The Lithuanian Jewish Community notes with sadness the death of Bernard Lown on February 16, 2021. He was born in Utena, Lithuania, on June 7, 1921, to Nisson Lown and Bella Lown née Grossbard and lived in Lithuania till he was 14. Bernard Lown passed away following a long struggle with illness at his home near Boston just a few months before his 100th birthday. He made major achievements in cardiology and was the founder of the group Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War which was awarded the Nobel peace prize for opposing nuclear proliferation in 1985.
Litvak Anti-War Activist, Cardiologist Bernard Lown Dead at 99
Photo: NYTimes.com
BOSTON (AP)–Dr. Bernard Lown, the Massachusetts cardiologist who invented the first reliable heart defibrillator and later co-founded an anti-nuclear war group who were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, died Tuesday at the age of 99.
The Boston Globe reported the Lithuanian-born doctor’s health had been declining from congestive heart failure. He died at his home near Boston.
Lown was a professor at Harvard College and physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. He advanced cardiac treatment.
He was one of the first doctors to emphasize diet and exercise in treating heart disease, and introduced the drug lidocaine as a treatment for arrhythmia, the Globe reports. In 1962 Lown invented the direct-current defibrillator, or cardioverter, which uses electric shocks to get the heart to resume beating.
He was also an outspoken social activist, founding Physicians for Social Responsibility in 1960 and later co-founding International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in the 1980s, the newspaper reports.
The international anti-war group called for a moratorium on testing and building nuclear weapons. They were awarded the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness about the consequences of nuclear war during the height of Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. At its peak the group had more than 200,000 members and chapters in more than 60 countries.
Full obituary here.
A Tale of Two Statues
In remembrance of signatories of conscience
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky’s observations on the eve of the 103rd celebration of February 16
We live in good times, incomparable to those which the Lithuanian Jewish community experiences eight decades ago. We live in a time of great achievements and at the same time there is still much to achieve. We live at a time when we still have to explain and defend ourselves, and we do this patiently but resolutely. We live at a time when society is crossing swords over ideas, attitudes and, most significantly, statues. Let this be the tale of two statues which don’t exist.
We are about to celebrate February 16, Lithuania Day, for the 103rd time. When we name the names of the signatories to the Lithuanian Act of Independence, this shows that the date for us is not just an historical day, but the triumph of the personal decision made by specific people whose result–a free and sovereign country–we all enjoy and take pride in. In the context of February 16, let’s also remember another group of people, a group I call signatories of conscience, the people whose decision resulted in hundreds of lives saved.
During the different Holocaust commemorations we often hear people taking pride that over 900 Lithuanians have been named Righteous Gentiles, but I don’t hear their names or their stories. I see the lack of context. And the context is very simple: the citizens of the first Republic of Lithuania, the same people who forged the young state, heard the Jews’ cry for help and responded. Do you think about the fact that generation which hid persecuted Jews on their farms, in their apartments and basements were the same people who created the first Lithuanian Republic? That they are the same generation whose achievements in art, learning and politics we take pride in today, whose deeds and lives we cite today as examples in the creation of the state? They include the family of February 16th signatory and engineer Steponas Kairys, and Lithuanian president Kazys Grinius, and the daughter of M. K. Čiurlionis, one of Lithuania’s greatest artists, Danutė Čiurlionytė abd her husband Vladimiras Zubovas, the family of Lithuanian writer Balys Sruoga, the family of writer Kazys Binkis, and professor Pranas Mažylis, the grandfather of Liudas Mažylis who rediscovered the original Lithuanian proclamation of independence German archives. They include Ona Jablonskytė, the daughter of the founder of the standard Lithuanian language Jonas Joblonskis, and his daughter-in-law advyga Jablonskienė. And not just presidents and professors, but simple village people were able to make the right choice. These are names which are inseparable from the history of Lithuania. Why don’t we want to erect a statues to these people, Lithuania’s signatories of conscience?
Mass Murders in Utena: Memories of the Holocaust
Photo: Just a few buildings witnessing to the Jewish past still stand in Utena.
Translated to Lithuanian by Vytautas Ridikas from Massacres in Utena by Tsozdik Bleiman writing in Russian
§§§
As the only living witness left, I am able to share some special memories.
My father Jakov Bleiman, who was formerly a rabbi in Crimea, performed the same duties in Utena, where my brother-in-law Efraim Yudelovich also lived with the family. At the beginning of the war I lived in Kaunas.
I decided to see my parents and then, if the right conditions were in place, to evacuate with the entire family. As it turned out there was no way to leave for somewhere, because just as I arrived in the city the Germans entered. Our fate became clear: we were all condemned to death.
Thursday. The first day of the German regime. Dozens of Jews are herded to work, led to the Germans and their Lithuanian helpers. The work is meaningless and insignificant, just in order to deride the Jews, sending them around all day with brooms, shovels and other implements.
Bringing Bagels Back to Vilnius
by Wailana Kalama
After a long absence, the Jewish staple has returned to the Lithuanian capital
Most food historians place the origin of the bagel somewhere vaguely in the Jewish alleys of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In those days in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius–also known as Vilna, the city once dubbed the “Jerusalem of the North”–bagels were ubiquitous, sold on the streets, and in the bakeries and markets. In modern times, however, the bagel had all but been erased from popular memory. Until now.
For centuries, the city’s Old Town was home to a thriving community of Litvaks, as local Jews referred to themselves. The district was lauded for its cultured elite and a Great Synagogue that attracted scholars from all over Europe. All that changed with the Holocaust, during which 95% of Lithuanian Jews were deported and murdered. Now, all that remains in the Old Town are monuments to what once was: street signs in Yiddish, inscriptions educating about the ghetto, a bust of the famed intellectual Vilna Gaon.
Statement by LJC Chairwoman on Recent Holocaust Denial by Lithuanian MP
You Are Quiet Again, as You Were in 1941
A comment on the silent state and the vociferous Rakutises
The Lithuanian Jewish Community, along with tens of thousands of Lithuanian Jews who were captured on the streets, locked in ghettos, marched to pits and shot and buried there, often close to their own hometowns, or shtetlakh, as Jews call them, where for centuries they had lived in common with Lithuanians–we are again guilty. Member of parliament of the Republic of Lithuania Valdas Rakutis in his commentary has said nothing new, and only repeats the mendacious and misleading narrative which has gone on for decades: We ourselves, the Jews, are guilty for the extermination of 95% of the Jews who lived in Lithuania before World War II.
I have met many such Rakutises, they always say the same thing. It is horrific that today these Rakutises also speak confidently in the parliament of the Republic of Lithuania, they are published and quoted, and again and again they blame those who were escorted by their neighbors to collection points in 1941, to synagogues, and from there to margins of forests and gravel pits, for the horror of the Holocaust.
It is said that all those who remained looked on in silence as the columns of Jewish men, women and children were marched along the streets of the towns in broad daylight. And now we have the same sort of situation: there isn’t much reaction at all to the lie of these Rakutises. The majority remain silent. There are some soft noises from his fellow party members, a few observations and speculations that maybe “Rakutis was mistaken,” but nothing even close to the precise and sharp uncompromising reaction demonstrated by the foreign embassies to Lithuania. The German, Israel and US ambassadors to Lithuania were among the first to condemn clearly and publicly Rakutis’s statement. The European Jewish Congress also responded as did the Jewish communities living abroad. The words by the Lithuanian MP didn’t slip by unnoticed by any of the Western states, where they react without excuse or compromise to open or hidden attempts to distort history and to expressions of anti-Semitism.
Lithuanian Jewish Community Chairwoman Demands Investigation for Holocaust Denial
DELFI.lt and BNS
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky reacted to MP Valdas Rakutis’s statement on the Holocaust by demanding the Office of General Prosecutor initiate a pre-trial investigation on Holocaust denial and distortion.
“Representing the Lithuanian Jewish Community, I demand … the prosecutor general begin a pre-trial investigation on Holocaust denial and distortion.
“Slaps on the hand don’t satisfy us. We, citizens of Lithuania, Jews living here, demand the rule of law and defense of our basic rights. And in the end, you should feel shame before those whose blood soaks the land of Lithuania,” Kukliansky said in a statement to the press.
The Office of Prosecutor General said they would consider beginning an investigation after they receive a complaint. “Currently this complaint has not yet been received, but if it is received, it will be considered in the prescribed manner and the corresponding decision will be made,” Office of Prosecutor General press representative Elena Martinonienė told BNS.
Ona Šimaitė: First Lithuanian Righteous Gentile Who Lived the Spirit of the National Anthem
Excerpts from Ona Šimaitė’s memoirs and Rimantas Stankevičius’s book “Gyvenusi tautos himno dvasia” [She Lived the Spirit of the National Anthem].
The Name Which Became Legend
Ona Šimaitė:
“I was too close to Jews during their time of great misfortune not to express my wonder at their unbreakable heroism and moral fortitude in the face of the death of their people on the other side of the barb-wire fence of the ghetto. You could say any people would have been broke physically and morally if they had to experience what every single Jew experienced. The Jews in the ghetto were heroes who never called themselves that.
“During that horrific time for Jews (and for all people of conscience) I often used to think that after it was all over, what the Jewish people had experienced would open the eyes of many people, and that we would only know about the hatred of Jews in archives and museums.
“But I was very wrong.
“Only a small portion of non-Jews remember the horrible means the Nazis used to exterminate thousands of Jews, and how Jewish children, women and the elderly were murdered.
“And shame to those who forget by whose hands this was accomplished, and who saved Jewish lives.”
Interview with Ruth Reches on the Holocaust
Photo: Ruth Reches, by J. Stacevičius, courtesy LRT.lt
by Domantė Platūkytė
Life in the lion’s den, classmates as part of execution squads and concentration camps. These are aspects of Ruth Reches’s family life she shared with the LRT.lt website. Her grandmother after coming back from a concentration camp found the family home occupied. The new owners brought out a tub of water and let them spend the night on the ground in an adjacent shack. “What happened in Lithuania can’t be understood and explained rationally,” Reches said.
Reches, the principal of the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium and a doctor of psychology, gave an interview to LRT.lt and spoke about her grandparents surviving the Holocaust, the brutality of people and the impulse to aggression disinhibited by the war.
“When neighbors and classmates murder people… My grandfather’s mother was murdered by my grandfather’s brother’s classmates in Alytus. There are so many stories where teachers shot their students, and the town priest rang the bells so the shots wouldn’t be heard,” Reches, who has a published a book about the Holocaust and self-identity, said.
She said the experiences of the Holocaust haunted her grandparents their entire lives.
“The Holocaust left trauma in my grandparents’ lives because the environment to which they returned after the war was hostile and traumatizing. They returned to their hometowns and my grandparents saw their homes had been taken, and society wasn’t ready to accept them back. They felt no support from society, only anger that they had survivied,” Reches told LRT.
More on the #MesPrisimename Campaign to Remember the Victims of the Holocaust
International Holocaust Remembrance Day will be marked around the world January 27 and the Lithuanian Jewish Community has and is inviting the people of Lithuania to join the #MesPrisimename (#WeRemember) campaign to remember the Jewish communities of Lithuania’s cities and towns exterminated in the Holocaust, the survivors and the rescuers.
“We remember the tragedy of the destruction of six million Jews of Europe every year at this time. We invite everyone–heads of state, politicians, the entire academic and education community and all the people of Lithuania–to remember on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day the people who were murdered in the flames of the Holocaust. This is our shared loss, the loss of the entire country,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said.
“We appeal to the entire academic and education community: use the opportunity this day provides and give attention to educating young people on commemorating the victims of the Holocaust. Hold virtual meetings with older members of the Jewish communities who remember these horrific periods of history. We still have the unique opportunity to speak directly with the eye-witnesses of these events, so let’s use it,” she added.
Internet Discussion: When All Eye-Witnesses to the Holocaust Are Gone
The Lithuanian Jewish Community is holding an internet discussion on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, called “When All Eye-Witnesses to the Holocaust Are Gone, There Must Still Be Public Commemorations.” The internet discussion is scheduled for 2:00 P.M. Wednesday.
Participants are to include LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, writer and law professor Justinas Žilinskas, Institute of the History and Archaeology of the Baltic Region Hektoras Vituks, Human Rights Monitoring Institute executive board member and philosopher Paulius Gritėnas and director of the Media and Democracy Program of the Vilnius Policy Analysis Institute Donatas Puslys. Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund director and writer Sergejus Kanovičius is to moderate the event.
Those interested in “attending” are invited to go to the LJC facebook page for the event or youtube channel at the designated time and date.
Video of Celebration of 130th Anniversary of Birth of Osip Mandelshtam
Artist and Cartoonist Leizeris Kaganas
by Polina Pailis on his 110th birthday for Septynios meno dienos newspaper
New trends in art appeared in Lithuania in the early 20th century based on new ideas and the search for new techniques for expression. Many cartoonists and caricaturists appeared in the press in the interwar period. The artist Leizeris Kaganas was especially prolific from 1931 to 1933.
Kaganas was born in 1910 and his place of birth is unknown. In 1929 he attended the Kaunas Art School but left after his first year. His off-the-cuff sketches and caricatures first appeared in the Kaunas newspapers in 1931. In the second half of that year he moved to Riga and competed in sketching contests there. In 1932 and 1933 he held exhibitions in Lithuania. In 1932 he was part of an exhibition in Stockholm. In 1939 and 1940 he lived and worked in Denmark. Kaganas’s fate following the German occupation of Denmark is unknown.
The first article about the young artist appeared in Lietuvos aidas newspaper on September 30, 1931, which said his talent had been noticed from the beginning.
History of the Jews of Šiauliai from the City’s First Industrialist to the Lincoln Penny
Photo: 3-D miniature diorama of the Old Town of Šiauliai by Saulius Kruopis, late 19th or early 20th century. Photo by Karolina Savickytė
by Gabija Strumylaitė, 15min.lt
It’s impossible to tell the story of Šiauliai without the names of important Jews who come from there or lived there. One was the industrialist Chaim Frankel whose leather factory once employed a fifth of the city’s population. Victor David Brenner, the Litvak whose most famous work is the United States Lincoln penny still in circulation, put Šiauliai on the world map.
“Before World War I Jews were about 60 percent of the population of Šiauliai. In the period between the wars this figure dropped to 30 percent. There truly is a lot of Jewish heritage in Lithuania. We often stumble upon it and realize it only now. For instance, until my colleague Andrius Kvedaras, whom you will also meet today, nobody conducted exclusively Jewish tours of Šiauliai. It was just part of the general program,” Aušra Museum historian Milda Černiauskaitė said.
Lithuanian Jewish Community Chairwoman on Importance of January 13 to Nation’s Jews
Photo: Faina Kukliansky, by Vidmantas Balkūnas, courtesy 15min.lt
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky remembers January 13. Lithuanian Jews, who restored their community finally 30 years ago after decades of restrictions, took part in events in those days [in 1991] Nowadays when they talk about the struggle for freedom, members of the community emphasize the greatest gift: the opportunity to speak freely.
What do you remember personally about that fateful night at the TV tower, the Lithuanian Radio and Television building and the parliament? What does the Jewish community remember about these events?
Jews did the same thing as everyone else in Lithuania. We have collected the recollections of our community members of that fateful night. They watched the television broadcast until it was cut off and they went to the barricades, in Vilnius but also in Kaunas and other cities.
We were there where the majority of Lithuania was. I remember when I travelled from Varėna during that time and saw the road full of tanks. At that time I had an elderly guest from America who said he was seeing tanks for the first time in his life.
On that particular night my friends and I–all of us were together with our young children–followed events, held vigil, waiting for our husbands who were there in the crowd by the barricades or who were doing their job as doctors.
My children are now grown up and always remember that night and the tension. It wasn’t clear what would happen and the tanks were already in place in the city. We didn’t have any information, we had seen the final frame when E. Bučelytė had to quit the [television] studio. We learned that night from medics that there were dead and wounded people.
About Rabbi Shmuel Abba Sniegas Who Was Decorated with Lithuanian Order of Grand Duke Gediminas
by Geršonas Taicas
Shmuel Abba Sniegas was born in Rokiškis [Rokishyok] in 1878. He attended a Jewish primary school and completed the Kneses Israel yeshiva in Slobodka (now the Vilijampolė neighborhood of Kaunas) in 1913. He was deported to the Pskov guberniya in Russia during World War I. He began working as a rabbi in 1916.
The Rebel from Žagarė Who Dared Criticize Stalin
Facts worth knowing about the Litvak poet Osip Mandelshtam
by Rūta Ribinskaitė, LJC member, for 15min.lt
As we mark the 130th anniversary of Osip Mandelshtam, the Lithuanian Jewish Community is inviting the public to take a new look at one of the most renowned poets of the Silver Age of Russian poetry. We present to readers long-forgotten and little-known facts about the phenomenal poet Osip Mandelshtam.
Mandelshtam’s family on both his mother’s and father’s side came from Lithuania. The Mandelshtam family’s roots are in northern Lithuania in the town of Žagarė. There are assertions the family settled in the town in the early 19th century.
The poet’s mother Flora Mandelshtam née Verbolvskaya was a musician and his father Hatzkel-Emil Mandelshtam belong to the first guild of merchants and was a leather tanner. The young married couple lived in Warsaw where the future poet was born on January 15, 1891, and then moved to live in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1896 and 1897.
Full text in Lithuanian here.
LJC Celebrates Life and Work of Osip Mandelshtam on 130th Birthday
The Lithuanian Jewish Community is inviting the public to learn more about one of the best poets of Russia’s Silver Age, Osip Mandelshtam.
Join the virtual day of poetry at 2:00 P.M. on January 15 on facebook by going to https://fb.me/e/1cV0KYzFo
Speakers and critics will present new insights and little known facts in Mandelshtam’s biography and poetry. The actors Viačeslavas Lukjanovas and Larisa Kalpokaitė will read excerpts in Russian and Viktorija Verikaitė will read Lithuanian translations of Mandelshtam’s poetry.
Our Freedom We Won Back Thirty Years Ago on January 13
Tanks next to Lithuanian Radio and Television. Photo: P. Lileikis
Aleksandra Jacovskytė, scenographer, photographer, graphic artist
Šura Jacovskytė remembers those days in January of 1991. She lived in the center of Vilnius and her friends used to gather at her apartment during those tense days and they watched events unfold together on LRT television.
“I saw and I still remember the final frames when Soviet soldiers broke into the television [studio], the image vanished and there was darkness… It was a horrible feeling,” Šura recalled. “I felt the same as everyone else did. I couldn’t believe the Soviet miasma would come back. The people of Lithuania were already different, they had got a taste of freedom, so it was impossible to go back. It was by then inconceivable to support the actions of the government of the Soviet Union, what they were getting up to, that was totally clear. Even a few months later, after the coup began, I told myself: ‘No, this cannot be…'”
Algirdas Malcas, director, Vilnius the Jerusalem of Lithuania Jewish Community
“I was at the parliament during those days. I walked every day from one site to another, and I had arrived with my dog. I used to go day and night, like a watchman’s rounds. I lived in the center so friends used to come to me to warm up. I was young then and the memories are unerasable.
Lithuanian Translation of Chaimas Kurickis’s Holocaust Memoirs Launched in Utena
Chaimas Kurickis was born in Utena, Lithuania, in 1921. He and his mother fled east as the German army approached in June of 1941. They were arrested, separated and imprisoned in Daugavpils, Latvia, his mother being sent to the ghetto and he to jail.
The hero of his book was also in the ghetto and several concentration camps, where he fought to survive right up till May 5, 1945, when Germany was defeated finally. Chaimas Kurickas set down his recollections and experiences along with several poems in a book called “To Survie and Tell the Tale,” translated to Lithuanian under the title “Išgyventi ir papasakoti” by Edmundas Kutka. The book has also been translated to Hebrew and Russian, and has caught the interest of Latvians who utilize it to talk about the tragic events of the Daugavpils ghetto, and Germans. The Lithuanian translation is expected to be of keen interest to Lithuanians and especially people from Utena who might be interested in the native author’s youth and experiences.
The launch of the Lithuanian translation of the book, published with aid from the Goodwill Foundation, included a panel of speakers, including tour guide and historian Chaim Bargman, Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum RIghteous Gentiles Department director Danutė Selčinskaja, teacher and historian Danguolė Jonaitienė who knew Kurickas from before the war, translator Tamara Jefremova and the translator of this book Edmundas Kutka.
The 20-year-old Utena native learned of the onset of war in his hometown. The rapid progress and unexpected moves of the German military forced him to adapt quickly to change. He and his mother and sisters were forced to flee, but the Kaunas-Daugavpils route was overcrowded with much military transport, Russian tanks and hundreds if not thousands of fleeing civilians, mainly Jews, trying to make their way towards Russia.