News – Page 122 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Rosh Hashanah on September 29

Israeli ambassador Yossi Levy, LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and designer and architect Victoria Sideraitë-Alon hold up the new Jewish calendar for 5780.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has published a new Jewish calendar for 5780 as we prepare for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. This year’s calendar features Lithuanian synagogues past and present.

The year 5780/2020 contains some anniversaries of global significance to Jews, including the 300th birthday of the Vilna Gaon and the 580th anniversary of the building of the Great Synagogue in Vilnius.

LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky calls for everyone to come together for a noble cause, to work together to protect the small surviving inheritance of Litvak culture for our grandchildren and the future.

2019-09-252019-09-27

Launch of Russian Translation of Book about Veisaitė

The Vilnius, Jerusalem of Lithuania Jewish Community invites you to the launch of the Russian translation of Aurimas Švedas’s book of interviews with Irena Veisaitė, “Gyvenimas turėtų būti skaidrus” [Life Should Be Transparent], at 3:00 P.M. on September 26 on third floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Both Veisaitė and Švedas’ will be there and discuss the book with the audience, with Olga Ugriumova and Daumantas Todesas moderating. The event will take place in Russian.

2019-09-252019-09-27

Following the Bloodied Star of David to Panevėžys

Photos by P. Židonis

Jurijus Smirnovas is now in his 80s and all he remembers from his childhood is in the cross-hairs of a rifle scope. Many times over during his childhood he could have lost his life by being shot, hanged, beaten to death or poisoned, because during World War II he was marked by the star of David, soaked with the blood of millions of people.

His story, however, had a happier ending.

“I’ve been in Panevėžys for 75 years now. The Germans brought me here before I was eight,” he says with a deep sigh. “It’s very hard for me to speak about this, I haven’t wanted to tell the story and I don’t want to now either, to relive everything, to go back to that terror, fear. At these moments I feel awful,” the Jewish man said.

2019-09-252019-09-27

Kaunas Jewish Community Honors Active Members

For years now the Kaunas Jewish Community has been giving thanks to our active members who take part in activities and help make them possible.

In earlier years this has mainly taken the form of a dinner party with live music, but this year we decided to take the volunteers on a tour in and around Kaunas.

Members learned about the town of Kačerginė, its history and cultural legacy, listening to the enthusiastic narrative of Lina Sinkevičienė while taking in the rural beauty of the place. Members were received warmly at the headquarters of the Kačerginė aldermanship. The beautiful landscape conceals a bloody history and Kaunas Jewish Community members paid their respects to the Holocaust victims in Šakiai, Lukšiai, Zapyškis and surrounding areas.

2019-09-252019-09-26

Remembering the Litvak Genocide: Let’s Remember Who Stands behind the Numbers

by Gediminas Kirkilas

September 23 is the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Genocide. On this day in 1943 the Vilnius Jewish ghetto was liquidated [sic, the ghetto was liquidated over several weeks–trans.]. Behind this fact hides the unusually complex and tragic history of the Jews of Lithuania (Litvaks), the unimaginably painful and tragic personal fates of Jews and their families. Of about 208,000 Jews resident in Lithuania, about 195,000-196,000 were murdered. Every year as we mark dates important to Litvaks, each time, let’s think hard about what hides behind these numbers.

We must continue to learn and teach and learn and teach more about the history of the Litvaks and the Holocaust, to increase our consciousness and sharpen our critical thinking, and to nip in the bud all kinds of right-wing extremism, so that there would be no place for xenophobia, racial and ethnic hatred and everyday domestic anti-Semitism in Lithuanian.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-25

Panevėžys Jewish Community Tours Historic Jewish Sites in Liepāja

Early in the morning on September 14 we went to the Pakruojis synagogue, where we were met by a cultural worker who received us warmly and spoke about the wooden synagogue built by the local Jewish community in 1801. Its function changed and it became a primary school as well as a house of prayer. After the Holocaust the synagogue was nationalized. During the Soviet period it was a theater, then an athletics gymnasium. The unique building fell into disrepair and ruin. In 2017 the synagogue was restored with its authentic interior, according to period photographs, which show playful drawings on the ceiling. Currently the synagogue serves as a space for cultural and other events. The second floor–the women’s gallery–houses an exhibit on the Jewish past, along with examples of the original walls.

Pakruojis was just the first part of the tour and we travelled on to the land of wind, Liepāja [Libave] on the Latvian coast. It is also a land of amber, a port and a holiday destination. The rustling and smell of the lime trees [liepos in Lithuanian, a folk etymology–trans.] give the city its name. But we weren’t there just to look at the pretty town, we were there to visit the largest Holocaust memorial in Latvia. About 7,060 Jews including about 3,000 Jews from Liepāja were murdered in the dunes around the town of Šķēde on the Baltic Sea. In total about 19,000 people of different ethnic backgrounds were murdered here. The site recalls one of the worst breakdowns in humanity in the preceding century. The memorial occupies a territory of 4,120 m² and is arranged in a menorah shape with contours formed of natural rocks and granite slabs, with the “lights” of the menorah represented by granite steles resembling gravestones with inscriptions in Hebrew, English, Latvian and Russia from the prophet Jeremiah. Members of the Panevėžys delegation honored the dead and left a wreath there.

2019-09-252019-09-25

Let Us Pray: Never Again. A Homily on the Lithuanian Day of Jewish Genocide

by archbishop Gintaras Grušas, bernardinai.lt

A shared legacy and joint work intimately united the Jews and Christians living in Lithuania over many long centuries. Then as now the Ten Commandments have united Christians and Jews, demanding we worship one God and to honor the individual human and his life, to protect the family and not to bow to unfairness.

Exactly one year ago Pope Francis preparing to visit a monument to Holocaust victims called for in the Prayer to the Angel of the Lord to work together, to celebrate our friendship and to confess together in the face of the challenges of the world: “Let us ask the Lord to provide us the gift of insight so that we may in time recognize those pernicious knots and atmosphere from which the heart of unexperienced generations atrophies, so that they would not give in to the allure of the songs of the sirens.”

On September 23 we mark the destruction of the Vilnius ghetto and of thousands of Jews who lived with our compatriots in Lithuania. Some members of the Church, due to human weakness, fear or even for the sake of personal gain, came to terms with the occupational regimes and even served their slave masters. A significant number of Christians, however, guided by Christian love, saved the persecuted Jews. Today we mark their graves with the signs and symbols of Righteous Gentiles. We believe that the prevailing climate of friendship and dialogue today will help the Christian and Jewish communities to better understand one another and to work more closely together in areas important to both communities such as the defense of human rights and human life, family values, social justice and the fortification of peace in the world, so that God’s love would be seen and seen more explicitly by humanity. This is a common foundation and a common way forward.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-242019-09-25

Andrius Navickas: Hate Is Always the Cowardly Choice

On September 23 we mark the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide, honoring the victims of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto in 1943. This was a blood-curdling day when the last surviving Jewish residents of Vilnius were either murdered or sent to concentration camps [sic, the liquidation took place over several weeks–trans.].

From that day onward there were officially no Jews left in Vilnius, only those who hid with families who dared preserve humanity, and also those remained who joined the Soviet partisans in the forests. The Jerusalem of the North had been strangled and we were all left the poorer.

Christians know the resurrection is impossible without the crucifixion. To raise the history of the Holocaust on the cross of our memory, first we have to confess in our hearts that it wasn’t THEIR agony and tragedy but OUR agony and tragedy. This is not the story of an oppressed people who demand vengeance.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-242019-09-24

Ponar 2019 by Sergejus Kanovičius

Memory cannot survive from one commemoration to another. Members of the Commission of Historical Memory are laid here and in pits in another hundred small Lithuanian towns and villages. To them it’s completely clear: no one defended them then. However strange it might seem, they have to be defended today, too. At that point in time one group chose to save people, while the other chose the path of Satan. They told my people in 1941 they would be safe in the ghetto. They lied. Today, eight decades later, as then, again they are telling us persistently that the ghettos were good, and those who helped set them up were heroes, or almost saints. Is there anyone today who will speak up and say clearly and without ambivalence that this is immoral? Who, where, when did they say this?

“History can never be left to the politicians, whether they be democratic or autocratic. History is not the property of a certain political doctrine or regime. History, when it is understood truly, is the symbol of our daily moral choices.” And I would add to these words of the late professor Leonidas Donskis: our attitude towards this tragedy, towards its victims, the rescuers, the desk murderers, its direct perpetrators and their unlimited worship–these reflect the state of our ability to remember. And today there are clear signs there is an attempt to make our memory and our moral choices sick. There is only one way to heal our memory: to tell the truth finally. If we want THEM to not just rest in peace, but in honor and dignity.

I wrote this poem 30 years ago:

2019-09-232019-09-26

Lithuania’s Jewish Victims of Genocide Remembered in Ponar

Lithuania’s Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Genocide was marked at Ponar September 23 in a March of the Living event. Although some of the traditional March of the Living Litvaks resident in Israel attended, they were far outnumbered by Lithuanians and especially by Lithuanian high school students.

As usual, people gathered on the west side of the railroad tracks in the town of Paneriai or Ponar just outside Vilnius to march the kilometer or so into the Ponar Memorial Complex for the ceremony at the central monument there. This year, however, hundreds of students arrived by train and walked in on the pedestrian overpass over the railroad. Also new this year was the Lithuanian honor guard who led the procession.

Poles, Russians, Lithuanians and Soviet POWs were also murdered at Ponar, albeit in significantly lower numbers than Jews. This year a Polish delegation and Catholic priest awaited the procession at the Polish monument at the entrance to the memorial complex.

2019-09-232019-09-25

Rescuers of Jews are Examples of Resolution and Nobility

Friday, September 20, Vilnius–Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda distributed the Lithuanian award the Life-Saver’s Cross to those who rescued Jews during the war.

Recipients are 38 rescuers of Jews. Most are no longer alive so their children and relatives attended the ceremony to receive the award.

President Nausėda said: “We are gathered here to honor the people whose courage, pity and ability to preserve the greatest values during the painful events of the 20th century made them examples of nobility to all of us. May the resoluteness of the heroes of that time to share their fate and food with the persecuted Jewish people inspire us to create the sort of Lithuania which would be good and safe.”

Photo by Robertas Dačkus

2019-09-202019-09-24

President’s Claim Mayor Divided Society with Noreika Plaque Take-Down Not True

Photo by Brendan Hoffman for the New York Times

“Every nation has to have its heroes. I understand Lithuanians on this. But how can we have heroes like Noreika?” said Pinchos Fridberg, the only Jew left in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius who was born in the city before the Nazis invaded in 1941.

The statement [headline] “Nausėda: Šimašius’s Decision to Take Down Noreika Plaque Divided Society” doesn’t correspond to historical reality.

by professor Pinchos Fridberg

On September 6 the internet news site delfi.lt carried a Baltic News Service report with the headline “Nausėda: Šimašius’s Decision to Take Down Noreika Plaque Divided Society.”

2019-09-202019-09-25

Reading of Names of Holocaust Victims at Choral Synagogue

A reading of the names of Holocaust victims will take place at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius between 10:00 and 11:00 A.M. on September 23.

2019-09-19

Lithuanian Historian Linas Venclauskas on the Swastika at LJC

15min.lt

A strong upsurge in anti-Semitism in Lithuania and the world has been noted recently. In early August the Lithuanian Jewish Community closed the synagogue because of possible danger, and a few days ago a swastika made of soil appeared at LJC headquarters. Vytautas Magnus University historian Dr. Linas Venclauskas says the wave of anti-Semitism might have been set in motion by recent disputes on historical figures, but won’t deny the possibility these incidents could increase in number.

Sunday a swastika was arranged in soil poured on the sidewalk next to the LJC building. LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky commented the incident truly caused alarm, especially because it came the week before Lithuania’s Day of Remembrance of Victims of Genocide.

Recent attacks against Jewish communities have been noted around the world. In the USA the number of shootings and other violent attacks inside synagogues has increased.

2019-09-18

Town of Darbėnai Deciding How to Commemorate Jewish Past, Some Ideas Divisive

by Jovita Gaižauskaitė, LRT TV

Residents of the town of Darbėnai in the Kretinga region are deciding how to commemorate the former Jewish population of about 550. The proposals so far have stirred up division in the town: no one wants to showcase that Jews were murdered there.

About 550 Jews lived in Darbėnai before World War II. Now the marked mass murder sites witness to their fate.

There is a plaque commemorating the Zionist Dovid Volfson, considered the inventor of the Israeli flag and the man who gave the modern shekel its name, on one of the houses in the Lithuanian town. Local residents keep coming up with more ideas to commemorate other Jews who lived there.

2019-09-18

On Photography and Memory: Antanas Sutkus Exhibit Pro Memoria to Mark the 7th Anniversary of the Destruction of the Kaunas Ghetto

by Paulius Jevsejevas

Šiaurės Atėnai (No. 17, 2019)

Antanas Sutkus has photographed a wide variety of people over his career, from famous figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jonas Mekas and Marija Gimbutienė to deaf and blind children living on the margins of society.

Even so, the photography in Pro Memoria disturbed me and wouldn’t allow me to build on earlier experience. Not because of some characteristic of the people portrayed, not because of the artistic choices the photographer made, and not because of my own attitudes as viewer. I am disturbed probably because I don’t have any definite words at hand to describe the general photographic situation I found myself in standing in from of these portraits. As I stood looking at those faces at least two different inner voices appeared and engaged in an unnerving inner dialogue.

On one side, we all now know that the people portrayed in this photographs along with hundreds of thousands of others for several long, seemingly endless years were placed beyond the bounds of society, intentionally separated and finally condemned to death. So these people, unlike other Lithuanian people photographed by Sutkus, these people didn’t have any social status at all. The people in the portraits survived, but I cannot forget all those who were murdered, even if I can’t see them: Every face, hand, glance in the series of portraits stands before me like a living body and at the same like a text which contains a story of the dead.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2019-09-18

Fayerlakh Performs at Peoples Fair

The Peoples Fair took place for the eleventh time in central Vilnius. The goal of this colorful event is to present the crafts, cuisine, traditions, culture and life of Lithuania’s ethnic minority communities.

The fair usually includes music, cooking and crafts workshops. This year the Jewish song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh performed as well.

2019-09-17

On Contexts

by Sergejus Kanovičius
Photo by Paulius Peleckis/BFL © 2019 Baltijos fotografijos linija

Ghettos are good. Herding people into them was an attempt to save the Jews. Honoring the herders is nothing special, just good etiquette. As is the division of property of the murdered.

The installation of plaques commemorating false heroes is a classic of the rule of law. The silence of almost all political leaders is a sign that all of this is to be tolerated and acceptable. Vilnius is decorated with hundreds of portraits of those who wished the Jews well in the ghettos, posters proclaiming Vilnius shouldn’t be the Jerusalem of the North, those wearing white armbands marching from the President’s Office towards the erection of the plaque guarded by the police, Holocaust denial and the revision of history on the lips of politicians and staff from the Genocide Center. Or maybe someone wants a t-shirt bearing pictures of these doers of good to the Jews? They’re not expensive. Patriotism is cheap, just thirty euros apiece. A swastika with flowers in front of the Lithuanian Jewish Community going extinct is just the logical continuation of this.

Everything, acts of good and evil, require favorable circumstances. Those flowers on that swastika are just flowers. They do not differ from those who silently tolerate this entire context, nor from those actively creating it. The dead cannot vote. But this silence regarding the living is telling.

2019-09-172019-09-23