Learning, History, Culture – Page 196 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

LJC Letter to the Prosecutor and the Genocide Center

Lithuanian Jewish Community
No, 179, February 11, 2016

To:
The Honorable Evaldas Pašilis
Office of Lithuanian Prosecutor General

The Honorable Birutė Burauskaitė
Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania

Re: Possible actions connected with the list comprised of 2,055 people who are alleged to have committed or contributed to the murder of Jews during World War II

February 11, 2016, Vilnius

The Lithuanian Jewish Community, seeking the restoration of historical justice and commemoration, and honoring the principles of the rule of law, equality before the law and the presumption of innocence, proposes:

2016-02-11

Musicians of the Symphony of the Lie

by Sergejus Kanovičius

Rūta Vanagaitė’s book has raised several more unpleasant matters. Although it seems to talk about victims and perpetrators, neither side making comments about the book seem to care. What does interest the Genocide Center and the manipulators of history who stand behind it is the status quo of the center’s immunity, which has been seriously threatened recently, and the Jewish Community doesn’t seem to care either, because its chairwoman has voluntarily fallen into the same orchestra pit where, faking the notes, the Genocide Center symphony orchestra is performing, the shining white knights cavorting with television entertainment figures out for ratings, and someone in the background whining about Holocaust education. But the people who were pushed below the turf 75 years ago still lie there as they lay before. Usually nameless, very often surrounded by used hypodermic needles, condoms and plastic beer bottles. As nameless as their murderers. Trying to name the latter causes great controversy, and again all sorts of “I do this for you, you do that for me” deals begin to find voice, after which prosecutors are supposed to suddenly confirm a list already confirmed long ago by historical fact of those who did the shooting or helped shoot almost all Lithuanian Jews to the very last individual.

2016-02-11

Opening of Exhibit “YIVO in Vilnius: The Legend Begins”

You are invited to the opening of the exhibit “YIVO in Vilnius: The Legend Begins” at the Lithuanian National Museum at Arsenalo street no. 1 in Vilnius at 4:00 P.M., February 18. Exhibit curators: Dr. Lara Lempertienė and Dr. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė.

The exhibit was created to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the creation of YIVO in Vilnius. It includes previously unseen material from Lithuanian state collections on the history and work of YIVO. It demonstrates how YIVO’s work gave stimulus to the intellectual life of the Jews of Vilnius and the wider Central and Eastern European arena. It also presents the city and urban community as a source of inspiration and as the historical and cultural hearth and sustenance for the institute’s work. The exhibit was first shown at the Galicia Jewish museum in Cracow from September 30 to November 8, 2015. The exhibit to open in Vilnius contains additional material.

2016-02-11

Come Meet Author and Art Historian Kristina Sabaliauskaitė

The Destinies series invites you to come meet Dr. Kristina Sabaliauskaitė at a presentation/seminar called

Jewish Motifs in the Art of Kristina Sabaliauskaitė

This will be the 24th seminar in our series and will be moderated by teacher and essayist Vytautas Toleikis.

Time: 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, February 17
Place: Jascha Heifetz Hall, third floor, Lithuanian Jewish Community, Pylimo street no. 4, Vilnius

Series organizer and MC: Lithuanian Jewish Community deputy chairwoman Maša Grodnikienė

2016-02-11

New Book about Jews of Ukmergė

by Daiva Zimblienė, lrytas.lt

A new book called “Ukmergės žydų bendruomenės istorija” [History of the Jewish Community of Ukmergė] is being passed around from hand to hand in Ukmergė. The almost 500-page book published in Lithuanian and English contains many important historical dates, interesting facts, documents and quotations about the Jews who lived in Ukmergė.

“I am not an artist, only a collector of historical facts. For about 15 years I carefully selected and accumulated different facts about the history of the city and district of Ukmergė. One computer folder began to grow quickly with material about the Ukmergė Jewish community. And that makes sense, because Jews were for several centuries the largest ethnic community in Ukmergė, you could say the dominant one,” author Julius Zareckas, deputy director of the Culture and Public Relations Department of the Ukmergė Ukmergė regional administration, said.

He said the new book is the second book of the same title which first appeared in 2008, with additional material and much more solid research.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2016-02-09

Israeli Scientists Discover Early Detection Method for Lung Cancer

by Michael Ordman

Scientists at Tel Aviv University and Rabin Medical Center have discovered they can detect lung cancer early in smokers by performing a CAT scan at the time they are admitted as pneumonia patients. Often the pneumonia is caused by young cancer cells blocking airways.

According to the American Journal of Medicine, lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer mortality in the US, associated with a 5-year survival of 17%.

The most important risk factor for lung cancer is smoking, which causes approximately 85% of all lung cancer cases. Only 15% of patients are diagnosed at an early stage.

2016-02-07

Lithuanian Jewish Community Wants Rescuers Commemorated

Vilnius, February 7, BNS–The Lithuanian Jewish Community says commemoration of Righteous Gentiles is missing in Lithuania, and so far the Vilnius administration isn’t considering any specific ideas to do so.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky hailed an initiative by activists to erect a statue in Israel to rescuers of Jews, but thinks such commemoration needs to begin in Vilnius.

“But why does it need to be built in Israel instead of Lithuania? Is there no need to honor rescuers in Lithuania? I don’t know, maybe it wouldn’t be over the top if such a statue appeared in Israel. I think there are people who left Lithuania who survived, and if someone was left alive, it was thanks to the rescuers. I don’t think people would object to that. But perhaps first we should set things in order in Lithuania,” Kukliansky told BNS.

2016-02-07

Lithuania to Publish Names of 1,000 Suspected Holocaust Perps

Following the publication in Lithuania of a groundbreaking book on local complicity during the Holocaust, a state museum on genocide said it would publish a list of 1,000 suspected perpetrators.

Terese Birute Burauskaite, who heads the Vilnius-based Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, said her institution would “this year try to publish a book” containing “over 1,000 Lithuanian residents who are connected to the Holocaust,” the news website Delfi.lt reported Tuesday.

Full story here.

2016-02-07

New Bagel Shop Opens with Great Expectations

Bagel shop, Vilnius, 1910, by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky.

A new kosher café in Vilnius, Lithuania, had its grand opening Thursday with an overflow crowd spilling into the street.

The Bagel Shop café is housed on the first floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, which some visitors still refer to as the Kahilla, in a mostly neglected and empty cafeteria hall.

Guests and LJC staff began filtering in well before the scheduled 3 P.M. start and four cheerful women behind the counter began placing bagel sandwiches cut into quarters on plates on the café’s six small tables.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky addressed the small packed room and said the Bagel Shop Café is an important part of the Bagel Shop tolerance program the LJC has been carrying out for the last year or so with funding from Norway and the EEA Grants program. She said the project was supposed to end earlier but had been continued into the next year.

2016-02-04

Prosecutors Should Examine List of Holocaust Perpetrators

Vilnius, February 2, BNS–Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky thinks a list of Holocaust perpetrators held by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania should be handed over to prosecutors for possible action.

Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania director Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė said she doubts such an investigation could take place and believes it is up to the Lithuanian Government and not the Center to address prosecutors.

“I would be satisfied” with the release of the list, Kukliansky said, “but would that affect the families of these people, would it violate their rights if guilt hasn’t been established? I would give the list to the prosecution, [these] crimes don’t have a statute of limitations, let them investigate. That needed to happen a long time ago. I think people need to know the names of the murderers as well as the rescuers. But the list may only be published when the guilt of these people has been proven. It should as provided for in law,” she added.

2016-02-03

La Cumparsita

by Sergejus Kanovičius

“Šeduva? Oi, oi, oi. What’s your name? Sergejus? Oi, great, come, I’m waiting. When will you arrive? Tomorrow. Really? Šeduva? Come. Oi…”

That’s how I rang into her life last spring. Neither I nor she knew what to expect from our unexpected meeting. I have knocked at the chambers of people’s memories knowing for some the trip back into the past will be pleasant, while for others it will perhaps not be such a joyful return to memories stashed away in the most remote drawers,

I found Frida’s house easily enough, after all it wasn’t very long ago, just two decades ago, that I lived almost right there. She opened the door for me, so fragile, so small, always smiling. After listening to my short introduction about how some strange people were concerned with recording her life and those of her neighbors, their deaths and the disappearance of their home town, she sighed and looking somewhere far off in the distance, as if at the Milky Way of memory, said:

“How long have I waited for you. How very long. All my life.”

2016-02-03

Panevėžys Jewish Community Member Oksana Navickienė Receives Yad Vashem Diploma

Oksana Navickienė, a member of the Panevėžys Jewish Community, has received a diploma from the Yad Vashem Memorial Authority and Museum in Jerusalem for completing a course at the International School for Holocaust Studies there. We hope she is able to apply her new knowledge to teaching the Holocaust to primary and secondary students throughout Aukštaitija. Congratulations, Oksana!

2016-02-02

The Smell of Fresh Jewish Bagels Returns to Vilnius

The Bagel Shop, a new kosher food café, opens its doors February 4. The café will prepare kosher food and different traditional sweets according to the rules of Judaism. The Bagel Shop’s main draw will be freshly-baked bagels and bagel sandwiches. Adhering to the strictest rules, the bagels will be made under the supervision of a rabbi versed in kosher food rules.

Bagels are a traditional European Jewish food product often referred to as a “baronka” in Lithuania in the past, and when cooked may be cut in half and made into a sandwich. The book Joy of Yiddish furnishes one version of the origin of the bagel, according to which the recipe for bagels was created in Cracow at the beginning of the 17th century, and that bagels were given then as gifts to women giving birth. The bagel was supposed to symbolize the “wheel of life” because of its roundness. The bagel’s popularity quickly grew and spread to other countries where Jews speaking Yiddish lived, and was quickly adopted in America, where today about five million bagels are baked daily!

2016-02-02

Lithuanian Jewish Community Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky on the Holocaust Discussions of Recent Days

Several days after commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day, discussions on the topic of the Holocaust have again come up in Lithuania. In my childhood I heard everything in my family–during conversation memories of the ghetto often came to the fore, being locked in the ghetto, taken to concentration camps, about the hole where people hid. But the experience of the Holocaust was as it were one of many things which separated Jews from non-Jews. They murdered us, while others at the same time went on with their lives, went to movie theaters, went to school and studied. Over just a few months almost the entire Lithuanian Jewish community, more than 200,000 people, were exterminated. For all of my life, for the entire Soviet period, many people treated us differently. We always knew our opportunities were limited and that we were different.

2016-02-01

The Co-Authors of Rūta Vanagaitė’s Book

by Sergejus Kanovičius

The noise generated as soon as an excerpt from Rūta Vanagaitė’s book “Mūsiškiai” was published was phenomenal in the true sense of the word. The passage released is almost certainly a transcription of an interview Saulius Beržinis conducted almost two and a half decades ago, one of many he did with Holocaust perpetrators. It says nothing about the book or its worth.

A bit later several interviews with the author and several responses to the facts recited in those interviews appeared. Writers, historians, publishers and known and unknown public figures began immediately discussing and judging the unread book, some even compared to a great work of literature and mused upon questions of metaphysical guilt and the effect of the Holocaust on society. For some of the non-readers it was enough that famous Holocaust historian and Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff attended the presentation of the book and participated in its creation: right-wing non-readers immediately christened the unread book a provocation by the Kremlin intended to sow ethnic discord. One long-time Conservative Party member even fretted the book would ruin Lithuania and Israel’s wonderful relations, although she was unable to explain exactly the connection between Lithuania’s inability to come to terms with its past and foreign policy.

2016-01-31

Jerusalem Post Reports on New Holocaust Book by Efraim Zuroff

In an addendum to a piece on International Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations around the world, the Jerusalem Post reported the publication of a new book by Efraim Zuroff, “co-authored” by Lithuanian Rūta Vanagaitė:

“Also on Tuesday, Zuroff launched his new book ‘Our People: Journey with an Enemy’ in Lithuania. Co-authored with Ruta Vanagaite, the writers accuse the current Lithuanian government of trying to ‘hide or minimize the role of Lithuanian collaborators during the Holocaust.'”

Full text here.

2016-01-31

Students and Teachers Converge on Ariogala to Remember the Holocaust

Ingrida Vilkienė, education program coördinator of the International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania reports on the commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day at a conference held at the high school in Ariogala, Lithuania. Teachers and students from schools with tolerance education centers throughout Lithuania as well as many others came to the Lithuanian town January 27 to remember the dead and present student works about the Holocaust. Others at the conference included Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon, Lithuanian ambassador for special assignments Dainius Junevičius, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Žakas Gercas with community members, Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman, Raseiniai district administrative head Algirdas Gricius and a large number of people from the education department and other institutions in the Raseiniai district administration.

2016-01-31

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

International Holocaust Remembrance Day was marked at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius with a minute of silence and a reading of the names of Holocaust victims. Cantor Shmuel Yaatov offered song and prayer for those who perished. Students from the Vilnius ORT Sholem Aleichem Gymnasium, Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon, deputy Lithuanian foreign minister M. Bekešius and may others took turns reading the names. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky addressed the audience, calling on them to pray for the Jews of Lithuania brutally murdered, and said there was a noticeable lack of an official reaction or even a minute of silence to remember the circumstances of the brutal mass murder of Jewish Lithuanian citizens by the leaders of the country.

Eye-witness Edmundas Zeligmanas, whose father was murdered as he watched by white armbanders, recalled the horrific mass murders in Šilalė during the first days of war in 1941. After his father’s murder, they murdered many members of the Jewish community the next day. The mass murders were so bloody and so swift there wasn’t time for the earth to absorb all the blood, and it flowed into a small stream which turned red.

2016-01-29

A Story of the Holocaust and the AIDS Epidemic: The Romance of an Indian Muslim Freedom Fighter and a Lithuanian Jewish Woman

by Kenneth X. Robbins and John Mcleod

In 1992 the editor of the Times of India telephoned one of Mumbai’s most prominent businessmen, Dr. Yusuf K. Hamied. The editor asked Hamied “as a Muslim leader” his opinion on the communal riots then taking place in the city. Hamied replied: “Why aren’t you asking me as an Indian Jew? Because my name is Hamied? My mother was Jewish!” His maternal grandparents perished in the Holocaust.

2016-01-29

They Survived the Holocaust

The POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, has posted a set of testimonies by Holocaust survivors:

They Survived the Holocaust. Survivors’ Accounts

It is truly difficult to find words to describe the ultimate atrocities of the Holocaust. Therefore, the words of those who managed to survive the Genocide are all the more important. For the International Holocaust Remembrance Day we present the survivors’ accounts from the oral history collection of POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews.

Webpage here.

2016-01-29