Dr. Yusuf Hamied was awarded the first ever Department of Chemistry alumni medal in a ceremony on March 17, 2016. The vice-chancellor of the University of Cambdridge, professor Leszek Borysiewiecz, presented the medal “for services to the community that have brought honour to the Department of Chemistry.”
American Jewish Committee Celebrates 110th Anniversary in Moldova
From left: Lithuanian ambassador to Moldova Rimantas Latakas, LJC chairwoman
Faina Kukliansky, AJC CEO David Harris
July 12, 2016, Chisinau (Kishinev), Moldova–AJC, the global Jewish advocacy organization founded in 1906 after vicious pogroms in Tsarist-ruled Kishinev, marked its 110th anniversary during a visit to the Moldovan capital.
The trip was highlighted by private meetings with president Nicolae Timofti, prime minister Pavel Filip, speaker of parliament Andrian Candu and deputy foreign minister Lilian Darii.
Lithuanian Holocaust Atlas Author: “I Crawled through the Underbrush to Find Commemorative Stones”
The Lithuanian internet news site 15min.lt has published an extensive interview with Milda Jakulytė-Vasil, the author and prime mover behind the Lithuanian Holocaust Atlas, a hardcopy manual on every known Holocaust mass murder site in Lithuania complete with GPS location and directions for drivers in Lithuanian and English, with an extensive interactive version on the web.
Known in Lithuanian as “Holokausto Lietuvoje atlasas,” the Lithuanian version is available here:
http://holocaustatlas.lt/LT/
with a complete English version here:
http://holocaustatlas.lt/EN/
In the interview on 15min.lt, Milda Jakulytė-Vasil recalled crawling through the brush to find long-neglected mass murder site commemorative markers. She also spoke about compiling the atlas and the help she received from the IHRA, but also from local people, local officials and politicians at the national level, including conservative opposition leader Andrius Kubilius.
Full interview in Lithuanian here.
Opening Ceremony for Yiddish Summer Course
Students, teachers and staff and other interested parties gathered at an opening ceremony for the summer course of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University Sunday. Director Dr. Šarūnas Liekis welcomed the new students and thanked supporters and teachers from around the world. The courses are arranged in four levels and will end August 12.
Bagel Shop Café Draws Attention of ARD-1 German Public TV Crew
German public television channel ARD-1 filmed footage at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on July 13 with a focus on the Bagel Shop Café for a program to be called “Berlin-St. Petersburg,” according to director Christian Klemke.
He said although the itinerary for the film crew had been decided carefully prior to their trip through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Russia, they had encountered interesting sites along the way which they will include in the final production.
When they were considering what to film in Vilnius, they discovered Vilnius’s rich pre-war Jewish cultural and spiritual life. “I wanted to know what there is now, so many years after the Holocaust,” Klemke said. Local producer Karolis Pilipauskas told him about the Bagel Shop Café. The Lithuanian Jewish Community facilitated meetings with members of the older generation, including Holocaust survivors. “I was very interested to hear their stories. Young members of the Jewish community also came to the café,” Klemke said.
Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium Graduation Celebration
The Lithuanian Jewish Community congratulates the students, parents and teachers on this significant day.
This year the Sholem Aleichem school graduated 18 high school students. This is the school’s 13th graduating class. Students come from a variety of ethnic backgrounds–Jewish, Lithuanian, Russian, Polish and others–and the school is a place of mutual respect and tolerance. Principal Miša Jakobas says he’s very proud because everyone passed their final exams, a major achievement in comparison to the problems encountered in other Lithuanian high schools. He said there were students who scored in the 96 to 97 percentile range, and one student scored 100% on the English language test, while the average scores were in the 70% range.
Let’s Not Name Streets after Nazi Collaborators
In Vilnius we have a street named after a Nazi collaborator, Kazys Škirpa, and as an elected city councillor I asked the municipality to change the name.
The street is in the absolute centre of town, between the Cathedral, the National Museum, the Castle and the Hill of the Three Crosses. Škirpa wrote the Lithuanian equivalent of Mein Kampf, and started an organisation to clear all the Jews out of Lithuania, men, women and children. He blamed them for Soviet atrocities just because they were Jewish.
I don’t think that’s the kind of person we should be celebrating on our walls. I asked the Names Commission to consider changing the name, to honour the Lithuanians who saved Jews from the Holocaust, instead of honouring a Nazi collaborator who wanted to create a racially pure Lithuania with Hitler’s help.
Yiddish Summer Course
The Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University proudly announces
The 2016 Summer Program in Yiddish Language and Literature17 July — 12 August 2016
offering four levels of intensive language instruction:
YIDDISH I: for beginners YIDDISH II: intermediate
YIDDISH III: higher intermediate YIDDISH IV: advanced
more information from Indre Joffyte, info@judaicvilnius.com
(Coordinator of Programs at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute)
Kiev Renames Street after Nazi Collaborator
Authorities in Kiev decided July 7 to rename the city’s Moscow Prospect in honor of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.
Allegedly pro-Western Ukrainian leaders and protestors have idolized Bandera, and the move to rename a street after the man could further trouble relations with neighboring Russia, Lithuania’s Baltic News Service reported on July 9.
As with Lithuania’s Nazi puppet government in the summer of 1941, Bandera declared Ukrainian independence as soon as the Nazis invaded the Ukrainian SSR.
Newsweek Magazine on the Last Nazi Hunter
by Stav Ziv
Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Kagan visits the Chamber of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Photo: GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty
Efraim Zuroff has accomplished much in his long career, but there’s one thing he’s particularly proud of: He’s the most hated Jew in Lithuania.
His Lithuanian friend Ruta Vanagaite agrees: She called him a “mammoth,” a “boogeyman” and the “ruiner of reputations”—and that’s just in the introduction to a book they co-authored.
Last summer, in a journey that helped cement his notoriety, Zuroff set off across the Lithuanian countryside in a gray SUV with Vanagaite, an author best known for a book about women finding happiness after age 50. Their goal: to visit some of the nation’s more than 200 sites of mass murder during World War II. On the road, between destinations, they talked and talked, recording their conversations. The trip formed the basis of their 2016 book, Our People: Journey With an Enemy, an instant best-seller in Lithuania. It also ignited a rancorous debate among Lithuanians, who have long downplayed their country’s considerable role in the Holocaust.
Farwell My Friend: Three Things I Learned from Elie Wiesel
Dear Friends,
Please find below Moshe Kantor’s opinion article published in the Newsweek following the sad loss of Prof. Elie Wiesel.
Kind regards,
The EJC team
European Jewish Congress (EJC)
Tel : +3225408159
Fax : +3225408169
Web : www.eurojewcong.org
FAREWELL MY FRIEND: THREE THINGS I LEARNED FROM ELIE WIESEL
The world has lost one of its premier moral voices, writes the president of the European Jewish Congress.
BY MOSHE KANTOR
The great French writer Victor Hugo once said that “adversity makes men.” There is no one in the history of humanity for whom this is more true than the late great Elie Wiesel. The world has lost one of its premier moral voices. His early life was fashioned in darkness, but he brought light to our world with his words of hope and peace. His courage to see good when he saw so much unspeakable evil should remain a legacy, not just for the Jewish people, but for mankind. Our view of life can be determined by interactions with extraordinary people. If you are lucky, each of us will meet one person who will change our world. For me, that was Elie Wiesel.
Documentary Film: “An Open Door: Jewish Rescue in the Philippines”
You are invited to attend a screening of An Open Door (2015) at the Lithuanian Jewish Community at 5:00 P.M. on July 13, 2016.
While Europe was under the thrall of the Nazis, Filipino president Manuel Quezon and US high commissioner to the Philippines Paul McNutt opened the door to 1,300 persecuted European Jews in the Philippines.
Jack Simke, assistant to the director and award-winning filmmaker Noel Izon, will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards. The event will take place in English.
For more information about the film, see here and here.
For more about the Jewish community in the Philippines, see here.
Judah Passow Thanks LJC Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky for Celebration for Return of Torah
“I just want to thank you once again for making possible such a moving and memorable day with the Lithuanian Jewish community,” Judah Passow said in the note.
“It was an honour and a privilege to be with all of you. I’m especially grateful to you for the time and effort you put into making what began as an idea a year ago into a reality,” he wrote.
Judah Passow’s father, professor David Passow at Philadelphia University, received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to commemorate Jewish life behind the iron curtain in 1960. When he went to Vilnius that same year, local Jewish leaders asked him to take away with him one of two Torah scrolls which were used in the Vilnius ghetto and survived the Holocaust intact, saying they were unsure what the future held for Jews in the Soviet Union. The Passows protected the Torah ever since then, for 56 years, and used it for three bar mitzvahs in the family. When he came to Vilnius last year for a showing of his photography work, Judah Passow met Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and the idea was fleshed out of returning the scroll to Vilnius. Just last week Passow returned the Torah dating from the time of Vilna Gaon, with a silver decoration his mother Aviva Passow made for the scroll.
Jewish Heritage Trip to Lithuania Visits Lithuanian Jewish Community
A delegation from the Jewish Heritage Trip to Lithuania led by Peggy Mosinger Freedman visited the Lithuanian Jewish Community July 1. The organization supports the “Food to Homes” program for the elderly conducted by the LJC Social Center. Members of the group are not infrequent visitors to Lithuania, where they always take a keen interest in Jewish life. This time the delegation included Canadian Alex Bronsteter, who said he can make the trip to the land of his roots now that he retired. He wants to bring his children to Kaunas next year as well. His mother survived the Kaunas ghetto, but most of her relatives were murdered.
The White Rose: German Student Opposition to Hitler in 1942 and 1943
Exhibit opens 6:00 P.M., July 5, 2016 at the Kaunas Multicultural Center, Šv. Gertrūdos street no. 58, Kaunas. Speakers to include Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas, German ambassador to Lithuania Jutta Schmitz and others. Wine will be served after the formal launch of the exhibit.
Global Media Carry Discovery of Escape Tunnel at Ponar
News of the discovery of the tunnel used by the burners’ brigade to escape from the mass murder site of Ponar near the Lithuanian capital has been picked up by media around the world. The Lithuanian Jewish Community received a report from the Lithuanian ambassador to India that Indian media are reprinting an article about it from the Washington Post.
A team of experts from Israel, Lithuania, the United States and Canada found the escape tunnel, new killing pits, overgrown paths taken by the victims to the execution site and the distribution of human ashes and crushed bone at the site.
The burners’ brigade was formed by the Nazis to exhume the corpses of Jews shot at Ponar, burn them in large piles and crush to dust whatever bones or teeth survived the fire. They knew they were condemned to death and over a period of time excavated a tunnel from their place of confinement.
White Rose Exhibit to Open in Kaunas
The White Rose was the only organized youth resistance group at universities in Nazi Germany (the Edelweiss Pirates and the Swingjugend weren’t specifically university groups and weren’t as organized), established by students and a professor in Munich in June of 1942. Gradually the White Rose movement has come to symbolize all German resistance to Naziism, although it is still not widely known outside Germany.
In their final leaflet distributed in February of 1943, the White Rose society wrote:
“Der deutsche Name bleibt für immer geschändet, wenn nicht die deutsche Jugend endlich aufsteht, rächt und sühnt zugleich, ihre Peiniger zerschmettert und ein neues geistiges Europa aufrichtet. Studentinnen! Studenten! Auf uns sieht das deutsche Volk!”
Remembering Lietūkis Garage
Events to commemorate the victims of the Lietūkis garage massacre took place in Kaunas on the last, very hot weekend in June. Seventy-five years have passed since this atrocity. On June 24 we remembered and honored the victims of the mass murder before a monument set up at the site of pogrom by the Kaunas Jewish Community 10 years ago. A commemorative concert was held at the Kaunas State Philharmonic on June 26 with a special program by the male vocal artists Quorum. Members of the Kaunas Jewish Community were joined at the events by Kaunas residents and representatives of social organizations, the municipality and the Catholic Church. Raimundas Kaminskas and Julija Iskevičienė, representatives of the Kaunas section of Sąjūdis [Lithuanian independence movement] expressed sorrow, solidarity and the hope the brutality and the mass murders would never happen again. The priest Robertas Pukenis and deputy mayor of Kaunas Vasiliy Popov expressed the same sentiments. Scouts from the Kaunas area honored the victims with a Lithuanian folk song.
Remembering Elie Wiesel: A Tribute from a Friend and Disciple
Dear Friends,
Together with the entire Jewish people and, indeed, the world, we are in mourning today for one of the greatest writers, teachers, and human rights activists of our age. Elie Wiesel not only survived the Shoah–he transcended its horrors and became the voice first of its survivors and then of the conscience of humankind.
Below are my recollections of, and tribute and farewell to, my friend and mentor for more than 55 years, published in Tablet Magazine. The link is:
May his memory be a blessing and a source of strength to his beloved wife Marion, his son Elisha, daughter in law Lynn, his grandchildren, his stepdaughter Jennifer, the entire Jewish people and to us all.
Menachem Rosensaft
Call for Recipes
Dear members,
This year the Lithuanian Jewish Community will be actively involved in the European Jewish Culture Day program and is organizing different events to present the Jewish languages and Jewish cultural heritage to the public. European Jewish Culture Day will happen September 4, 2016.
The Bagel Shop Café will have on offer Jewish culinary heritage and is asking you to recall dishes made by your parents and grandparents, to find handwritten recipes (including in Yiddish) and to share them. We will prepare the best examples and offer them to the public during the event, and publish the recipes and descriptions.