Journalist and writer Silvia Foti has visited Šiauliai for the second time to speak about her grandfather Jonas Noreika at the Šiauliai Jewish Community and his Holocaust crimes in Plungė, Telšiai and the Šiauliai district during World War II. She delivered a talk followed by a discussion and questions from the audience. We sincerely thank Silvia for making the visit and for her honesty and openness on this sensitive and very personal topic.
Lithuanian Jewish Community press release
Wantonly, without any sort of permission, representative of the National Unification Party (Lithuanian: partija Nacionalinis susivienijimas) Vytautas Sinica has initiated the installation of a plaque commemorating Kazys Škirpa on the façade of the Vilnius District Court building. This is both an administrative and moral crime.
The International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania has recognized the activities of the Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) and the Provisional Government of Lithuania–both founded and led by Kazys Škirpa–as anti-Semitic.
“This is a monument to a man who led the organization which encouraged violence against Lithuanian citizens of a different ethnicity and fomented anti-Semitism. None of this is a subjective judgment or interpretation; these statements are confirmed by historical facts, sources and documents. The commemoration of this kind of person is a mistake and socially divisive,” the chairman of the Commission’s Nazi Crimes subcommittee and Millersville University professor emeritus Saulius Sužiedėlis said.
Other historians engaged in Holocaust research and international organizations are unanimous regarding the veracity of the aforementioned historical facts.
The Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania has issued as well an official finding of history which admits the actions of the LAF probably did encourage Lithuanians to become engaged in Holocaust crimes. The mass distribution of the LAF ideology led to the murder of 220,000 Jews living in Lithuania, or around 95% of the total Jewish population.
The Sabbath begins at 9:42 P.M. on Friday, June 21, and concludes at 11:32 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Note: St. John’s Eve or Midsummer’s Eve, aka Joninės in Lithuanian and Litha in Celtic lore, is an official holiday in Lithuania observed this year from Saturday through Monday with government offices and some businesses closed.
Heartfelt congratulations go to our young chess champion Daniel Ser from Šiauliai competing as part of the Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club. He took silver in the European Union chess championship and met the rating requirements for FIDE to bestow the title of candidate chess master upon him and is now the youngest candidate for master in the three Baltic states. We are very proud of Daniel and his parents and wish him every continued success.
Lithuanian journalist Rimas Bružas has travelled to Germany to make a film about Lithuanian Jewish concentration camp inmates.
Currently he’s visiting Bergen-Belsen located about 65 kilometers from Hannover in Lower Saxony. Originally this concentration camp was intended for privileged victims including inmates from neutral countries and prisoners the Nazis were hoping to trade in prisoner swaps with the Allied countries.
In the fall of 1944 Bergen-Belsen began receiving transports from concentration and death camps such as Auschwitz and the inmate population grew from 7,300 in July of 1944 to about 15,000 by December, 1944. When British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, there were about 60,000 prisoners there, almost all of them Jews. Anne Frank was among the 50,000 people murdered there.
The Bergen-Belsen memorial site continues to maintain memory stones inscribed by students from the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius commemorating the victims of the Holocaust.
#WeRemember
All last week the LJC hosted the TOLI seminar where experts on Jewish life and culture from different Lithuanian institutions of learning come together to teach teachers about Litvak life before the Holocaust and about the Holocaust.
The TOLI institute founded by Olga Lengvel in New York and Lithuania’s International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regime in Lithuania jointly held the seminar which this year was called “Learning from the Past, Action for the Future: Teaching the Holocaust and Human Rights.”
The seminar was attended by over 30 teachers and educators from throughout Lithuania. They included ethics, Lithuanian language and literature, English, geography, information theory and history teachers, as well as librarians and social workers who sacrificed their summer vacations to learn and improve their knowledge.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Psychologist Dirot Huber, her husband Jacob who directs a water-supply company and their daughter Romi from Haifa visited the Panevėžys Jewish Community last week. They were searching for family roots in Panevėžys and Ukmergė, namely, relatives of great-grandfather and pharmacist Haim Leibovitch born in 1867 and a grandfather named Teodor Todres, born in 1903 and deceased in 1951.
The pharmacy had been located on the first floor of the building at Smetonos street no. 3 with the owners living above it. Leibovitch’s brother Tovia was the principal of the Hebrew gymnasium in Ukmergė.
The visitor brought with them period photographs which they kindly allowed the Panevėžys Jewish Community to scan digitally for conservation in the Community’s archives. Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman showed them many photographs from that archive.
Yiddish poet, literary scholar, author and SF enthusiast Velvl Chernin who is now also an envoy for the Jewish Agency will deliver a lecture next week at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on the current political and economic situation in Israel and opportunities for making aliyah and settling in Israel.
Time: 6:30 P.M., Tuesday, June 25
Place: Third floor, Lithuanian Jewish Community, Vilnius
BNS reports yet another anti-Semitic attack in Lithuania, this time upon a Holocaust memorial in the cemetery in Senoji Varėna (Old Varėna) in southeast Lithuania.
Police from Alytus, Lithuania, told BNS they received a report of the vandalism just after noon on Monday from a local resident who saw it on Sunday evening as he was walking in the forest.
Alytus Police Department communications department director Kristina Janulevičienė told the news agency the vandalism was recorded as evidence and including destruction of an information stand, the partial destruction of a memorial obelisk and the placement of some sort of sticker forbidding people from placing stones at the memorial, a common Jewish tradition at grave sites.
“It doesn’t appear this was just done by children somehow. It’s a premeditated crime and act of vandalism. According to our information an obelisk marking the site was also damaged,” Varėna regional administration mayor Algis Kašėta told the 15min.lt website.
Alytus police head of communications Kristina Janulevičienė said police are currently on scene investigating.
The Šiauliai Jewish Community invites you to a meeting and discussion with Silvia Foti.
Foti is a Lithuanian-American writer who lives in Chicago. She is also the granddaughter of Lithuanian Nazi commander Jonas Noreika. When she began writing her family’s story, she approached it from the viewpoint of modern Lithuanian Holocaust denial, but quickly discovered her grandfather was responsible for the mass murder of Jews, and she began writing about that, alienating the Lithuanian public in North America and Lithuania who were raised to deny Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust.
Foti’s books have been published in English and Lithuanian and she has appeared on major media telling her story of the journey from Holocaust denial to the truth, including on the BBC’s Hard Talk interview program.
Everyone is welcome to attend and participate.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Friday, June 21
Place: Šiauliai Jewish Community, P. Višinskio street no. 24, Šiauliai
Last Friday evening the Šiauliai Jewish Community celebrated the Sabbath and holiday of Shavuot with guests from Israel Alon Ron and Nadia Roizen, lighting the Sabbath candles, breaking bread and sampling the sanctified wine.
The guests from Israel thanked Community members for their fellowship and vowed to return again to their grandparents’ hometown, Šiauliai to visit their new friends.
The Sabbath begins at 9:39 P.M. on Friday, June 14, and concludes at 11:30 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
We are saddened to report Mikhail Filippov-Yablonsky died June 12. He was born in 1947. He was a great soul beloved by everyone, an artist, musician and singer and a long-time member of the Fayerlakh Jewish song and dance ensemble. May he rest in peace. We extend our deepest condolences to Misha’s wife, children and many friends and family members.
Dear readers,
Happy Shavuot!
Today Jews around the world celebrate Shavuot, one of the most important holidays on the Jewish calendar for centuries, with not one but several significant meanings.
The first is the religious one which tells the story of how seven weeks after the Hebrews left Egypt, God gave the gift of the Torah to Moses and the entire Jewish people, the sacred text in the form of the Pentateuch with 613 mitzvot, or laws. Shavuot is also called the Feast of Weeks. Traditionally Jews do not sleep on this night and spend it studying Torah, intoning the morning prayer when dawn breaks.
This is an especially important holiday because God’s Ten Commandments have determined the whole course of human morality and civilization. Having received the oral Torah, only a portion was written down, with the rest inscribed only 1,500 years later, after the destruction of the Second Temple.
Shavuot is also the celebration of the first harvest, featuring abundant dairy products and homes decorated with flowers. Traditionally Jews make pancakes with curds and cheesecake, and eat ice cream, drink milk shakes and consume other treats.
Have a delicious holiday!
The Vilnius Jewish Public Library will host a conference on Litvak literature on Sunday, June 22, at 1:00 P.M. Yuri Greisman, Arkadijus Vinokuras, Elena Suodienė, Samoilas Lormanas, Leonida Kriščiūnienė and others will give presentations in Lithuanian. The Vilnius Jewish Public Library is located at Gedimino prospect no. 24 in Vilnius.
JTA–Israeli forces rescued four hostages held since October 7 in the central Gaza Strip, including Noa Argamani, the festival-goer who was filmed screaming as she was carried away by terrorists on a motorcycle.
In addition to Argamani, 26, the army said in a statement that Almog Meir Jan, 22; Andrey Kozlov, 27; and Shlomi Ziv, 41, were rescued Saturday in the raid. All four were attending the Nova music festival on October 7 when Hamas terrorists killed approximately 1,200 people and abducted some 250, launching the war.
The army said special forces carried out the operation in Nuseirat in the center of the coastal territory. Arnon Zamora, a commander of the operation, was killed in the battle.
Hamas initially said “dozens” of Palestinians were killed in the operation. Media later quoted the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry as saying the number was more than 200. It did not report what proportion were civilians and what proportion were combatants.
Last week two more attacks were made against the Lithuanian Jewish Community. A man in a mask with the help of an accomplice brazenly stole the Israeli flag flying above the entrance of the building in Vilnius, then took the flag to a nearby park and cut it up with a knife. He also apparently threatened a person there with the same knife, but didn’t wound that person. The next day someone broke a window at the Bagel Shop Café operated by the LJC in the same building as LJC headquarters.
Both incidents were recorded on security video which has been turned over to police.
The LJC expects law enforcement will take swift action to punish the criminals in light of the rising danger posed to Jews in the Lithuanian capital.
“What’s most discouraging isn’t the crimes themselves, but people’s apathy. In the video recording you can clearly see pedestrians passing by who stopped to look back at the crazed masked man but didn’t bother to call the police. There is more than one living eye-witness in our community who has personally experienced what tragic consequences can ensue from remaining passive while crimes are committed,” LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky commented.
Last weekend the 50th annual Lithuanian ping-pong championship was held in Kelmė. Congratulations to Rafaelis Gimelsteinas representing the Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club who took away one gold and two bronze medals.
Playing singles and doubles in the 45-49 age group with partner Jurgita Grucytė from the Sostinė club, Rafaelis competed against the strong team of Aidas Čeponka and Anželika Petrauskienė who have won before. After pitched battle, in the fourth set Rafaelis and Jurgita only needed one more point to win, and concentrated sufficiently to get that point, winning 3:2 and taking gold.
“I dedicate this victory to the Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club and trainer Alirgdas Majorovas,” Rafaelis Gimelsteinas said, adding there would be chess and table tennis tournaments next Sunday at the Cvi Park space in Vilnius where he will be taking on contenders.
Jevgenija Feldman passed away on June 7. She was born in 1939. She was a member of the Klaipėda Jewish Community and a client of the Saul Kagan Welfare Center. Faina Kukliansky and the entire Lithuanian Jewish Community send our deepest condolences to her daughter Maja and all her family and friends.
The Sabbath begins at 9:34 P.M. on Friday, June 7, and concludes at 11:22 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.