Antanas Terleckas passed away at the age of 96 during the night of February 16. He was a former dissident and political prisoner, a staunch supporter of Lithuanian independence, a human rights advocate and the founder of the Lithuanian Freedom League. The Lithuanian Jewish Community extends our condolences to his friends and family members.
Knafaim Club Open Again
After a short vacation, the Knafaim Club for youth aged 13 to 17 has reopened, ready to receive members and friends every Friday at 6:00 P.M., with different games and activities to improve Jewish and general knowledge, followed by a ceremony to greet the Sabbath. For more information, contact programs director Žana Skudovičienė at zanas@sc.lzb.lt or call+370 678 81514.
Happy February 16
The Lithuanian Jewish Community wishes you a very happy February 16, the traditional Lithuanian day of independence celebrated by citizens of all ethnic backgrounds in the period between the two world wars.
First Quiz Held
The Bagel Shop Café hosted the first quiz in what is to become a regular event. Last Sunday’s topic was Jewish Music. Participants didn’t just squeeze their brains, they also sang, trying to recall the tops songs from various historical eras. It’s safe to say most of the participants learned some new facts along the way. The moderator, writer Arkadijus Vinokuras, was accompanied by son Saulius, with help formulating questions from Sholem Aleichem music teacher Ūla Marija Barbora Zemeckytė. While the initial plan was to hold the quizzes every Sunday, the plan now is hold one per month on a Sunday, so stay tuned for the next round. You can check here or consult the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s facebook page.
Kaunas Isn’t a Lithuanian City, Despite Long-Standing Claims to the Contrary
A Lithuanian translation of interwar Jewish author Kalmen Zingman’s book “On the Spiral Staircase” was recently published by the Hubris publishing house. Goda Volbikaitė translated it.
What can this novel written in 1925 and only now available in Lithuanian tell today’s readers? First of all, it talks about Kaunas. The translation of this book is also a kind of proof Kaunas wasn’t just a Lithuanian city. People of other ethnicities also lived there whose works can (and should) be listed in our literary canon. We spoke with the translator of this book about the little-known figure of Kalmen Zingman, spiral staircases, the Aleksotas aerodrome, Slobodka and Yiddish literature.
Just three years before his death, Zingman wrote in his diary: “I feel like that wonderful time when I will be recognized and famous isn’t far off.” Unfortunately his dream was not to come true. Why do you think Zingman wasn’t successful in literature and recognition?
For truth’s sake, it has to be said that no Yiddish writer working in Kaunas in the period between the two world wars got famous. We are talking about around 30 authors in total who lived in Kaunas for a shorter or longer time.
It’s very clear why they didn’t become famous in the Lithuanian context: there was a lack of interwar translations from the Yiddish language into Lithuanian, just as there is in our time. I should say Lithuania is still just in the early stages of discovering Yiddish literature. Sutzkever and Kulbak are better known now, and some rarer names such as Matilda Olkin and Yitzhak Rudashevski. But basically whole strata of Yiddish literature made in Lithuania are still unknown to the Lithuanian reader.
Applications Being Accepted Now for Compensation for Personal Property Lost in Holocaust
The Goodwill Foundation is planning to disburse from 5 to 10 million euros to those who lost personal property during the Holocaust and their heirs and who meet specific criteria.
Those who survived the Holocaust in Lithuania and their heirs are eligible to make application until December 30, 2023. Compensation is planned to be paid by July 1, 2025.
No claims can be made for plots of land, but applications made by those seeking recompense for commercial buildings, residential homes and apartments will be considered seriously.
Those eligible to apply include Jewish property owners who lived in Lithuania until May 8, 1945, and whose property was seized by the Nazis or Soviets from June 15, 1940, until March 10, 1990, and who didn’t have an opportunity to receive their property and get compensation for it because they weren’t Lithuanian citizens from June 18, 1991, until December 31, 2001. Inheritors eligible for compensation are widows or widowers of former Jewish property owners, parents or children of such, and in the event they are dead, then grandchildren or spouses of grandchildren. Those left property in last wills and testaments are also eligible, as are their widows or widowers, parents, children, grandchildren or spouses of grandchildren.
Bringing the Generations Together
The Israeli International Museum Anu in Tel Aviv, the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium and the Lithuanian Jewish Community are conducting the “From Generation to Generation” project, bringing ninth graders together with seniors from the Community. The first meeting this year happened last week.
Sholem Aleichem principal Ruth Reches said: “Children especially enjoy this project and the seniors appreciate it as well. This moving and meaningful bringing-together of different generations makes people care, enriches the soul and let’s us understand one another better.”
LJC program director Žana Skudovičienė said the first meeting was very friendly, and marked the Tu b’Shvat holiday, with delicious dates from Israel. “It was very nice and warm. We discovered we shared interesting relatives in other countries. There was a lot of emotion because of that, and these will be good memories,” she confided.
Weekly Quiz
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to a new series of quizzes on Sundays on Jewish history. Writer Arkadijus Vinokuras will moderate the quiz at the Bagel Shop Café on Sundays with a new topic every week. Come and show off your knowledge, or just come to learn something new. The first quiz will be held at 2:00 P.M. this Sunday, February 12, at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. The topic will be Jewish music, with musc professor Leonidas Melnikas offering his expert opinion as judge. Register by sending an email to katrina@lzb.lt.
Leader of Antakya Jewish Community Still Missing, Wife Found Dead
Antakya Jewish community leader Saul Cenudioglu remains missing but the body of his wife has been found, according to the newspaper Haaretz. Days of major earthquakes have rendered much of the area around Syrian-Turkish border including the small town of Antakya an urban wasteland. The number of known dead is now approaching 20,000.
World Jewish Congress vice-president Maramas Stern and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky express their deepest condolences in the face of this indescribable tragedy. The WJC is in contact with the Jewish community in Antakya and is attempted to send aid to the earthquake victims there.
“In these difficult times we extend our deepest condolences to the victims of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. Our thoughts and prayers are with those who have lost family members, with those experiencing trauma and who have lost their homes,” WJC executive vice-president Maramas Stern wrote in a letter circulating among Jewish communities around the world.
“We grieve together with the family members of those who have perished and we are praying for all victims and those missing. We wish you strength in this difficult moment,” LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky wrote.
Silvia Foti Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize
According to a blog post by Grant Gochin in the blog section of the Times of Israel internet site, Jonas Noreika’s granddaughter Silvia Foti has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2023.
Although the Nobel Prize committee has historically refused to release the names of nominees for 50 years, according to Gochin’s blog post:
“[Former Beverly Hills] mayor [and current Council Member John] Mirish proudly announced that Silvia Foti has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Foti is the granddaughter of an apex mass genocidal murderer of Jews in Lithuania, Jonas Noreika. She bravely exposed her grandfather’s crimes and Holocaust fraud by the government of Lithuania. Foti is the first non-Jewish Lithuanian in history ever to be nominated for the most prestigious peace prize in the world.”
If selected for the prestigious recognition, Foti would joint earlier female writers who received the prize including indigenous Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchu who won the Nobel peace prize in 1998, Belarus’s Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich who won the prize in literature in 2015 and 2018 peace prize recipient Nadia Murad Basee Taha, the Yezidi human rights activist from Iraq.
Silvia Foti has written an extensive biography detailing her grandfather’s Nazi activities during the Holocaust in Lithuania published in English and Lithuanian.
Grant Gochin’s blog post with an interesting story about the Lithuanian consul in Los Angeles here.
Young Jewish, Roma Leaders Visit POLIN Museum
Participants in the project to promote mutual understanding among young future leaders from Lithuania’s Roma and Jewish ethnic communities sponsored by the Goodwill Foundation and Germany’s EVZ Foundation visited the award-winning POLIN Jewish history museum in Warsaw. Besides viewing the interactive exhibits teaching about 1,000 years of Jewish history in Poland, the young people and educators engaged in a discussion there among themselves and with educators from the museum
People often say there are two Warsaws, pre- and post-war, not surprising since the entire city was leveled in warfare and especially during the Warsaw Uprising, and painstakingly reconstructed in the post-war period. The female guide for the Lithuanian delegation was a rare original resident of the Polish capital and able to speak something like seven languages.
“This museum is a huge story and we have the moral duty to tell it,” she said. The bright modern museum located in the Warsaw ghetto stands in sharp contrast to the dark granite monument commemorating the heroes of the Uprising. The guide told the group around 80% of world Jewry called Poland home for centuries. The Lithuanian delegation led by the guide viewed multimedia installations, texts, music, paintings, photographs and recreated scenes from Jewish daily life.
YIVO Digitizes Chaim Grade’s Archive, a Yiddish Treasure Trove with a Soap Opera History
Photo: Chaim Grade and his wife Inna Hecker Grade in the United States in 1978. They met in Moscow in 1945. Courtesy YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
by Andrew Silow-Carroll, jta.org, February 5, 2023
JTA–Years ago, when I worked at the Forward, I had a cameo in a real-life Yiddish drama.
A cub reporter named Max Gross sat just outside my office, where he answered the phones. A frequent caller was Inna Grade, the widow of the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade and a fierce guardian of his literary legacy. Mrs. Grade would badger poor Max in dozens of phone calls, especially when a Forward story referred kindly to the Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. Grade’s widow described Singer as a “blasphemous buffoon” whose fame and reputation, she was convinced, came at the expense of her husband’s.
As Max explains in his 2008 memoir “From Schlub to Stud” Mrs. Grade “became a bit of a joke around the paper.” And yet in Yiddish literary circles, her protectiveness of one of the 20th century’s most important Yiddish writers was serious business: because Inna Grade kept such a tight hold on her late husband’s papers–Chaim Grade (pronounced “Grah-deh”) died in 1982–a generation of scholars was thwarted in taking his true measure.
Inna Grade died in 2010, leaving no signed will or survivors, and the contents of her cluttered Bronx apartment became the property of the borough’s public administrator. In 2013 Chaim Grade’s personal papers, 20,000-volume library, literary manuscripts and publication rights were awarded to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the National Library of Israel. They are now stored in YIVO headquarters on Manhattan’s West 16th Street.
US Ambassador Calls on Ukmergė Mayor to Remove Monument to Lithuanian Nazi
Photos: Grant Gochin via Times of Israel
According to an article on the webpage of Lithuanian State Radio and Television, US ambassador to Lithuania Robert Gilchrist did more than just attend events to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. According to the report, he sent a letter to the mayor of Ukmergė (Yiddish Vilkomir), Rolandas Janickas, asking a a monument be erected at the site where around 10,000 Jews murdered there in the Holocaust, and asking an existing monument to Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator Juozas Krikštaponis be removed from its location at the central park in the small Lithuanian town north of Vilnius.
According to Lithuanian State Radio and Television, copies of the letter were sent to speaker of parliament Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen, Lithuanian culture minister Simonas Kairys, Lithuanian foreign minister Garbielius Landsbergis and director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania Arūnas Bubnys.
He also wants the plaque to Jonas Noreika in central Vilnius removed. According to the US embassy’s website, ambassador Gilchrist said the following in an address on Holocaust Remembrance Day at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius:
“I would like to express appreciation to the Speaker, the government, and the Seimas for the recent passage of legislation to provide symbolic compensation for heirless and pending claims on private property lost by Jewish Lithuanians during the Holocaust. I also commend you for the passage of legislation that would direct removal of monuments to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, which includes Nazi collaborators who participated in the Holocaust. I hope this will lead to the swift removal of such monuments, including to Juozas Krištaponis in Ukmergė and Jonas Noreika here in Vilnius.”
Full article in Lithuanian here.
Ambassador Gilchrist’s full address here.
Background here.
Discussion Club: Was Jewish Life Wonderful under Smetona?
The #ŽydiškųPašnekesiai discussion club will address the topic “Was Jewish Life Great during the Smetona Era” at the Bagel Shop Café at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius at 5:00 P.M. on February 8. The discussion will be live-streamed on the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s facebook page.
In the broader public discussion of whether to erect a statue to the interwar Lithuanian president and dictator Antanas Smetona, proponents have begun saying he defended Lithuania’s Jewish population and was even known as “King of the Jews.” Opponents of the monument counter there were no stops placed on anti-Semitism in Lithuania in the period between the two world wars, meaning the entire span of Lithuanian independence, and Jews were banned from public service and elsewhere.
What do today’s Jews and Lithuania’s current crop of historians think about these issues? Attend or tune in to find out.
Moderator and club founder Arkadijus Vinokuras will put the question to Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman, Lithuanian Jewish Community; Žygimantas Menčenkovas, member of the Leftist Alliance, philosopher, teacher and activist and via internet Linas Venclauskas, historian and author of a recent book on Lithuanian anti-Semitism prior to 1940.
Šiauliai Students Learn about the Holocaust
Šiauliai’s Gegužės pro-gymnasium marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day with a lesson for the combined group of 7th graders there about the Holocaust, taught by Šiauliai Jewish Community member and math teacher Ieva Rafael, religious faith teacher Elvyra Ramoškienė and history teacher Kristina Puzarienė. Other teachers from the school, colleagues at schools in Akmenė and Papilė and members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community observed the lesson.
Ieva Rafael focused on the mass extermination, religious faith teacher Elvyra Ramoškienė spoke about the moral and spiritual issues as well as Jewish symbols and history teacher Kristina Puzarienė talked about the spread of prejudices and stereotypes and abuses of human rights according to teaching methodologies she acquired in professional training in Israel.
The young people heard the story of the Jewish girl Hana who was rescued from a ghetto and discussed the dangers of not speaking out or acting in the face of pressure.
Sixth-graders from the school attended the commemoration of Holocaust Remembrance Day with members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community at the memorial stone marking the former gate of the Šiauliai ghetto.
Tolerance Lesson in Panevėžys
On February 1 the Panevėžys Jewish Community held a tolerance lesson attended by students from Panevėžys Gymnasium No. 5. Participants spoke about how to encourage tolerance among people of different ethnic backgrounds.
Gymnasium No. 5 is one of the leaders in Lithuania in terms of teaching the Holocaust to young people, mainly in the upper grades. It has its own Tolerance Center directed by history teacher Beata Viederienė. In fact it’s become a sort of tradition for students in the upper grades to make posters about the Holocaust and to display them in Panevėžys, leading to greater public awareness of the Holocaust.
“Learning about the Holocaust is important both as history and overall in general education. We have to understand this better to insure it doesn’t happen again,” Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman said.
He provided the visiting students with a brief overview of the Jewish history, culture and traditions in Panevėžys, and the reputation local Jews had for higher religious learning.
Remembering Saulius and Silvija Sondeckiai
A concert and discussion will be held at the Stasys Vainiūnas House at Goštauto street no. 2-41 at 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, February 8, in memory of the remarkable Lithuanian musical couple Saulius and Silvija Sondeckiai. Professor Leonidas Melnikas is to speak and students from the Saulius Sondeckis Art Gymnasium in Šiauliai will perform. The event is free and open to the public.
February 3 marked seven years since the death of renowned Lithuanian musician, conductor and professor Saulius Sondeckis. In the run up to that sad anniversary, his widow, cello player and professor Silvija Sondeckienė, passed away on January 21.
Review of BBC Documentary How the Holocaust Began
Photo: Historian James Bulgin at the Majdanek concentration camp, near Lublin, Poland Credit: Benjamin Holgate/BBC
James Bulgin’s BBC Two documentary contains horrifying footage, showing how ordinary people facilitated the Nazis in murdering Jews
What springs to mind when you hear the word “Holocaust?” This was the question which opened James Bulgin’s film “How the Holocaust Began” (BBC). Most likely you will think of somewhere like Auschwitz, and the Nazis presiding over processed mass murder. But Bulgin, an historian from the Imperial War Museum, wanted to show us something different.
Large-scale executions of Jews began in 1941 as the Germans made their way across Eastern Europe. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen death squads carried out many of these murders. But the chilling truth presented here was that they did not, in fact, could not, act alone. They needed not just the tacit support of the civilian population, but their active participation. Ordinary people facilitated and sometimes carried out the mass killings of men, women and children.
The documentary contained horrific footage, a “home movie” shot by a German soldier of people being marched into trenches and shot in the head. Spectators gather round, smoking and talking, to watch. It was a terrible thing to see. But equally unforgettable were the words of Faina Kukliansky, whose grandmother had been rounded up in Alytus, Lithuania, and taken to a forest along with 2,500 others to be murdered. Kukliansky had discovered that this was done by local townsfolk and even school children: “That confirms what my uncle used to tell me… That probably his classmates killed his mother.”
Full review here.
LJC Asks Conservative Party to Look Into Member’s Anti-Semitic Remark
Photo: Old cemetery in Nemakščiai
The Lithuanian Jewish Community has asked Gabrielius Landsbergis, the leader of the conservative Homeland Union/Lithuanian Christian Democrats Party, to look into remarks made by fellow party member Remigijus Laugalis.
“If you don’t vote for me, then you can bury yourself in the Jewish cemetery,” Laugalis allegedly remarked.
Remigijus Laugalis is currently the alderman of the town of Nemakščiai and is seeking to be elected to the town council of Raseiniai, Lithuania.
The LJC has asked Landsbergis to undertake actions to educate residents of the Raseiniai district about the consequences of uncontrolled anti-Semitism and racism. The LJC has offered to help hold educational meetings with historians, cultural experts and writers in a spirit of cooperation based on mutual respect.
Update: The politician apparently made a glib comment as a joke in response to a question posed by a reporter which he found ridiculous. The questions was, is it true you said if people didn’t vote for you, you wouldn’t allow them to be buried in the local cemetery?
Ona Šimaitė Bio Better Known in US, Israel, France than Lithuania
Rimantas Stankevičius utilized Holocaust Remembrance Day to present again his biography of Lithuania’s first recognized Righteous Gentile Ona Šimaitė on Holocaust Remembrance Day. The book was published back in 2021 by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania. He gave an interview about his book to the news website delfi.lt.
“… at the intersection of Stiklių and Didžiosios street [in Vilnius] there was a false-flag operation intended to show Jews had attempted to kill a German officer. … Men, women, children and the infirm were sent en masse [from the nieghborhood] to the prison. One elderly woman was carried. Women marched cradling babies and with small children who clung to their mothers’ skirts. Many children from the orphanage were marched there along with their teachers. I saw a cobbler with a limp from Stiklių street whom I knew well. He wasn’t able to walk without a walking stick. They took his cane at the entrance to the prison and began beating him with it. Then they threw the stick through the prison gate whistling, guffawing and cursing the prisoners. On the other side of the prison I saw a Jewish woman in a white hospital gown. She appeared to have become completely lost. I looked for my 11-year-old daughter who was taken from home to no one knows where when she was supposed to be on duty at the hospital. I advised the woman to go home quickly so she wouldn’t end up in the prison. I wrote down her name and address and promised to do everything I could. The well-known Lithuanian public figure Marcelė Kubiliūtė and I went to the home of Buragas, the director of Jewish affairs. I went to Lithuanian security. I looked over lists there but didn’t find the girl’s name. I shrugged my shoulders and asked, ‘Is it worth getting all worked up about a Jewish girl?’ When I inquired where the girl might be, they suggested I go to the Lithuanian Special Squad which was shooting Jews. There was no sense going there at all,” Ona Šimaitė, librarian at Vilnius University from 1940 to 1944, stated.