Chuck Hughes, the Canadian celebrity chief who has an entire collection of series on Canada’s Food Network cable channel and the owner of two renowned restaurants in Montréal, visited the Bagel Shop Café last week.
Best known for his show Chuck’s Day Off, now carried by the Cooking Network on cable networks in the United States as well, Hughes has a special place in his heart and his kitchen for seafood.
The LJC’s Ilona Rūkienė caught up with Chuck last week and asked him a few questions.
Two commemorative plaques honoring the famous Litvaks Solomon Levit (1894-1938) and Chackelis Lemchenas (1904-2001) have been unveiled in Ukmergė (Vilkomir), Lithuania. Levit and Lemchenas were from the area. Levit is noted for his work in biology and medicine, and as the founder of the Genetic Medicine Institute in Moscow. He attended school in the city of Ukmergė. Lemchenas was a talented and respected Lithuanian philologist, lexicographer, linguistic reformer and cultural figure in his own right, and taught at the Jewish Real-Gymnasium in Ukmergė.
The ceremony on December 6 was attended by Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon, Ukmergė Regional Jewish Community chairman Artūras Taicas, Ukmergė regional administrator Rolandas Janickas and vicar Šarūnas Petrauskas, among others.
Chairman Taicas said at the ceremony he was encouraged to see so many people turn out for the event. He invited the Israel ambassador and the regional administrator to unveil the commemorative plaques.
On December 1 the Lithuanian Embassy in the UK in cooperation with University College London invited the public to the annual Litvak Days in London.
The program of the sixth annual Litvak Days included an evening of Yiddish song performed by Polina Shepherd at University College London and a conference on Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) in Lithuania held at the Lithuanian embassy.
“Lithuania puts a lot effort into promoting and preserving the rich heritage of Lithuanian Jews. We regard the Litvak Days events in London as a platform which facilitates cultural links between the UK’s British, Lithuanian and Jewish communities”, Lithuanian ambassador Asta Skaisgirytė said.
Litvak Days in London were attended by Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community and Arkady Rzegocki, ambassador of Poland. Dainius Junevičius, ambassador-at-large, conveyed a message from the Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius.
Full story here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community this week hosted the launch of the second corrected and expanded edition of Irina Guzenberg and Genrikh Agranovsky’s book in Russian about Jewish Vilna.
The new edition has been reorganized with a new structure and better indices of names and sites.
Author Irina Guzenberg has done exhaustive research to provide authentic street names from the period and the book is graced with attractive period photographs. Much of the history is unknown to modern residents of the Lithuanian capital, which was not very Lithuanian before the 1950s. Before the war one heard Yiddish, Polish and Russian spoken on the street.
Press release, November 9, 2016
For the third year in a row Jewish communities around the world will host challa baking events and Sabbath celebrations. More than 1,006 cities around the world are participating in this enchanting event, and this year Vilnius is one of them. The Lithuanian Jewish Community officially joins the Shabbat Project Thursday, November 10, when we will host an evening of baking that special Jewish bread called challa with Community members and friends.
Challa is a special bread baked for Sabbath and holidays among Jewish families. The process of making and breaking challa is deeply rooted in tradition and religion. The word’s primary meaning is that of loaf or bun, as recorded in the Book of Numbers or Bamidbar in the Old Testament or Tanakh, and was one of the first commandments given the Israelites as they were preparing to leave the wilderness for the Promised Land: “Ye shall offer up a cake of the first of your dough for an heave offering: as ye do the heave offering of the threshing floor, so shall ye heave it.” (Numbers 15:20)
The event will feature a brief history of the Sabbath, music and hymns, kneading the dough together and baking traditional Sabbath challa. Ester Izakson, the wife of the rabbi of Vilnius, will lead the event. She will present the ceremony of separating a portion of the dough for the cohen, the haFrashat khalva, one of the three commandments incumbent of women in Judaism.
We’ll begin activating the yeast at 6:00 P.M. on November 10 at the Bagel Shop Café, Pylimo street no. 4, Vilnius. The Lithuanian Cultural Council is supporting the event.
The event will be attended by Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky with family members, foreign ambassadors and guests.
For more information, contact Dovilė Rūkaitė, director of projects for the Lithuanian Jewish community, at projects@lzb.lt
Long-awaited renovation work has finally begun at the museum set up at the house and office of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania. So far renovation is going on inside the house. The façade also requires repair, but there are reports there are problems in financing all the repairs needed at this point in time.
The second floor of Sugihara House is currently being refurbished and all exhibits have been placed on the ground floor temporarily. The ground floor houses the diplomat’s office. When the second floor is finished, there will be more exhibit space drawing even more visitors from Japan, Lithuania and around the world fascinated by this man who rescued so many Jews from the Holocaust.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
The Jews of Veisiejai and Lazdijai were shot in Kaktiškės
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky lost twenty-nine relatives during the mass murders, and only her grandfather and his children survived because of help by rescuers. There are several members of the LJC who are descendants of Jews from Veisiejai, Lithuania, who survived the Holocaust, including: F. Kukliansky, A. Levinsonas, I. Bereznickis, Junona Bereznicky , V. Sideraitė and the sisters R. and L. Ofčinskaitė.
Monument to Holocaust victims in Kaktiškės
Saulius Kuklianskis. the pharmacist in Veisiejai, his wife the doctor Zinaida and their three children Moshe, Ana and Samuelis were living in Alytus when the war began in Lithuania. After the Nazis occupied the country, the family soon lost the young, cared, loving and beloved mother of three Zinaida Kuklianskienė, but the pharmacist and his children survived. The dramatic path to rescue for the family included fleeing occupied Lithuania, living in the Grodno ghetto for a year and a half, flight from Grodno and return to Lithuania, a road filled with danger and the continual fight for survival. After they returned to Lithuania in February, 1943, Saulius, Moshe, Ana and Samuelis hid for a year and half in the forests around Druskininai with the help of residents of the villages of Sventijanskas, Gerdašiai, Vainiūnai, Macevičiai and Bugieda.
Leading tours of Jurbarkas, Nijolė Paulikienė tells tourists about Jews as well, because it is impossible to leave out the story of people who lived here for centuries. The guide gets her information from books and from Jurbarkas old-timers.
The large Jewish community who lived in Jurbarkas are now only commemorated on Kauno street, formerly called Didžioji and Vilniaus streets, where there are signs about genocide locations and graves. When Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon visited our town in June, Jurbarkas residents began to recall the legacy of the Jewish community more intently. At the end of October Israel Day events will be held at the public library, and there are plans for sites in the town to commemorate the memory of the Jews.
Guide and teacher Nijolė Paulikienė has much she can say about the Jews of Jurbarkas. She even dreams of setting up a Jewish museum there and is actively charting the vision for that museum. Individual old-timer residents of Jurbarkas still have memories of the Jews in the card-catalogs of their memories, as do the streets covered over in asphalt and the repainted façades of the Old Town. Before World War II Jews accounted for 42% of the population of Jurbarkas, but after the war only 76 were still alive.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
The historic company faced eviction since June when its landlord blocked access to the theater.
JTA
The Warsaw Jewish Theater building (photo: Tadeusz Rudzk)
WARSAW, Poland–The Jewish Theater in Warsaw has found new temporary venues with the help of two government ministries.
The historic company has faced eviction since the beginning of June, when its landlord, looking to build a new high-rise on the site, blocked access to the theater.
At a news conference this week, the theater unveiled plans to launch a new season on Thursday at two temporary sites, the Club of the Warsaw Garrison Command and the home of the Warsaw Chamber Opera.
by Jūratė Juškaitė
manoteises.lt
Historians reckon about 17,000 people were deported from Lithuania during the first Soviet occupation. Cattle cars were sent deep into Russia from June 14 to June 18, 1941, and many of the deportees didn’t survive the first winter. Most people in Lithuania know these facts well, but June of 1941, often called the tragedy of the Lithuanian people, isn’t all that Lithuanian.
Research recently performed by cultural historian Violeta Davoliūtė soon to appear in the book “Population Displacement in Lithuania in the Twentieth Century” (Brill, 2016) attempts to bring the experiences of deported Lithuanian Jews back into collective memory regarding those days in June. The researcher says the narrative of deportations formed during the push for Lithuanian independence in the late 80s and early 90s contained ethnocentric elements and was often too “Catholicized.” Although the official politics of memory seem complicated if only for the widespread “Jewish Communist” stereotype, Davoliūtė says these and similar stereotypes have failed to divide this group of deportees, which is a tight-knit community based on shared experience.
In a recent discussion historian Dr. Arvydas Anušauskas was the first to call the 1941 deportations multiethnic. Why are they called this?
Following prolonged illness Sara Lapickaja, 79, died in Ashdod, Israel, on October 11, 2016. An active former member of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, she was also a Yiddish language and literature expert and a held a doctorate in philology. The Lithuanian Jewish Community express our deepest condolences to her surviving family and relatives.
Sara Lapickaja was born in Kaunas on June 14, 1938. She and her 10-year-old brother managed to escape the Holocaust and flee to Russia without their parents, where they were sheltered at an orphanage in the Kirov oblast. Lapickaja was in the first class of the Vilnius Jewish School in 1945, but the school was shut down within several years and she transferred to a Russian school, then graduated from the Vilnius Music School where she received a degree in choir conduction. She taught high school in Vilnius and Kaunas until 1988 while devoting much of her energy to the Jewish community, setting up an amateur volunteer choir which she conducted and helping establish the Jewish kindergarten in Vilnius, among other things.
In 1988 with help from the Lithuanian Jewish community she travelled to Israel on a Soviet passport to study at Bar-Ilon University. In Israel she devoted herself to Yiddish language and literature and earned a master’s degree, then furthered her education in St. Petersburg, Russia, where she successfully defended her doctoral thesis, “Ber Gelpern: Editorial and Educational Work” in 1997. She taught Yiddish language and literature in Israel for many years at Bar-Ilon and other institutes of higher learning.
She had a deep and significant relationship with Vilnius’s famous writer Abraham Karpinovich who wrote in Yiddish. They often attended conferences together, including in Vilnius. Karpinovich devoted much of his creative fervor to Jewish life in interwar Vilnius and after his death in 2004 the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum set up a special room in his name containing much of his archives and other items.
Everyone who knew Sara loved her and we will remember her goodness, sincere and open nature and her goal of being useful to her people.
Let her rest in peace in the Land of Israel.
Lithuanian prime minister Algirdas Butkevičius has sent birthday greetings to art history and theater scholar Markas Petuchauskas on the occasion of his 85th birthday.
“You are an important creator of the cultural history of Lithuania and have dedicated many years of your life to the study of art and art history, and especially the development of our theater. Led by mature wisdom and relying upon your wide erudition, you have revealed to us the unique nature of works by famous artists and have painted detailed and colorful pictures of celebrated personalities. You have always been a person of wide horizons and constructive dialogue, and therefore have contributed much to the understanding and to the good cooperation between the Jewish and Lithuanian peoples.
“I sincerely thank you for your great contribution to the spiritual fortification of our state and enrichment of cultural life,” the Lithuanian prime minister said in his birthday greeting.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community wishes professor habil. Markas Petuchauskas a happy 85th birthday! The doctor of art history has written many books on theater and drama over many years.
We wish him continuing health, continuing creativity and hope for another of his wonderful books. Let’s all wish him inspiration, success and love.
Today Markas Petuchauskas is the only person who can speak with real authority about the Vilnius ghetto theater which operated in 1942 and 1943. He was a ghetto prisoner and miraculously survived, as did his mother, after being rescued by good people. For many years he has sought to renew the interrupted dialogue between Lithuanians and Jews, which, he says, is best understood through art.
Happy Birthday! Mazl tov! May you live to 120!
VILNIUS, September 30, BNS – Lithuania on Friday is paying last respects to late Israeli president Shimon Peres.
Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė and foreign minister Linas Linkevičius attended his funeral in Jerusalem, and Vilnius residents and guests can express their condolences at the Israeli embassy.
“We bid farewell to a great man of the world, a man of peace, an example of tolerance, a man important to all, including Lithuania, because he considered Lithuania, this region, his birthplace and called himself a Litvak,” Grybauskaitė said.
“His visit several years ago marked a significant improvement in the relationship between our states, which is very important for us not only as we look to the future, but also as we reflect on our painful past,” she said.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky also attended his funeral in Jerusalem.
Peres was born only 100 kilometers from Vilnius in a small town in what then was Poland in 1923.
Editorial board of Di Yiddishe Stime, 1924. Sitting, right to left: Nathan Goren, Roza Khazan-Feigin, Moshe Cohen, David Cohen, Reuven Rubinstein, Moritz Helman, Rafael Khasman. Standing, right to left: Ya’akov Feigin, Israel Zhufer, Moshe Rabinowitz, Eliezer Shibolet. Photo courtesy jewishgen.com
Jews were the largest ethnic and religious minority in Lithuania in the period between the two world wars. The Jewish culture of Lithuania, just like that of Eastern Europe as a whole, was multifaceted and diverse, and the Yiddish language was an important vehicle of communication. When Isaac Bashevis Singer received the Nobel Prize for Literature in December of 1978, he wasn’t just speaking in vain when he said: “There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for two thousand years. It has been revived in our time in a most remarkable, almost miraculous way. … It is a fact that the classics of Yiddish literature are also the classics of the modern Hebrew literature. Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and Cabbalists—rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky says late Israeli president Shimon Peres was a person of exceptional intellect and always stressed his ties with Lithuania.
“It’s important for us, for Lithuanian Jews, that he was one of our own, we always considered him a Litvak and he considered himself a Litvak. After all, he came from Vishnev, a village 70 kilometers from Vilnius in what is now Belarus but which was Lithuanian territory then. It was so nice for us that our countryman was so intelligent, so educated, such an erudite, and could speak on any and every topic even at a venerable age. Our entire community is in mourning. We know human life has an end, but when you encounter death, great sadness overtakes you,” Kukliansky said.
Peres visited Lithuania three years ago and Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė met him when she visited Israel last year. This last spring he was decorated with the Lithuanian order of the Great Cross “For Contributions to Lithuania.”
No, it’s not the latest whacky facebook language option to spice up your social media experience, but a novel by Litvak Canadian author Gary Barwin which is up for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize for best new novel or short story in English authored by a Canadian.
Yiddish for Pirates is one of six candidates for the annual prize, vying for the prestigious award with Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien, Wonder by Emma Donoghue, Best Kind of People by Zoe Whittal, Party Wall by Catherine Leroux translated from French and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl by Mona Awad.
Every year the Giller Prize looks back at the previous year’s fiction and presents a winner from their shortlist. This year’s awards ceremony will take place in Canada on November 7.
On September 14 the Academic Council of the Lithuanian Department of Ethnic Minorities selected the winners of a new prize created this year for best final academic work on ethnic minorities.
Department of Ethnic Minorities director Dr. Vida Montvydaitė made the final decision on recommendations from her Academic Council and selected Julijana Leganovič in the first nomination category for her bachelor’s work “Comparative View of the Development of the Vilnius and the Kaunas Jewish Communities in the Interwar Period.”
The second category was for master’s work and the winners were Rūta Anulytė with her “Heritage Protection and Maintenance of Historical Jewish Cemeteries in Lithuania: Practice and Recommendations” and Mantas Šikšnianas with his “Jews of Švenčionys from the mid-18th Century to the mid-20th Century: Shtetl, Sabbath, Shoah.”
Full story in Lithuanian here.
by Aras Lukšas
lzinios.lt
On September 23, 1943, the Nazis and collaborators concluded the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. Twenty-two years ago this date was officially made the Day of Remembrance of the Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide. Now let’s remember the Jews of the rural towns and villages whose entire communities were destroyed during the first four months of war. Keydan, Yaneve, Vilkomir, Zager, Shadeve, Nayshtot-Tavrig… What do these strange words mean? Most likely not everyone would know these are the names of Lithuanian towns: Kėdainiai, Jonava, Ukmergė, Žagarė, Šeduva, Žemaičių Naumiestis. This was how the Jews who lived here for centuries called their homes in their native Yiddish language. In many of the locations just mentioned, they constituted half or even the majority of the population. For instance, before the war half the population of Ukmergė was Jewish, and Jonava’s was 80% Jewish, including traders, craftsmen, artisans, butchers and dairymen, attorneys and doctors…
Full story in Lithuanian here.
