“On Sunday at three o’clock the streets of the ghetto were closed. A group of three hundred Jews from Salos and Smurgainys left for Kaunas with a large crowd of Jews from the countryside at the railroad station. Standing at the gate I saw how they packed their things. Happy and in a good mood, they got on the train. Today terrible news reached us.

“Eighty-five cars with Jews, almost 5,000 people, were not taken to Kaunas as promised; instead the train took them to Ponar where they were shot. Five-thousand new victims of brutality. The entire ghetto is upset as if struck by lightning. People are consumed by the sense of butchery… Everything is so horrible.”

These are the thoughts fifteen-year-old Yitskhok Rudashevski wrote down in Yiddish in his school notebook. The thoughts of someone mature beyond his age, or perhaps thoughts made old through violence, suffering and waiting for death… Yitskhok’s life ended here, as did those of many Vilnius ghetto inmates, in one of the pits of Ponar turned into human sacrifice sites.

Lithuanian school children and young adults have not had the opportunity so far to read Yitskhok’s diary, and the several pages included in history textbooks do not reflect the horror of the Holocaust, or the 700 years of Lithuanian Jewish history, or my people’s contribution to fortifying Lithuanian statehood. Little is said of Lithuanian collaboration in the Holocaust, and heads are bowed and statues raised not always to the true heroes of Lithuania. The Holocaust is passed on as a crippling tragedy of from one generation to the next, and from a different generation to the next as horrible guilt, at the subconscious level. The time has come to recognize the common historical memory of Jews and Lithuanians. Lithuanians and Litvaks have one shared history in which Lithuanians and Jews intertwine, and the paths of Israel and Lithuania crisscross. Zionism, or Jewish patriotism, a very strong tradition in Litvak history, saved many Jewish families from death. Am Yisrael khai. Mir zainen do!

For perhaps the first time at this event in Ponar, Jewish partisan Fania Brancovskaja will not speak. The entire Community says, Get well soon, Fania!

This reminds us of the passage of time, the worth of a human life, its fragility and transitory nature, and it encourages us to act, while we can, to keep memory alive. Only historical memory and truth will help the older generation to know, give the younger generation the chance to learn, and help build the bridge of memory between peoples and countries.

Eli Rabinowitz interviews Phillip Maisel, 95, Survivor of the Vilna Ghetto, and friend of Hirsh Glik in Melbourne, Australia. August 22, 2017

Hirsh Glik, 20, wrote the poem, Zog Nit Keynmol, in Yiddish in the Vilna Ghetto in 1943. Its powerful words are about hope, heroes and resistance. It became immediately popular and spread quickly. Hirsh was killed in Estonia the following year.

Two Jewish Russian brothers, Dmitri and Daniel Pokrass, had composed a march for a movie in 1938. This was later matched with the poem. After the Holocaust, this song became the anthem of the Survivors and has been sung ever since at annual Yom Hashoah commemorations, mostly in Yiddish, and in Hebrew in Israel.

Many school children now sing Zog Nit Keynmol at commemorations in Yiddish, the lingua franca in 1943, but hardly spoken today. Most do not understand the meaning, inspiration and context of the words. This was brought to my attention in January by Rabbi Craig Kacev, the Head of Jewish Studies at South Africa’s largest Jewish Day School, King David. Three weeks later, 1000 of his high school students attended my audiovisual presentation consisting of short YouTube clips. It was a resounding success and the start of my remarkable journey taking me to South Africa, the UK, Lithuania, Poland, Israel, the US, Canada and back home to Australia in six months!

by Arkadijus Vinokuras

You have to have malice to call me a Russophobe. I am addressing several Russian-speaking Jews of Vilnius who are spreading this lie. I have the highest regard for all kinds of Russian art. By personal invitation of legendary clown Yuri Nikulin I performed in his circus in Moscow. Also at the invitation of legendary Taganka Theater director Yuri Lubimov, I performed in his presentation of Master and Margarita at Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theater. Several of my best poems were written in Russian. Incidentally, I write poetry in Lithuanian, Russian, Swedish, English and Spanish.

So what horrible thing has happened to begin this malicious campaign against my person? Is it that I have foundation to say the Vilnius Jewish Community elections for chairman initiated by Simonas Gurevičius have nothing in common with democratic principles? If that’s it, no one has even attempted to rebut my arguments. So what else is left? To turn my well-founded criticism into the accusation that I am insulting the Russian-speaking Jews of Vilnius. That’s just cheap. But if anyone does feel falsely “suspected” of something, I sincerely apologize.

The accusation is without basis. When the fascists of any European state murdered our parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, they didn’t care a bit which language they were speaking. After the 1917 Revolution around 100,000 Jews were murdered in pogroms. When Lithuanian Jews were deported to the gulag by order of Josef Stalin, it didn’t matter what language they spoke. Before and after World War II Russian Jews were subject to “cleansing” and tens of thousands of Russian Jews died in the gulags.

This is my statement which brought on the storm: “There is another problem, that of mentality, afflicting the Vilnius Jewish Community. For instance, the majority of those 260 VJC members who assembled speak Russian exclusively among themselves. They only watch Russian television channels. The don’t understand terms such as democratic elections and democratic election and democratic election campaign procedures.” I am clearly talking only about 260 people and I stress “the majority of them.” In other words, my statement has nothing to do with the 2,000 other Jews in Vilnius, many of whom are Russian speakers. On what considerations was my statement based? I wanted to explain what I believed were the reasons the democratic rules of the game were violated and ignored. After all, 260 people voted in elections which clearly violated the principles of fair elections and the community was divided. The easiest thing to do was to reject my arguments at a primitive and emotional level, shouting “Gospodin Vinokuras padsadnaya utka Faini.” And also by accusing me of belittling Russian-speaking Jews.

by Geoff Vasil

The ORT Sholem Aleichem Gymnasium in Vilnius had a special guest Monday. Eli Rabinowitz from Perth, originally Cape Town, tries to make it to Lithuania every summer, and says he’s been here seven times now in the last six years. He comes from a long line of Litvaks in South Africa and has been quietly going to schools around the world to get them to teach their students the Partisan Song.

For those who don’t know what that means, there is a world-famous song which came out of the Vilnius ghetto, one treated as a sort of national anthem in Israel, where people stand at attention when it is sung. Most people in Vilnius and Lithuania today have never heard it, but over the decades before the internet came along, the song went viral in slow motion.

LitvakSIG delegation visit Tolerance Center, Vilna Gaon Museum, Carol Hoffman third from left

The Litvak genealogical web site LitvakSIG‘s board of directors have recently been travelling around Lithuania as part of their important work. The board currently includes nine members: Amy Wachs, Barry Halpern, Carol Hoffman, Dorothy Leivers, Garri Regev, Jill Anderson, Phil Shapiro, Ralph Salinger and Russ Maurer. Six of the nine board members visited Lithuania this past week to meet with archivists and members of the Vilnius and regional Jewish communities. We managed to interview Carol Hoffman at the Bagel Shop Café in Vilnius last Sunday.

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Tell us something about yourself.

My names is Carol Hoffman. I was born and raised in the United States. My father was born here in Lithuania in 1892 in Kapčiamiestis, in Yiddish it’s Kopcheve. My mother was born in the United States but her mother was born in Kapčiamiestis, in Kopcheve, in about 1858. So my entire family from my mother’s side and from my father’s side are Litvaks.

So, my entire family are Litvaks, they’re from the same place, from the same shtetl, and I was raised with a strong sense of being my brother’s keeper. I came to Israel in 1972 with three young children and a husband and we settled in the northern part of Israel. I worked as a librarian and a teacher of computer science in the university for many, many years, and I retired seven years ago when began working full-time as a volunteer for LitvakSIG. This is my seventh or eighth or ninth trip to Lithuania, I’m not sure. My first trip was in 2000. I had never been here. I met Regina Kopelevich on the border and we went to … Kopcheve and then to Vilnius. So I feel the strong sense of roots.