June 22, 1941, was the date the Nazis invaded Lithuania, Belarus and neighboring countries and the Holocaust began. Today the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius will hold a prayer service to remember the beginning of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Unlike in the West, Jewish victims in the East were mainly executed near their homes. Over just a few months in the summer and fall of 1941 the vast majority of the once-populous Jewish community of Lithuania were exterminated.
The Holocaust began in Panevėžys and Lithuania on June 22, 1941. We must not forget how Litvaks lived before the tragedy and how their history ended in 1941.
There are still eye-witnesses to the mass murder of the Jews who lived in the Panevėžys district before World War II. The first mass shootings began in July in the Panevėžys district when ghettos were set up in every town and city, in Panevėžys, Biržai, Kupiškis, Pasvalys, Rokiškis and elsewhere.
The Panevėžys Jewish Community and the scouts of Panevėžys have undertaken a project conceived by Michailas Adomas and Elena Adelina to maintain the mass murder sites in the district.
This time the clean-up began June 9 in the Kurganova Forest in the Panevėžys region. Volunteers including Panevėžys scouts and the chairman of the Panevėžys Jewish Community participated. The scouts learned about the Holocaust in Panevėžys, the Panevėžys district and Lithuania.
In total around 200,000 Jews were murdered in Lithuania with about 13,500 Jews murdered almost immediately in the Panevėžys region.
Photo: Children in Kaunas ghetto, courtesy Yad Vashem.
Today [June 15] the Lithuanian parliament adopted a resolution on commemorating the 80th anniversary of great losses and resistance to the occupations of Lithuanian by totalitarian regimes which says “After Nazi Germany occupied Lithuania, the Nazis began to carry out the genocide of the Jews of Lithuania, opening the way to mass murders and violence, leading to the loss of the larger part of the Jewish community.”
The language of the resolution is missing an essential element, a reminder that the mass murders were carried out with the aid of local collaborators. Would you like to put it more simply and clearly? There were people in the Lithuanian cities and towns who murdered their Jewish neighbors. Should we put it yet another way? There weren’t Nazi tanks and units standing by the side of the gravel pits on the forest margin, there were armed local men who fatally shot Jews lined up there, men, women and children [in Lithuania Jewish children were often murdered by smashing their heads against trees and rocks or with rifle butts in order to save ammunition–translator]. Another formulation which frightens us so much is also missing: there were Lithuanians among those who organized and physically carried out the genocide.
Does that sound horrible? But it’s the truth. The truth which is so hard to admit yet again. Perhaps the Lithuanian parliament is following the Lithuanian saying, “one teaspoon of tar ruins the barrel of honey?”
If so, it’s being misapplied, because the Lithuanian people aren’t a barrel of honey, and the Lithuanians who murdered Jews aren’t a teaspoon of tar. They are criminals who have committed crimes against humanity. A nation who can admit such people existed in its ranks is a brave and honorable nation. It’s not that their sins pass down to us, just that today’s generation is still afraid of the truth.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community had hoped the voice of the only Jewish member of the Lithuanian parliament, Emanuelis Zingeris, would be heard. He proposed amending the text of the resolution to read “the Nazis and their local collaborators.” He was not heard. Neither were the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the thousands of victims who stood before their armed neighbors, and millions of Jews and other people of goodwill around the world who are only asking for one thing, to face the truth.
Before writing this commentary, many people said: “It’s not worth raising the issue, it’s better to keep quiet, remain silent, not irritate, not sow discord.” But as Tomas Venclova said, “We should avoid descending into these scandals, but they will be inevitable as long as there are defenders of the Nazi collaborators.”
Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman
Lithuanian Jewish Community
by Victoria Sideraitė-Alon
The old Jewish cemetery in the Šnipiškės (Shnipishok) neighborhood in Vilnius wasn’t destroyed in a single day. Back at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the remains of 700 Vilnius Jews buried there were exhumed and reburied in a different part of the same cemetery during construction in the surrounding area.
Later during the Soviet era during the mid-20th century when work went on to extend what is now Šeimyniškių street, encroaching again on the old Jewish cemetery, these 700 burials were again exhumed and sent to a different grave. They were rediscovered in 2003 during construction of apartment houses next to Vilnius’s King Mindaugas Bridge. At the time, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairman Simonas Alperavičius resolved to have these 700 reinterred at the still-operational Jewish cemetery on Sudervės road in Vilnius. The reburial ceremony was attended by LJC officials and rabbis. The new grave there was marked with four posts.
The deportations of Lithuanian residents touched every ethnic group in the country, the Jews included. On 14 June 1941, some 3 thousand Jews were exiled from Lithuania.
In the fall of 1941, a train carrying a cargo of exiles from Lithuania rolled in to the foreign and cold city of Syktyvkar. Ravaged by famine and disease, they had travelled thousands of kilometres in tightly sealed cattle cars. Entire families would die from starvation. Those deported on orders from Joseph Stalin, the ‘Father of Nations’, included the Abramovičius family of Jews from the town of Tauragė (Taurogi shtetl): mother Taube-Leja and her three kids, the oldest son Leibas aged 12, the middle son Abramas, 8, and the youngest Aronas, just five.
The city of Utena in northeast Lithuania has a new piece of public art, a bronze heart, to recall the birth there of Bernard Lown, Nobel prize winner and famous cardiologist who invented the defibrillator.
The statue comes as part of a project by cultural historian Sandra Dastikienė called “Old Neighbors” intended to bring public attention to the Jewish community’s legacy in the Utena region.
“To heal communication between the Lithuanian and Jewish peoples, we have to start at the grassroots level, from the culture of the small towns or shtetls, where both separate communities lived together in peace for centuries. It was that, namely neighborliness, that I want to emphasize with my project in Utena, Anykščiai, Molėtai and Dusetos,” Dastikienė said.
Lown was born in Utena on June 7, 1921, to a family of Jewish merchants. Fearing growing anti-Semitism and seeking a better life for their children, his parents took the family to the USA in 1935. Bernard Lown studied medicine there and was graduated in 1945. He passed away earlier this year in February at the age of 99.
Union of Former Concentration Camp Prisoners member Sulamita Lev celebrates her birthday June 7. She has been an employee of and volunteer at the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the LJC Social Center for many years.
We wish her a happy birthday, much happiness and good health, strength of spirit and joy. We wish you many meaningful years to come and that you would always remain as you are, young at heart.
Mazl tov!
The newspaper Šiaulių Kraštas published the incredible story of Sulamit’s life and rescue from the Šiauliai ghetto two years ago. The text is available in Lithuanian here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community congratulates Rūta Ribinskaitė for successfully defending and taking first place among final works for earning a bachelor’s degree at the International Relations and Political Science Institute of Vilnius University. Her work was titled “(Un)Fading Stereotypical Images of Jews: A Qualitative Analysis of the Internet News Site Delfi.lt.”
She told us: “Thank you for the opportunity to connect with the Jewish community, to acquire a lot of information, to gain experience and get to know members of the community, which led to my successful completion of studies.”
Way to go, Rūta.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky has participated in the commission for the final supervisory assessment of work done to restore the synagogue in Žiežmariai, Lithuania. Work on the ground floor is now complete.
Work on the building is drawing to an end and the synagogue is set to begin hosting educational, cultural, tourist and other public activities. Following completion, it could become an important community site and tourist attraction.
Currently the synagogue is hosting an exhibit of reproductions of drawings by Dora Pilianskienė. She came from Žiežmariai and as a young Jewish woman left her hometown, but at an advanced age began drawing and painting images she cherished from Žiežmariai. Her relatives have bequeathed her works to the Žiežmariai Culture Center.
Isaac Herzog has been elected Israel’s 11th president, with 87 votes of Knesset’s 120.
The Jewish agency head, former Labor chief and son of 6th president defeated educator Miriam Peretz and said he’ll work to “build bridges” within Israeli society and with Diaspora.
Isaac Herzog, the chairman of the Jewish Agency and former head of the Labor party, was elected Wednesday as Israel’s eleventh president.
Herzog defeated Miriam Peretz, a social activist who overcame the loss of two of her sons in battle to become an Israel Prize-winning educator, with 87 votes, the most a presidential candidate has ever won, to her 26.
In the secret election, in which all 120 MKs were eligible to cast votes, three abstained, three votes were disqualified and one lawmaker, Ra’am chair Mansour Abbas, did not vote.
United States representative Brad Sherman (D, Sherman Oaks, California) has asked the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States for clarification regarding claims by the Lithuanian Government the pro-Nazi prime minister in the Lithuanian Provisional Government of 1941 was somehow exonerated by the Congress in the 1970s.
Correspondence leading to the latest letter:
Dear Community members,
This year we’ll mark the 80th anniversary of the onset of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The Lithuanian Jewish Community is creating a digital chronicle to help the broader public understand how Litvaks lived before the Holocaust and what happened to their communities beginning in 1941.
We are asking you to share the stories and photographs of your relatives who lived in the Lithuanian shtetls and died in the mass murders in 1941 or the years following.
Everyone is invited to participate by sending copies of photographs and short texts including biographies and descriptions of murders to info@lzb.lt or zanas@sc.lzb.lt
Please indicate the names of people in photographs, locations and dates if available.
“From Lazdijai to Hollywood: The Joseph Achron Phenomenon” is a lecture celebrating Joseph Achron’s 135th birthday.
Joseph Achron (or Akhron, 1886-1943), the violin prodigy and composer born in Lazdijai, Lithuania, charmed audiences in Warsaw, Grodno, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Kiev and other cities around Europe, and went on to play Carnegie Hall. Having achieved fame in New York and Los Angeles, he remains little known in Lithuania. A close friend of Jascha Heifetz and Arnold Schönberg, he was humble on stage. He composed his greatest hit, Hebrew Melody, in barely an half hour.
How did his religious family support the young virtuoso’s musical career? What did Tsar Nikolai’s mother present as a gift to Achron? What did Achron contribute to the creation of professional Jewish music? Find out the answers and other interesting matters in Kamilė Rupeikaitė’s lecture “From Lazdijai to Hollywood: The Joseph Achron Phenomenon” at 3:00 P.M. on May 25.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community extends our deepest condolences on the death of long-time Lithuanian diplomat Edminas Bagdonas to his surviving family members.
Edminas Bagdonas, 58, passed away Saturday in Vilnius following a battle with illness. He was one of the most remarkable of Lithuanian diplomats after the country achieved independence in the early 1990s. Most recently he served as Lithuanian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. He has been active in Lithuania’s diplomatic corps since 1994 and has served as ambassador to Israel and Belarus.
His admirers have called a “statesman with a capital S.” Litvaks in Israel remember him well for his communicability, professionalism and sense of duty.
Arie Ben-Ari Grozendsky, the chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jewish in Israel, has sent the following condolences as well:
Happy birthday to Fania Brantsovskaya, our living link with former Lithuania before the Holocaust. A Jewish partisan, she kept fighting after the war, educating generations about the truth of what happened. Most of us at a certain age in adulthood begin to slow down, to rise more slowly from our chairs, to walk more cautiously. Fania never did. She still walks with a spring in her step as if she were a teenager, with a smile for everyone and ready to talk to anyone without regard for social status. Happy birthday, Fania. Mazl tov! Bis 120!
by Birutė Vyšniauskaitė, lrt.lt
“It was very cozy and even fun because all the neighbors gathered in one hiding place. We also took in a married couple from the neighboring building because they didn’t have anywhere to hide after the danger signal,” Litvak woman Dusia Lan Kretchmer told Lrytas.lt about the Hamas rocket attacks on Tel Aviv Wednesday night. She left Lithuania about 50 years ago.
Kretchmer said she was in disbelief Hamas rockets were targeting Lod, the city on the way towards Israel’s main Ben-Gurion International Airport, on Wednesday.
“I have taught chemistry for twenty years in this city. Over that entire time I have witnessed Jews and Arabs living together in peace. Many times I have celebrated holidays with the city’s communities, Arabs celebrated their holidays with Jews, Jews with Arabs. So many Arabs live there, I can’t wrap my head around why Hamas would take aim at their own people,” she said.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
On May 6 the Atomic Bunker military heritage museum in Kaunas put on display three exhibits featuring items from museum founder Julius Urbaitis’s personal collection which he called a part of the history of Kaunas as the Lithuanian provisional capital in the interwar Republic.
The three exhibits are:
1. Goods and items from the D. Rozmarin manufactory and colonial goods [dried and canned goods and non-perhishables in general] store;
2. Ironworks and smithing equipment from the heirs of B. Rabinovitch;
3. Charming amateur and academic works commemorating anniversary of grand duke Vytautas the Great celebrated in 1930.
Kaunas mayor Matijošaitis, LJC chairwoman Kukliansky, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Žakas, Volfas Engelman brewery general director Horbačauskas, Rūta company director Pridotkas and other honored guests attended the opening of the three exhibits.
Our respect and gratitude go to Julius Urbaitis for his concern for Jewish history and the contribution Jews made in establishing the first independent Republic of Lithuania. LJC chairwoman Kukliansky presented Urbaitis the commemorative medallion of the Lithuanian Year of the Vilna Gaon and Litvak History for this initiative of his and its implementation.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky personally visited World War II veterans in their homes to congratulate them on Victory Day. There are only six such veterans known to be resident in Vilnius. Warm wishes and congratulations to RIva Spiz, Aleksandr Asovski, Boris Lipnicki, Fania Brantsovksaya, Eliziejus Rimanas and Tatyana Arkhipova-Efros.
Holocaust survivor and historian and Jewish partisan Yitzhak Arad died May 6 at the age of 95 in Israel. He was one of the founders and the first director of the Yad Vashem memorial institute in Jerusalem. He also achieved the rank of brigadier general in the IDF. He was born in Švenčionys (Shventsian), Lithuania, in 1926, moved with his parents to Warsaw and escaped back into Lithuania with his sister at the onset of World War II. He escaped the Švenčionys ghetto and joined partisans in the forests in Belarus. In 1945 he went to Israel where he fought in four wars and was later appointed director of military education. He served in the Israeli military for 25 years and was appointed to head Yad Vashem in 1972. He earned a doctorate at Tel Aviv University and taught Jewish history, authoring numerous books about the Holocaust.
Our deepest condolences to his family and friends for their loss.