The Ąžuoliukas choir performed at an event held by the Kaunas Jewish Community, the Kaunas city municipality and the Kaunas State Philharmonic to celebrate the 100th birthday of the late Herman Perelstein, the founder of the choir, at the Kaunas State Philharmonic on the evening of November 6, 2023. A short video filmed by a member of the audience has been posted to youtube, viewable below of the choir’s performance with Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas’s introductory address.

On November 6, 1943, around 725 Jewish children were abducted from the Šiauliai (Shavl) ghetto and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, chairmen from the Šiauliai, Kaunas, Palanga, Panevėžys and Švenčionys Jewish Communities, Israeli ambassador Hadas Wittenberg-Silverstein, German ambassador Cornelius Zimmermann, Lithuanian MPs and members of the Jewish Community and general public and students and teachers came together to mark the 80th anniversary of this atrocity in Šiauliai November 6.

Members of the Kaunas Jewish Community and the general public turned out on the last weekend in October to mark the anniversary of the Grossaktion, the mass murder operation during which around 10,000 Jews were taken from the Kaunas ghetto and murdered at the Ninth Fort in a 25-hour period on October 28 and 29, 1941.

The entire population of the Kaunas ghetto was assembled on Democrat Square inside the ghetto where Gestapo officer Helmut Rauca personally selected many of the victims. Rauca later found refuge in Canada, where he opened a holiday resort on a lake in Ontario. He was never tried.