by avoiding things like non-kosher meat, and instead enjoyed a plant-based diet full of fresh produce, grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. For those of you with eating restrictions, you know how hard it is to turn down foods that everyone else is noshing!

In the story of Purim, food and celebration are central to her strategic success. In order to earn the favor of her husband, King Ahasuerus, she hosted two impressive (and probably extremely delicious!) banquets that set the stage for her requests of the King to save the Jews of Persia.

After all these years, delicious food and drink–like hamantaschen, Haman’s fingers, and plenty of wine–are essential parts of the celebration of Queen Esther and Purim.

If you’d like to party like Esther this Purim, click here for recipes.

2016-03-23

Hag Purim Sameach!

Purim is a happy time when sorrow, worry and fear take a vacation as the holiday of delicious food and jokes arrives. Purim is one of the most-anticipated and interesting of holidays on the Jewish calendar. It’s a celebration harkening back to the time when the Jews living in Persia were saved from destruction.

Book of Esther

The Purim story is contained in the Book of Esther in the Old Testament of the Bible. The heroine of the story is Ester, a beautiful young woman who lived in Persia, and the hero is her brother Mordecai. Ester was taken into the harem of king Ahasuerus and became queen, but the king didn’t know Ester was a Jew because she hid this from him. The villain of the story is Haman, the arrogant, egotistical vizier to the king. Haman hated Mordecai because he wouldn’t bow down and serve him, so Haman decided to destroy the Jewish people. In his well-known speech to the king, Haman said:

2016-03-22

Bagel Shop Café on Television

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The Catholic newspaper and website bernardai.lt now has a video outlet as well and has presented a feature on the new Bagel Shop Café located at the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius. The video presentation in Lithuanian, Hebrew and English features short conversations with Lithuania’s two new rabbis on the meaning of kosher food and cooking, as well as a brief interview with Smhuel Levin, the chairman of the Lithuanian Jewish Religious Community, among others.

To view the interview, please direct your browser here.

2016-03-07

Fayerlakh Concert and Bagel Shop at the Kaziukas Fair in Vilnius

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The opening of Vilnius’s annual street fair will feature a concert by the Jewish song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh, at 5:00 P.M. at the Vilnius Old Town Hall square. The group is promising a whole range of music and performances, including a traditional Sabbath prayer and song.

Don’t forget, the Bagel Shop Café will also be at the fair on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. LJC staff, members and volunteers are all invited to come and help sell Jewish bagels during the fair. It should be a lot of fun and this year the annual street fair will include a Jewish shtetl section.

2016-03-04

New Bagel Shop Opens with Great Expectations

Bagel shop, Vilnius, 1910, by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.

A new kosher café in Vilnius, Lithuania, had its grand opening Thursday with an overflow crowd spilling into the street.

The Bagel Shop café is housed on the first floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, which some visitors still refer to as the Kahilla, in a mostly neglected and empty cafeteria hall.

Guests and LJC staff began filtering in well before the scheduled 3 P.M. start and four cheerful women behind the counter began placing bagel sandwiches cut into quarters on plates on the café’s six small tables.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky addressed the small packed room and said the Bagel Shop Café is an important part of the Bagel Shop tolerance program the LJC has been carrying out for the last year or so with funding from Norway and the EEA Grants program. She said the project was supposed to end earlier but had been continued into the next year.

2016-02-04

The Smell of Fresh Jewish Bagels Returns to Vilnius

The Bagel Shop, a new kosher food café, opens its doors February 4. The café will prepare kosher food and different traditional sweets according to the rules of Judaism. The Bagel Shop’s main draw will be freshly-baked bagels and bagel sandwiches. Adhering to the strictest rules, the bagels will be made under the supervision of a rabbi versed in kosher food rules.

Bagels are a traditional European Jewish food product often referred to as a “baronka” in Lithuania in the past, and when cooked may be cut in half and made into a sandwich. The book Joy of Yiddish furnishes one version of the origin of the bagel, according to which the recipe for bagels was created in Cracow at the beginning of the 17th century, and that bagels were given then as gifts to women giving birth. The bagel was supposed to symbolize the “wheel of life” because of its roundness. The bagel’s popularity quickly grew and spread to other countries where Jews speaking Yiddish lived, and was quickly adopted in America, where today about five million bagels are baked daily!

2016-02-02

A Special Experience on Gastronomical Tour: Sabbath Dinner in Israel

Sometimes it happens that you fall in love with a country at first sight. You want to go there every year, to discover new places and experiences and new tastes there. That’s what happened to the wife of Lithuanian ambassador to Israel Darius Degutis, the passionate cook Nida Degutienė. After her return from a recent culinary tour of her favorite country, Nida said this kind of tourism provides visitors with the opportunity of entering local homes, experiencing daily life firsthand, sitting down at the same table with hosts and listening to their stories.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2016-01-22

Lithuanian Jewish Cookbook Wins Award in South Africa

Lietuvos rytas, Lithuania’s largest daily newspaper, reported the English translation of Nida Degutienė’s book “Izraelio skoniai: šventės ir kasdiena” has been awarded the title of best Jewish cookbook in South Africa for 2015. The translation was published as “A Taste of Israel: From Classic Litvak to Modern Israel” by Struik Lifestyle, a division of Penguin Random House South Africa, in 2015. The Lithuanian book was published by the author in 2014.

The newspaper didn’t specify who issued the award, but said the cookbook would compete as a South African entry at World Cookbook Awards 2015 ceremony to be held May 28 in Yantai, China.

Nida Degutienė is the wife of former Lithuanian ambassador to Israel Darius Degutis. She presented her cookbook at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on Friday, April 24, 2015, as the final speech at a celebration of the 67th anniversary of Israeli independence.

2016-01-15

Pre-War Cookbook Becomes Best Seller

Did you know Fania Lewando operated an extremely popular vegetarian restaurant between the two world wars in Vilnius, a city which had few vegetarians? Diners included Marc Chagall and Itzik Manger, the Yiddish writer, who also left their impressions in the restaurant’s guest book.

The restaurant owner also had a cooking school and kept her healthy and tasty vegetarian recipes in her personal recipe book. It was long thought that book was lost following her death, but it unexpectedly resurfaced at an antiquarian book sale and became an international best seller. Now it has appeared in Lithuanian as well.

2016-01-13

Remembering the Holocaust Victims of Panevėžys

The Panevėžys (Ponevezh) Jewish Community has compiled a small book called “Nežudysi” [“You Will Not Kill Us”]. It contains information gathered from issues of the newspaper “Išlaisvintas Panevėžietis” [“Liberated Ponevezher”] published in the early years of World War II. The surviving articles allow us to reconstruct images from the tragic moments the Ponevezh Jewish community experienced at that time. A new city administration was formed in June, 1941, which was led by a commandant and the Nazis. Very quickly a so-called Jewish Quarter was established through which passed more than 13,000 Jews. The ghetto lasted 40 days. All of its inmates were murdered so quickly and efficiently that even now it is impossible to make complete lists of the victims. The book also discusses the small portion of the Jewish population which managed to escape during the first days of war. It also details Jewish property in Panevėžys and its seizure, mass murder sites and Jewish cemeteries. The chapter called “Gatvės vaiduokliai” [“Ghosts of the Street”] tells the story of Joint Street, which the new city administration renamed June 22nd Street in the desire of pleasing the Nazi occupiers. There is also much space devoted to the Righteous Gentiles of Panevėžys who risked their lives to save entire families of Jews. The last part of the book provides a list of documents and articles at Lithuanian archives and libraries awaiting scholarly attention. The text is printed on a red background symbolizing the spilling of the blood of innocents to focus the reader’s attention on the meaning of the text. A ceremony to present the new book is scheduled for January 29, 2016 in Panevėžys.

2015-12-31

Review of Mini Limmud Conference 2015

Organizer Žana Skudovičienė at the podium at Mini Limmud 2015.

The Mini Limmud conference is a large educational and entertainment event for Jewish families. The three-day program with overnight stays and entertainment at a hotel was instituted so that everyone might find something of interest and importance in learning about Jewish history, traditions, religion, Yiddish culture and current events. This year the organizer was Žana Skudovičienė. Responses by participants were positive and they expressed their thanks as well as a preference for more interesting speakers next year. Organizer Skudovičienė said they hadn’t been able to invite all the speakers they wanted this year.

“It’s hard for me to evaluate my success because this was the first year I was the organizer,” Skudovičienė said. “Junona Berznitski organized all the earlier Limmuds and I just participated as an MC, and I just had to worry about my clothes and appearance, create some scenes and write a text. But now it was a great challenge for me. I met all the potential speakers and selected only the most interesting people. These all agreed to participate, but there were others who wanted to participate but couldn’t because of plans made earlier. People requested we get reporter Viktor Topaller but everything was limited by funding. We were in touch with Viktoras Šenderovičius who wanted to come but couldn’t, but plans to next time. I wanted to find more Judaism and Jewish history experts, not necessarily from outside the country. Giedrius Jakubauskis delivered an extremely interesting presentation. Attendees were happy with the presentation of Saulius Šaltenis’s new book “Žydų Karalaitės dienoraštis” [“Diary of a Jewish Princess”]. They bought up all the copies of the book brought to Limmud, and we might have brought more from the publisher.”

Conference participants enjoyed meeting Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon and were eager to learn about Israeli current events. There was a real discussion and people were concerned with why Israel always seems to be at the losing end of the propaganda war in the media. There wasn’t enough time for a comprehensive answer from the ambassador, but we hope to continue this discussion at the Community.

2015-12-30

New Bagel Shop Magazine On-Line

The Bagel Shop newsletter is now a magazine and is available on-line in three languages, Lithuanian, English and Russian.

In this issue we present an interview with Laurina Todesaitė about Jewish cuisine, an excursion through the world of Jewish botanists in the inter-war period, a tour of Jewish Vilna, a new questions section and a new Mystery Photograph contest as well as all the usual columns.

2015-12-01