The Adomas Mickevičius Public Library in Vilnius is opening an exhibit of photography called Abisl Yidishe Vilne or A Bit of Jewish Vilnius with an opening ceremony at 5:30 P.M. on Tuesday, April 2. The exhibit is to feature the works of Aleksandra Jacovskytė, Daumantas Levas Todesas, Eugenijus Bunka and others. The exhibit will run till April 20, 2024. The library is located at Trakų street no. 10 in Vilnius.
An evening to remember the Jewish writer and first Yiddish literary critic Israel Isidor Elyashev packed the house at the Art and Museum Department of the Vincas Kudirka Public Library in Kaunas last Monday, January 15.
The Kaunas Jewish Community organized the event and Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas spoke about the man and his legacy, along with others.
Yesterday evening the Litvak Culture and Identity Museum opened next door to the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius.
LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky spoke at the opening ceremony, saying the long-awaited exhibits would finally be made public and should be very interesting. She said the history of the Litvaks didn’t begin and end with the Holocaust, that we have a rich history which hasn’t gone away and that the new museum will offer the public a view of that history.
“We are neighbors, the Lithuanian Jewish Community is based right here, on the other side of the wall, in the same building, the former Tarbut gymnasium. We are alive and are celebrating our Jewish identity, and everyone who learns something here at the museum, we invite them to stop by the Community as well, to try our bagels, listen to music and participate in our events. Food, culture and other Community activities of which we are proud–these are all part of the Litvak identity,” Kukliansky said.
Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg-Silverstein also spoke at the opening.
Photo by I. Gelūnas
The Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum reopens its branch in the former Tarbut Gymnasium at Pylimo street no. 4a Thursday, January 18, following reconstruction and the installation of a new Litvak Culture and Identity exhibit.
The space used to house the museum’s History Department and Gallery of Righteous Gentiles, and has been undergoing renovation for several years. The third floor will now house a permanent exhibit on the life and work of Rafael Chwoles, the Litvak artist. Other exhibits feature Litvaks who found fame and achievement around the world in various fields of endeavor. The space includes four storeys accessible by stairs.
The Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum includes consists of several sub-museums and spaces including the Tolerance Center, the Holocaust Museum, an information space at the Ponar Memorial Complex outside Vilnius and soon an exhibit inside the former Jewish ghetto library in the Vilnius Old Town.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
The Kaunas Jewish Community invites you to an evening commemorating literary critic and writer Israel (Isidore) Elyashev.
Bal-Makhshoves as he was also known, “man of thoughts,” used that nom-de-plume in his Jewish writing at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The commemoration will be held in the former Jewish cafeteria near Elyashev’s home where he died 100 years ago on January 13, 1924. Speakers will touch upon his friendship with the painter Marc Chagall, Jewish life in Kaunas, Elyashev’s home street now known as Daukšos gatvė but formerly called Yatkever or Butcher’s street with five synagogues located along it, about the return of “evacuated” Jewish exiles in 1921 and about the shared and separate Lithuanian and Jewish cultural legacy in Lithuania’s interwar provisional capital Kaunas.
Speakers will also detail his family, including his sister Ester Veisbart who was an art critic, teacher and Lithuania’s first female doctor of philosophy who died in the Kaunas ghetto; the rest of his family who were killed in the Kaunas and Vilnius ghettos and Soviet labor camps and the members of his family to made it to Palestine and lived.
The Shofar Gallery of the Jewish Culture Information Center in Vilnius is hosting an exhibit of works by art and book restorer and artist Modestas Saukaitis inspired by Abraham Sutzkever’s poetry. Saukaitis’s works on exhibit are verre églomisé, an ancient technique which uses white gold painted on glass to produce an extraordinary effect.
The exhibit runs till December 23 and is open to the public during the gallery’s working hours, from noon to 6:00 P.M. on weekdays and from noon till 4:00 P.M. on Saturday. The gallery is located at Mėsinių street no. 3A in the Vilnius Old Town.
For more information, see here.
Lithuanian construction company Infes reported they concluded a contract with the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum for help creating a museum inside the Vilnius ghetto library space located on Žemaitijos street, formerly Strashun street, where library director Herman Kruk wrote most of his Vilnius ghetto diary and where the FPO, the Vilnius ghetto partisan fighters force, had a shooting range in the basement.
Infes said they would undertake capital renovation of the building and do other construction there. According to their press release, the museum will teach visitors about the Vilnius ghetto and the Holocaust in Lithuania and will feature unique items from the Vilna Gaon Museum’s collections.
Eastern European folklore and folk-song expert and performer Maria Krupoves-Berg will present a lecture and concert at the Lithuanian National Library’s Hall of Statehood at 6:00 P.M. on December 14. The event is free and open to the public.
The event called “The Sounds of Eastern European Jewish History and Music” sponsored by the National Library’s Judaica Studies Center will talk about and demonstrate genres of Yiddish song and how some songs became a kind of national anthem, accompanying Ashkenazi and especially Litvaks at crucial points in history, reflecting yidishe neshama, Jewish identity. Krupoves will perform with Boris Kizner on violin. The scheduled duration is one and a half hours.
The Šalom, Akmenė! project with the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum are holding a concert to remember the late novelist Grigoriy Kanovitch. It is to include students from art schools in the Akmenė and Joniškis regions and students from the Song Cathedral of the Music Academy of Vytautas Magnus University. The program includes songs in Yiddish.
Time: 3:00 P.M., Sunday, December 3
Place: Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon Museum, Naugarduko street no. 10, Vilnius
The concert is free and open to the public.
With deep sadness we report the death of Henry Kissinger. He was born May 27, 1933, to a German Jewish family and went on to serve as secretary of state and national security advisor under US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and remained the main voice of American foreign policy under president Jimmy Carter. He was the architect of US foreign policy who engineered the withdrawal of US troops from South Viet Nam “with dignity” (for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973), Nixon’s overture to Red China, NATO’s peacekeeping mission in Yugoslavia–calling for the “Finlandization” of the constituent break-away republics–and of policy surrounding the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the emergent Russian Federation. An outstanding proponent of the State of Israel, although he refused to take up the cause of Soviet refuseniks as antithetical to US interests–and he seemed to have a personal antipathy towards Soviet Jews–, in more recent times he was an outspoken proponent for peace in the Ukraine, calling upon NATO to take Russia’s security concerns seriously and for the parties involved to develop a real post-Cold War security architecture for Europe which would take Russia’s legitimate security interests into account. He died aged 100. Our deepest condolences to his many friends and family members.
Photo: Left: Simon Karczmar and wife
The Old Town Hall in Vilnius will open an exhibit of paintings by Litvak artist Simon Karczmar (1903-1982) at 6:00 P.M. on Monday, November 6. Originally from Dieveniškės, Lithuania, Karczmar moved to Jerusalem later. The exhibit runs till November 30.
The latest issue of the Bagel Shop Newsletter has appeared in print and here in .pdf format.
Beigelių krautuvėlė-EN (1)
The Lithuanian Academy of Sciences and the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities invite you to attend an international conference called “The Intellectual Heritage of the Jews of Vilnius” on October 10 and 11 at the Lithuanian Academy located at Gedimino prospect no. 3 in Vilnius.
According to the Lithuanian Academy’s press release:
“Thanks to the support of the Research Council of Lithuania, we were able to invite such world-renowned experts in Jewish history and culture as Israel Bartal, David Fishman, David Roskies, Benjamin Brown, Alex Lubotzky, Marcin Wodzinski, Jon Seligman, Avner Holtzman, Tsvia Walden, Mordechai Zalkin and others.
“The conference will also feature presentations by prominent Lithuanian scholars: Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Mindaugas Kvietkauskas, Lara Lempertienė, Jurgita Verbickienė and doctoral student Saulė Valiūnaitė.”
A program is available in English here.
For more information, visit the Lithuanian Academy’s website here.
by Grant Gochin
MAD Magazine was a staple of American satire for generations. It was a formative architect of American humor, spawning an untold number of artists, journalists, creators, humorists, movies, and television shows. I ascribe my own particular sense of humor to having been fascinated by MAD Magazine in my youth.
Al Jaffee was best known as the American political cartoonist who contributed to MAD Magazine from the 1950s until 2020. From 1927 to 1933 he lived in provincial Lithuania, in his parents’ native town of Zarasai.
Al Jaffe and MAD Magazine personify the Jews of Zarasai. Zarasai is today a tiny, irrelevant village, in remote Eastern Europe. From Zarasai, was formed the American sense of humor.
So, what happened to Jaffe’s Jewish community from Zarasai, Lithuania?
Photo: YIVO executive board chairwoman Ruth Levine, Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda with wife Diana Nausėdienė and YIVO executive director Jonathan Brent, photograph by Robertas Dačkus
September 19, 2023
As part of his working visit to New York Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda attended the unveiling of a memorial plaque to the Lithuanian librarian and bibliographer Antanas Ulpis at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.
Gitanas Nausėda said it is important to preserve the memory of the deeds of Lithuanian librarian, bibliographer and director of the Vilnius Book Chamber Antanas Ulpis and the Paper Brigade because thanks to them thousands of Jewish books and documents were safeguarded during the Nazi and Soviet occupations.
During the Nazi occupation around 20 Jews from the Vilnius Ghetto, the so-called Paper Brigade, hid Jewish books, Torahs and other documents, risking their lives. Later Antanas Ulpis, director of the Book Chamber, saved these unique documents and texts from destruction by the Soviets by hiding them in nooks and crannies at St. George’s Church in Vilnius.
“This is not only an important part of the history of Lithuanian Jews which has been preserved, but also an example of humanism, when evil is countered with good and darkness with light,” the Lithuanian president said.
European Days of Jewish Culture
Time: Starts at 10:00 A.M. on September 3, 2023
Location: Lithuanian Jewish Community, Pylimo street no. 4, Vilnius; Choral Synagogue, Pylimo street no. 39, Cvi Park (Petras Cvirka Square across the street from the Lithuanian Jewish Community).
Exhibit “Ghetto Children Tell Their Story to Contemporary Children”
Time: September 4 to September 30, 2023
Location: Adomas Mickevičius Public Library, Trakų street no. 10, Vilnius.
Special Concert to Remember Victims of the Holocaust
Lithuanian prime minister Ingrida Šimonytė, patroness
Time: September 6, 2023
Location: Lėlė Theater, Arklių street no. 5, Vilnius.
by invitation only
This play by students from the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius is based on passages from the diaries of Yitzhak Rudashevski, Masha Rolnik and Hermann Kruk with Vilnius ghetto songs performed by Rafailas Karpis and Darius Mažintas. Sholem Aleichem students will tell the stories of children from the Vilnius ghetto.
Location: Konstantinas Sirvydas Square in Vilnius, next to the French embassy
Time: 8:00 P.M., September 20.
#VilniusGhetto80
The Lithuanian parliament will host an international conference called “Communism and Anti-Semitism” beginning at 10:00 A.M. on November 28. The organizers of the conference include the Lithuanian Jewish Community, YIVO, the POLIN institute and the Goodwill Foundation. It will be broadcasted on the parliament’s website www.lrs.lt and via the parliament’s youtube channel. Stay tuned for more details.
#VilniusGhetto80
The National Drama Theater in Kaunas presents the play “Getas” [Ghetto] written by Joshua Sobol and directed by Gintaras Varnas at 4:00 P.M. on September 24 and 6:00 P.M. on November 14. The theater is located at Laisvės alley no. 71 in Kaunas.
The play centers around Vilnius ghetto inmates who waged a spiritual and cultural war for survival under genocidal conditions, founding the Vilnius ghetto theater in the face of almost certain death.
#VilniusGhetto80
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies present their podcast episode “Remembering Vilna: Voices from the Holocaust” at 6:00 P.M. on September 21 at the National Library located at Gedimino prospect no. 51 in Vilnius. The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University in the United States currently conserves over 4,000 testimonies by Holocaust survivors. “Remembering Vilna: Voices from the Holocaust” is the third episode of the podcast series “Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust” produced jointly by the Fortunoff center and YIVO in New York. This episode draws upon Hermann Kruk’s diary and other testimonies which detail the destruction of the Jews in Vilnius. Podcast guests also discuss the rise of anti-Semitism in the period between the two world wars, the Soviet occupation of Lithuania followed by the Nazi occupation, the establishment of ghettos, the mass murder of the Jews of Vilnius and the end of the war and what that entailed.
Podcast producers Nahanni Rous and Eric Marcus and hostess Eleanora Reissa will attend the event which will be conducted in English.
#VilniusGhetto80