Klaipėda residents were treated to fictional historical plays in situ and Rosh Hashana treats as part of European Days of Jewish Culture events in the Lithuanian port city September 10. A series of skits were performed in the Old Town by the Šatil theater troupe depicting Jewish experience, daily life, triumphs and misfortunes in the interwar period. This was followed by a presentation of Jewish folklore at the Puppet Theater in Klaipėda, formerly known as Memel under East Prussian rule.
by Arkadijus Vinokuras, LRT.lt, September 5, 2023
With great pomp the de-Sovietization law has been released into public circulation. Correction: the law bans the propagation of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and ideology in any form. The law allows for the removal of symbols of both authoritarian ideological from public spaces.
Nonetheless, the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania [hereinafter Genocide Center] and the worshipers of Nazi collaborators arrayed around that institution are standing shoulder to shoulder when it comes to the removal of symbols from the period of the Nazi occupation. When Genocide Center historian Alfredas Rukšėnas cynically called for respecting the feelings of those who honor the murderer Juozas Krikštaponis, the question arose of whether Lithuania isn’t being guided by a broken moral compass.
The worship of Nazi collaborators is a method by which Lithuania’s radical right-wingers push their pro-fascist and authoritarian ideas on society and put a stop to historical truth. At the same time, attempting to hide their obvious affiliation with the Nazis, they beat their chests crying out they are against anti-Semitism, respect victims of the Holocaust, condemn Nazis and fascists, but still they worship these “heroes” who called for a fascist revolution in Lithuania. Who called for getting rid of the Jews and murdering them.
Full text in Lithuanian here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community was gratified to see so many young people attend European Days of Jewish Culture events held in Ukmergė (Vilkomir) last Tuesday. A large number of local residents and a delegation of 62 students from Israel attended events including a reading of the names of Holocaust victims from the area.
The Lithuanian town where about half of all households spoke Yiddish until World War II had multiple working synagogues, a Jewish hospital, Jewish schools and other Jewish institutions. Ukmergė Jewish Community chairman Artūras Taicas introduced local Holocaust survivor Elena Jakiševa, said to be the only Jew from Vilkomir to survive the Holocaust, to participants who were keen to hear everything she had to say. Chairman Taicas said it was important for the current generation of young people to learn from living witnesses without distortion and suppression.
This year the Švenčionys Regional Jewish Community will commemorate the 80th anniversary of the largest mass murder operation in the Švenčionys district on October 1. Švenčionys Regional Jewish Community chairman Moshe Shapiro invites everyone to attend.
Program:
11:00 A.M. Remembrance ceremony at the Menorah statue in the Švenčionys city central park;
12:00 noon Opening of new exhibit at the Nalšia Museum;
1:00 P.M. Remembrance ceremony at the mass murder site in Platumai village in the Švenčionėliai rural district.
The Panevėžys Jewish Community will hold a series of ceremonies on Friday, September 22, to remember the victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Participants will gather at the Sad Jewish Mother monument on Memory Square in Panevėžys located at Vasario 16-osios street next to the Vyturis pre-gymnasium.
Program:
2:00 P.M. Opening ceremony, wreath- and stone-laying at the monument, addresses;
2:40 P.M. Travel to the mass murder site in Kurganava Forest where approximately 8,000 Ponevezh Jews were murdered;
3:30 P.M. Travel to Žalioji Forest where approximately 5,000 Ponevezh Jews were murdered;
5:00 P.M. Conference and screening of Holocaust films from Yad Vashem at the Panevėžys Jewish Community located at Ramygalos street no. 18 followed by coffee and tea.
Everyone is invited to attend any and all of these events.
The Klaipėda Jewish Community will present a program of events to celebrate European Days of Jewish Culture beginning Sunday afternoon on September 10 at the Klaipėda Jewish Community located at Sinagogų street no. 13 in the port city.
The Shtatil theater troupe is to perform a play about Jewish stories and events in Klaipėda city and district, formerly known under East Prussian rule as Memel and Memelland (or Memelgebiet), respectively. The performance won’t be confined to the theater: players promise a tour through the city to illustrate the fictional stories about Jewish life which could have happened there.
The play concludes at the Klaipėda Puppet Theater at Turgaus street no. 9, followed there by a presentation of more Jewish stories, namely fairy tales, for the whole family, narrated by Klaipėda Jewish Theater director Nerijus Gedminas and actors.
#EDJC2023 #Atmintis #Memory #AEPJ #UNESCO #Lietuvos žydų bendruomenė ##KlaiėdosŽydųBendromenė #OurCommunities
The Šiauliai Regional Jewish Community invites the public to an open house this Friday as part of the Šiauliai Days currently being celebrated. This is an opportunity to learn more about what the Community does and Šiauliai (Shavl) Jewish traditions, and to tour the interior as well as the museum, to get to know members and to view the exhibition “Wooden Synagogues of Lithuania.”
Time: 11:00 P.M., Friday, August 8
Location: Šiauliai Regional Jewish Community, Višinskio street no. 24, Šiauliai
After a great start in Vilnius, the European Days of Jewish Culture move on to Vilkomir (Ukmergė) with a series of interesting and perhaps moving events. The two-day program promises to enrich the public’s knowledge of Jewish culture and hopefully to teach them about the rich Jewish heritage inherent in their local area.
At 2:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 7, there will be a reading of the names of Holocaust victims at the location where the Great Synagogue once stood in Vilkomir (Vienuolyno street no. 2).
At 7:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 7, the Ukmergė Tolerance Center (Vasario 16-osios street no. 11) will open an exhibit of photography by Jurga Jackevičiūtė called “Įmelsta žemė” [Pierced Land] including a presentation by the photographer of her trips to Jerusalem.
At 5:00 P.M. on Friday, September 8, the Ukmergė Tolerance Center will screen a documentary film by Loic Salfati called “Secrets of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius” which includes documented historical facts, a large number of interviews and findings from archaeological digs at the site of the former Grand Synagogue in 2019 and 2021 to tell the hitherto little-known true history of the synagogue which mostly survived the Holocaust and World War II only to be razed in the 1950s. There will be a discussion with the French filmmaker following the screening.
The first Sunday in September is the traditional time to commemorate the Jewish victims murdered in the Holocaust in the Pivonija Forest outside Vilkomir (Ukmergė) and this year marked the 82nd anniversary of the mass murder. As usual, the commemoration began at 12 noon.
Members of the Ukmergė Jewish Community and fellow Jews from the Vilnius and Kaunas communities gathered at the mass murder site for the ceremony.
Also attending the ceremony were Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein, American embassy chargé d’affaires Tamir Wasser, UK ambassador Brian Olley, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas, Ukmergė regional administration mayor Darius Varnas and others.
Ukmergė Jewish Community chairman Artūras Taicas initiated the ceremony, saying: “Every year we remember this tragedy, we gather here not only to honor the dead, but also in order to ensure this tragedy never happens again, and with the aim of telling the truth about the tragic events of 1941.”
by Arkadijus Vinokuras, Times of Israel, September 2, 2023
Director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania [hereinafter Genocide Center] Arūnas Bubnys in refusing to carry out the decision from the so-called De-Sovietization Commission to remove a monument commemorating murderer of Jews Juozas Krikštaponis, under pressure from public anger, has ordered the municipal administration of Ukmergės [Vilkomir] to remove the bas-relief image and name of Juozas Krikštaponis and to rededicate the monument to local Lithuanian partisans.
Finally, some initiative has been shown, although the law was grossly violated. Nonetheless, the issue of what influence the National Unification Party [Nacionalinis susivienijimas] and other interest groups have over Genocide Center commemorative policies remains unanswered.
The situation is absurd: Genocide Center director Arūnas Bubnys acting as sovereign has come up with his own pseudo-rules and has refused for months to follow the order from the De-Sovietization Commission, an order which, according to Lithuanian law, must be carried out within 5 days.
Photo: Jews in the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania are boarded onto trucks during a deportation action to a work camp c. 1942 (Image: US Holocaust Memorial Museum)
by Justin Amler, August 30, 2023
Our People: Discovering Lithuania’s Hidden Holocaust
by Rūta Vanagaitė and Efraim Zuroff
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 240 pp., A$49.99
Under the terms of the secret protocols of the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in June 1940. After the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union, Lithuania was occupied by the Germans in June 1941.
Caught in the middle were the country’s Jews.
Our People is a book about a journey in search of truth in the face of authorities who want to take that truth and distort it into something quite different.
One of the greatest myths of the Holocaust was that it was Hitler and the Nazis alone who committed the atrocities against the Jews. But this is, at best, misleading. While the Nazis were the driving force behind the genocide of the Jewish people, they could not have succeeded without the collaboration of willing local citizens across many countries.
Yesterday was the 82th anniversary of the annihilation of the Jewish community of Keydan (Kėdainiai). Jews from the city of Keydan and the small towns of Šėta and Žeimiai were murdered at Daukšai village near Keydan in 1941. This mass murder operation targeted 2076 people in total with 710 men, 767 women and 599 children brutally massacred for being born Jewish. The Keydan Jewish community had lived in the area for 300 years before this.
The commemoration ceremony took place at the mass murder site, followed by a presentation at the City of Kėdainiai’s Multicultural Center of Aron Pik’s book Notes from the Valley of the Slaughter. Translator of the book Andrew Cassel also participated, as did Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas and a representative from Lithuania’s International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Regimes in Lithuania.
The Nechama Lifshitz Song Contest is back and scheduled for several days in mid-September. A big hit last year, we expect it will draw even more attention this third time around.
Nechama, or Nekhama according to a stricter transcription, was an amazing Yiddish-language songstress sometimes called the Jewish Nightingale who began her professional career in Vilnius and Kaunas, going on to fame in the Soviet Union and world renown with concert tours abroad.
The best voices from Lithuania and abroad will meet at the Lithuanian Music and Theater Academy performance hall from 11:00 A.M. till 6:00 P.M. on September 17. The hall is located at Tilto street no. 16 in central Vilnius. That same evening Jazz Cellar 11 at Aušros vartų street no. 11 in Vilnius will host popular music vocalists starting at 8:00 P.M.
On September 18 there will be a concert performed by prize winners at the Old Town Hall in Vilnius starting at 6:00 P.M. The same evening the party continues at Jazz Cellar 11 with the closing ceremony for the song contest.
“I grew up in a Jewish setting. We lit candles during Hanukkah as did everyone, we ate home cooking. Only now, thinking about how that food was prepared, so I realize this was kosher food. We were surrounded by Jews, Jews came over as guests, when you got sick it was Jews who treated you. When I was small I didn’t even know things could be any other way. I only saw girls dressed colorfully next to the Gates of Dawn in Vilnius, and I wanted those kinds of clothes, too, but my grandmother wouldn’t let me, saying only Polish girls dressed that way,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman and attorney Faina Kukliansky recalled about her early childhood.
“Later on life changed, school, studies, new people, new homes where you couldn’t keep chickens with their legs tied as in my grandmother’s kitchen. One important thing, however, didn’t change: the Yiddish language which we used at home, all our relatives and closest friends…” …
Simas Levinas will deliver a lesson in basic Yiddish at 11:00 A.M. on September 3 in the kitchen of the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius. Everyone is welcome to attend the free event which is part of the European Day of Jewish Culture celebrations in Lithuania.
You’re invited to a presentation and discussion of the book “Вильнюсский еврейский Народный театр 1971-1999” [Vilnius Jewish Folk Theater 1971-1999] with the author Betsalel “Tsalik” Frank from Israel. Boris Kirzner will serve as moderator for the Russian-language event. Following the event, the author will invite the audience to share a glass of wine and celebrate Sabbath together. The event will take place in the Jascha Heifetz Hall at the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius at 6:00 P.M. on Friday, September 8.
The entire Lithuanian Jewish Community wishes Fayerlakh director Laurisa Vyšniauskienė a very happy birthday. May your days be filled with health, appreciation of your important work, talented people and many happy moments. Mazl tov. Bis 120!
A stone stele marking the site of the synagogue which once served the Jewish community in Balbirishok (Balbieriškis) was unveiled in the small Lithuanian town last week.
Attending the unveiling ceremony were Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas, US embassy chief of mission William Kendrick, Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein, educational program coordinator of the International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania Ingrida Vilkienė, representatives of the Prienai regional administration and the Balbieriškis aldermanship and a large contingent of local residents and students from the Balbieriškis primary school’s Tolerance Center.
LJC chairwoman Kukliansky welcomed the audience and said she was impressed and pleased the truly significant role played by Litvaks in the history of the town was being remembered and appreciated.
September 3rd is coming. The first Sunday in autumn, the day the Lithuanian Jewish Community will again celebrate the European Day of Jewish Culture, a day the Community has celebrated for a decade now. As in previous years, all events across Europe to celebrate the day are modeled on a general theme. This year it’s memory. This topic is like a bridge leading to the Jewish cultural legacy which remains to a great extent unknown by the wider population. #Atmintis or Memory doesn’t end on the first Sunday in September, of course, and in September and October the Lithuanian Jewish Community will hold and coordinate events throughout Lithuania.
Below you’ll find the events program for September 3, all of which are free and open to everyone.
Register here: https://bit.ly/459c4nZ
#EŽKD2023 #EDJC2023 #Atmintis #AEPJ #LietuvosŽydų(litvakų)Bendruomenė #CviParkas #BeigeliųKrautuvėlė Kultūros Paveldo Departamentas Tautinių mažumų departamentas prie Lietuvos Respublikos Vyriausybės #mūsųbendruomenės #OurCommunities
This Sunday’s quiz will test your knowledge of Litvak artists, their influence on art history, what stands out in their work and why Litvak artists are important on the world stage. Prizes are to include falafels, wine and other goodies. It all takes place starting at 5:00 P.M. on Sunday, August 20, at the Israeli street food kiosk in Petras Cvirka Square across the street from the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius. Everyone is welcome.
by Grant Gochin
Fearing stigmatization and persecution, Lithuanian rescuers of Jews awarded the “Righteous among the Nations” designation, often hid it from their neighbors and family members for decades. Today, the Lithuanian Government honors these Rescuers on a national level (as they should have from the very beginning). Unfortunately, the Lithuanian honors are not sincere and are just another performance. Jewish people who were saved are reduced to vehicles for Lithuanian virtue signaling.
“Righteous Among Nations” Lithuanians comprised only 0.04% of the Lithuanian population. These genuine heroes are now used by the State as an alibi for anyone who is Lithuanian, i.e. the 0.04% are presented to the public as the stereotypical norm, while the 99.96% of Lithuanians who were not “Righteous Among Nations”, are negated or their deeds rewritten. This is clear Holocaust distortion.
Krikštaponis
The case of Juozas Krikštaponis is far more illustrative of Lithuania then, and now. Krikštaponis was a vicious, genocidal murderer. But, he “only” murdered Jews. So, for Lithuania this is not any impediment to national honors. Lithuania honors so many murderers of Jews, that it appears this could be a standard for national hero status.