Learning – Page 71 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Condolences

Simonas Dovidavičius passed away December 14. He was deputy chairman of the Kaunas Jewish Community, the founding light and director of the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas, highly educated, a tour guide and a good friend. His loss is a great loss to the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Kaunas Jewish Community. Our condolences to his many friends and loved ones.

Those wishing to bid him farewell may do so at the St. Anthony of Padua Church in Kaunas, Radvilėnų highway no. 15A, Kaunas, on Tuesday, December 17, beginning at 5:00 P.M. He will be buried at noon on December 18 at the Aleksotas Jewish cemetery in Kaunas.

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Paideia Jewish Studies Program

2019-12-12

Come Meet Eva Tombak

Come meet writer, yoga teacher and Community member Eva Tombak at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, December 17, at the LJC in Vilnius.

2019-12-12

Launch of Lithuanian Translation of Yossi Levy’s Love Peddlers

The Lithuanian translation of Israeli writer and Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Yossi Avni-Levy’s book Love Peddlers will take place at the Lithuanian National Library in Vilnius at 6:00 P.M. on December 18. The book-launch event will be moderated by Litvak writer Markas Zingeris. Promotional materials for the event say it will be held in English.

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New Book by Dr. Aušra Pažėraitė

The publishing house of Vilnius University has published a new book called “Nesuk į kelią iš takelio. Lietuvos žydų religinės ir filosofinės minties paveldo trajektorijomis” [Don’t Quit the Path for the Road: Along the Trajectories of the Litvak Religious and Philosophical Thought Heritage]. The Lithuanian-language book contains extracts from the texts of the Vilna Gaon, Chaim of Volozhin, Grozdinsky, Israel Salanter and Emmanuel Levinas with commentaries.

Dr. Aušra Pažėraitė has written a bit about her book especially for the www.lzb.lt website:

“It has long been my dream to write a book talking about, examining and interpreting the heritage of Litvak religious and philosophical thinking. … [Among others,] another problem which arose was the time-period and the range of what Litvak means. I mean the problem of geographical boundaries in which we can look for the Litvak heritage, which has changed drastically over history, and it happens that the same historical figures are assigned to Lithuania’s, Poland’s and Russia’s legacy… So I chose a narrower problem, the Litvak-ness which is associated with religious tradition, historically connected with the Vilna Gaon and his circle of followers. So this allowed for choosing a specific perspective which would allow me to connect schools of thought otherwise hard to reconcile: the Western understanding of religion which is still forming in the modern period, which seems to so many people self-evident… i.e., between the written sacred texts and the oral texts, the traditional of passing traditions on orally. …”

The book is available at the Vilnius University bookstore, at the Versmė chain of bookshops and on the internet sites patogupirkti.lt, knygos.lt and humanitas.lt

2019-12-112019-12-19

How the World Discovered the Holocaust

by Laura Kešytė

When did filmmakers start working on the topic of the Holocaust? How did they choose to portray it? Is it possible to present the horror of the Holocaust on camera? Cultural historian Violeta Davoliūtė-Opgenorth talks about this.

Violeta Davoliūtė-Opgenorth is a senior academic at the Lithuanian Cultural Research Center and is a visiting professor at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales. In 2015 and 2016 she worked as an academic at Yale’s Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. She defended her dissertation “Testimony: From the Poetics of Place to the Politics of Memory” at University of Toronto.

The development of the topic of the Holocaust in cinema in Western Europe, especially in the 1960s and 70s, is closely connected with the trial of Adolf Eichmann and with Hanna Arendt’s articles about the trial compiled in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem and published in 1963, and with Raul Hilberg’s research, whose book published in 1961 distinguished clearly for the first time the categories of perpetrator, observer, judge and victim.

These sparked politically painful discussions in European countries about who the collaborators, victims and observers were in World War II and what their roles were, their prototypes and how to present them properly. This was directly connected with the cinema because the cinema exerted great influence on these discussions and historical research in general: it offered new perspectives for telling the story of WWII to its audiences. In other words, the cinema didn’t just reflect but actively encouraged a shift in the narratives of history.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-12-112019-12-11

Soviet Dissident Natan Sharansky Named 2020 Genesis Prize Recipient

Photo: Natan Sharansky, a Soviet refusenik and Israeli lawmaker, was named the 2020 Genesis Prize laureate. (Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

by Laura E. Adkins

NEW YORK (JTA)–The Genesis Prize Foundation has announced that Natan Sharansky, a Jewish refusenik, prolific leader in the Soviet Jewry emigration movement and former Israeli politician, will be awarded the 2020 Genesis Prize.

The Genesis Prize, dubbed the “Jewish Nobel,” was started in 2013 and is financed through a permanent $100 million endowment. The annual award honors “extraordinary individuals for their outstanding professional achievement, contribution to humanity and commitment to Jewish values.”

Sharansky was selected to honor “his extraordinary lifelong struggle for political and religious freedoms, emphasizing the relevance of his work in today’s world,” the Genesis Prize Foundation said in a news release.

2019-12-112019-12-13

Not in Our Name

by Grant Arthur Gochin

The first mass murders of Jews in the Holocaust began in Lithuania. Germany had not yet decided to annihilate the Jews of Europe; they had put forth the idea to relocate Jews to Madagascar or Uganda, but the war made this plan impossible. Lithuania proved to the Nazis that there was indeed an alternative.

Between occupations by Russia and Germany in 1941, Lithuania was governed by an interim Provisional Government, led by Prime Minister Juozas Ambrazevičius Brazaitis. The Lithuanian Provisional Government displayed to Nazis how easily a population could be enticed into perpetrating genocide.

Upon Nazi arrival, Einsatzkommando 2 of the German Security Police asserted charge of murders of Jews. Einsatzkommando 2 reported the murder of 114,856 Lithuanian Jews as early as December 1, 1941. One hundred and thirty-nine Nazi personnel, of whom forty-four were secretaries and drivers, and ninety-five were murderers, directed this slaughter. Local Lithuanians enthusiastically and voluntarily conducted the looting, raping, torture, enslavement and murders of their Jewish neighbors. Thereafter, Germany introduce the Final Solution of the Jewish problem in January 1942.

Full text here.

2019-12-09

Presentation by Joachim Tauber at Holocaust Property Restitution Conference

Among other notables, renowned German historian Joachim Trauber delivered a presentation at the Goodwill Foundation’s conference on Jewish property restitution held at the Lithuanian Jewish Community this week. Professor Trauber is a lecturer at the Institute for the Culture and History of the Germans in Northeast Europe of the Nordost-Institut at the University of Hamburg in Lüneburg and is a member of Lithuania’s International Commission for Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Communist Occupational Regimes in Lithuania as well as of similar commissions in Latvia and elsewhere. He is the author of number books and academic articles about the Holocaust in Lithuania and Northeast Europe. We are please to be able to post a copy of the slideshow presentation he gave Monday for those who were unable to attend the conference in Vilnius.

holocaust in lithuania 1941-1944_6

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Presentation by International Law Expert Dirk Haupt at Holocaust Restitution Conference

International law expert Dirk Haupt of Lund University in Sweden delivered a presentation at the conference held at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on December 2 organized by the Goodwill Foundation and dedicated to discussing Jewish property restitution in Lithuania and Europe. We are pleased to be able to share his slideshow presentation below with those who were unable to attend.

haupt dirk roland - presentation 2019-12-02 compensating for nazi injustice and indemnifying jewish victims - the german experience2

2019-12-052019-12-16

EJC President Kantor Praises French Parliament Resolution to Fight Anti-Semitism

Wednesday, December 4, 2019–European Jewish Congress president Dr. Moshe Kantor praised the French National Assembly’s decision adopting the IHRA working definition of anti-Semitism and recognizing explicitly that this includes hatred against the state of Israel as a Jewish state.

“We applaud this decision because it is logical and important,” Dr. Kantor said. “Anti-Zionism is almost always just a mask for hatred of Jews and Jewish collectivity and is just the most modern manifestation of the oldest hatred.”

“In the past, anti-Semites used religious, racial and ethnic slurs, and now they use national. Anti-Zionists co-opt all the worst antisemitic libels and motifs throughout history against Jews and merely reapply them to the Jewish state.”

The motion passed with 154 in favor and 72 opposed in the parliament’s lower house. It was proposed by lawmaker Sylvain Maillard of La Republique en Marche, president Emmanuel Macron’s centrist party.

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Regimes Change, but Cowards and Brown-Nosers Don’t

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

The epic of the presentation of the play Mūsiškiai [Our People] by the Juozas Miltinis Theater in Panevėžys, Lithuania, just demonstrates once again that the cowardly and obsequious appear to travel through time: they stay exactly the same under all systems of government.

The possession of these character traits turns their owner into the worst kind of tool in the hands of any kind of government. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Nazi, Communist or democratic regime. In all of them, the coward becomes an ultra-patriot ready to carry out any order by the government or mob, for example, by banning a play someone doesn’t like without even viewing it beforehand.

Who will take responsibility for the persecution of theater art director Andrius Jevsejevas? Who will take responsibility for the critique of Polish playwright Michal Walczak by someone who either did read the play or did not, but in any case didn’t understand it? Who will apologize to the highly talented young actors who performed their roles flawlessly? Who at the theater will take responsibility for the idiotic requirement in the contract with the playwright that his work must have no connection with Rūta Vanagaitė’s book Mūsiškiai?

The wild spirit of the Soviet Party political enforcers roams the perfomance spaces. It would appear that, out of fear of the street or out of fear of some sorts of bureaucrats, acting theater director A. Venckus didn’t even welcome the creators of the play during the premiere. Well, cowards shouldn’t become theater directors, because theater is for the courageous. Although it takes real civic courage to express one’s opinion in a dictatorship, this is the basic norm in the frame of democratic government.

2019-12-032019-12-16

Goodwill Foundation Conference on Holocaust Restitution Update

Press Release (updated)

Regional Consultation about Restitution of Holocaust Era Assets

Next week regional consultation regarding restitution of Holocaust era assets will be held in Vilnius. The experiences of returning assets of European countries will be reviewed and well-known historians will present their research about what happened in Lithuanian during WWII.

The conference is dedicated to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Terezin declaration. In 2009 47 countries, Lithuania among them, has signed the document in Prague and announced a program of activities directed at securing assistance, compensation and commemoration of Nazi victims’ memory. It is noteworthy the countries stressed the importance of ensuring communal and private property restitution.

“Noting the importance of restituting communal and individual immovable property that belonged to the victims of the Holocaust (Shoah) and other victims of Nazi persecution, the Participating States urge that every effort be made to rectify the consequences of wrongful property seizures, such as confiscations, forced sales and sales under duress of property, which were part of the persecution of these innocent people and groups, the vast majority of whom died heirless,” the Terezin declaration says.

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Honoring Lithuania’s Jewish Soldiers in Kaunas

by Dr. Raimundas Kaminskas

A ceremony to honor Jewish volunteer soldiers was held at the Žaliakalnis Jewish cemetery in the Gričiupis aldermanship in the Kaunas region on November 23. Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas recalled for the audience historic Jewish-Lithuanian relations and the contribution Jewish Lithuanian soldiers made in the battles for Lithuanian independence in 1919 and 1920 and later in the national Lithuanian military.

Director of the Kovo 11-osios Street Community Dr. Raimundas Kaminskas shared his thoughts on the civic-minded and patriotic Jewish soldiers in the period of Lithuanian independence from 1918 to 1940 and presented the chairman of the Kaunas Jewish Community a medal commemorating the Union of Jewish Volunteer Soldiers Who Served in the Liberation of Lithuania.

After the commemoration the audience moved to the St. Antthony of Padua Church where the mortal remains of church builder, rescuer of Jews and Lithuanian military volunteer father Juozas Želvys (1899-1985) are interred. The Žaliakalnis Jewish cemetery was established in 1861 and operated until 1952. The Lithuanian Cultural Heritage Department reports among the burials of many noted public, cultural, political and religious figures there, 14 of the graves are those of Lithuanian Jewish soldiers who perished in the battles for Lithuanian independence.

2019-11-29

Photographic Facts: Interwar Newspaper Verslas (“Business”) Heavily Fertilized Ground for Events of 1941

by Pinchos Fridberg and Polina Pailis

Slogan “Lithuania for Lithuanians”

[Photo: banner: “Lithuania for Lithuanians,” inscription: “The Pavasarininkai [literally “spring workers”] carried these kinds of banners and the coat of arms of Lithuanian businessmen through the streets of Kaunas during their Anniversary Congress.”]

This slogan didn’t just appear yesterday or the day before. We see it in the photograph over 80 years ago. And it wasn’t just in some small rural newspaper, but on the first page of the well-known weekly Verslas (“Business”) on July 7, 1938, published by the Union of Lithuanian Merchants, Industrialists and Tradesmen, 1932-1940, Kaunas.

We would like to point out the banners featuring hatred of other ethnic groups were carried by religious youth. The Pavasarininkai were members of the Federation of Lithuanian Catholic Youth, of whom there were about 100,000 in 1940.

2019-11-282019-12-11

Kaunas Synagogue Vandalized with Heil Hitler Graffiti

The entrance to the Choral Synagogue in Kaunas was vandalized with a Heil Hitler inscription in black paint. The desecration was discovered Saturday morning and was likely committed during the foregoing night.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky says this anti-Semitic attack against the synagogue in Kaunas confirms attacks on Jews are continuing. There have been five in just the last few months in Vilnius, Kaunas and Šiauliai. Despite criminal investigations, no one has been brought to account so far.

Police spokesman Ramūnas Matonis told BNS said the incidents were undoubtedly anti-Semitic. He said investigations have been started on sowing ethnic discord.

LJC chairwoman Kukliansky said the attacks coming just before important Lithuanian Jewish events were especially surprising.

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Goodwill Foundation Announcement on Holocaust Restitution

November 22, 2019

Press Release

Regional Consultation on Restitution of Holocaust-Era Assets

At the beginning of December a regional conference on the restitution of Holocaust-era assets will be held in Vilnius. The experiences of returning assets of European countries will be reviewed and well-known historians will present their research about what happened in Lithuania during WWII.

The conference is dedicated to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Terezin declaration. In 2009, 47 countries, Lithuania among them, signed the document in Praha and announced a program of activities directed at securing assistance, compensation and commemoration of the memory of the victims of the Nazis. It’s noteworthy these countries stressed the importance of ensuring communal and individual property restitution.

2019-11-22

Launch of Book “Gaon Code”

On Wednesday, November 20, the Lithuanian Jewish Community hosted the launch of a new book called the Gaon Code, a slightly dramatized retelling of Litvak history in Lithuania and abroad.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky introduced author Rytis Sabas and journalist and historian Rimvydas Valatka, who spoke about his media colleague and the skepticism he felt when Sabas told him he had written a book. That skepticism soon turned to enthusiasm as Valatka, who says he isn’t a literary critic, was drawn into story, which he called a thriller. Valatka played an interview he had conducted with Sabas for LNK television.

Rytis Sabas spoke briefly before presenting a slideshow on the overhead with diverse images of Jewish Lithuania. He then spoke about the book, saying it was 80% historical fact.

During questions Sabas said he had named the book Gaon Code intentionally with Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code in mind. He said he initially wanted to write a book which would be interesting to an international audience, but after he learned more about Litvak history, he realized Lithuanians needed to learn this part of their country’s own incredible history.

Photography by Dovilė Abromavičiutė

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Presentation of the Gaon Code

You’re invited to a presentation of the adventure novel the Gaon Code at 6:00 P.M. on November 20 at the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius. The novel stems from a Lithuanian man’s desire to demonstrate the significance of Litvaks in Lithuanian and world history. The book presents in an easily readable form numerous facts and stories about the Jewish communities of Vilnius, Želva and Ukmergė and about their contributions to learning and history.

Author Rytis Sabas and Lithuanian historian and journalist Rimvydas Valatka will discuss the book and its inspiration.

Rytis Sabas is also a journalist from Vilnius interested in history. He has travelled extensively including in Bosnia. Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The book is an adventure including a plethora of historical fact and some light fiction. While it attempts to show the grandeur and influence of the Vilna Gaon, it’s intended more to showcase Litvak history and the Litvak heritage. It’s aimed at outsiders, readers who might not know much about Lithuanian Jews.

The book is written in Lithuanian and the presentation will be conducted in Lithuanian. For more information, call 8 678 81 514.

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