The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to attend the unveiling of a plaque commemorating the 120th anniversary this year of the birth of Vilnius native and violin master Jascha Heifetz. The unveiling will take place at 5:00 P.M. on August 19 in the foyer on the third floor at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. Event will take place in full conformity with whatever healthcare rules are in place at the time for public gatherings.
Irena Piesliakienė passed away August 6. She was born in 1939. She was a member of the Kaunas Jewish Community. Our deepest condolences to her daughter Rita.
I am endlessly grateful for the friendship and fruitful cooperation from the very beginning with the Kaunas 2022 team (and especially the Memory Bureau team) and I am thankful for the honor bestowed me as a member of the consultation committee for the Litvak Forum to take place in 2022.
I am so very glad because it is always pleasant to communicate with open, tolerant people who are hungry for knowledge and who are striving to insure our society might also become more open, more tolerant and more accepting.
I am glad because we are joined in a common goal: to encourage recognition of the multicultural history of our city and to appreciate what we have, while not averting our gaze from painful episodes.
With virus restrictions eased, the Panevėžys Jewish Community received some foreign visitors interested to learn more about their relatives, their biographies and their fate.
Yeir and his wife, both from Israel, visited us on July 25. He’s the great-grandson of famous Panevėžys rabbi Rabinovitch, the ilui who lived and worked here for more than 20 years. Yeir was keen to learn more about religious life in Panevėžys in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He experienced the city and visited Jewish heritage sites here.
According to archive documents from 1857, eight synagogues in Panevėžys are mentioned, with a few more synagogues located in private residences. Religious life in Panevėžys is the subject of a forthcoming book called “Žvilgsnis į praeitį: Panevėžio žydų istorija ir palikimas” [A Glimpse into the Past: The History and Legacy of the Jews of Panevėžys], already printed and soon to be launched.
The Sabbath begins at 8:51 P.M. on Friday, August 6, and concludes at 10:15 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
On August 4, 1941, the Jews of the Akmenė region who were being detained in the town of Akmenė were taken to Mažeikiai and murdered. An event called “Shalom, Akmenė” was organized and held to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust there on August 4. A new monument marking the site of the former synagogue in Klykoliai village was unveiled and the victims were remembered at the town square in Akmenė with a reading of names, sung prayers and kaddish. The ceremony there ended with a procession along Stoties and Viekšnių streets to the Akmenė town cemetery. Old Jewish cemeteries on the Tirkšliai-Mažeikiai highway were also visited.
Participants included members of the Šiauliai Regional Jewish Community, Lithuanian MP Kasparas Adomaitis and others. Our gratitude goes to the organizers, Diana and Marijus Lopaitis and the Akmenė History Museum.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community’s song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh recently performed at the Peretocze festival held annually in the vast Belovezha forest which was once part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and now spans large parts of eastern Poland and western Belarus.
Photographs from the event can be found here.
On July 30 organizers and guests of the “Road of Memory 1941-2021” project and local residents assembled at the Kupiškis Ethnographic Museum where museum historian Aušra Jonušytė moderated events.
United States embassy to Lithuania representative Wartenberg welcomed visitors in the name of US ambassador Robert Gilchrist and Lithuanian Foreign Ministry ambassador Marius Janukonis and veteran Conservative Party politician, former minister and MEP Rasa Juknevičienė as well as others participated and spoke at the event whose main organizer was Lithuania’s International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes, whose deputy director Ingrida Vilkienė also delivered an address to the audience. Kupiškis regional administration mayor Dainius Bardauskas also spoke.
A procession bearing banners and flags walked to the mass murder site at the Freethinkers’ Cemetery in Kupiškis with marchers bearing flowers, candles and stones inscribed with the names of the murdered. The commemoration included a reading of the names of the victims and descriptions of their lives and families.
The most recent storm in Vilnius did damage to the Jewish cemetery on Sudervės raod in Vilnius. Many grave monuments fell down and some broke. If you have loved ones interred at this cemetery, the administrator of the cemetery is asking you to renew your contact information including telephone numbers and email addresses so that the administration can contact you.
The administration’s telephone number is 370 67025750 and the email is es48e@hotmail.com
The Lithuanian Jewish Community has been celebrating the European Day of Jewish Culture for a number of years now on the first Sunday in September with events in Vilnius and at associated LJC member communities around the country. The topic this year is dialogue, #Žydiškipašnekesiai, revealing different aspects of Jewish culture, the Litvak contribution to Lithuanian history, culture and democracy and the living Litvak legacy. The LJC usually opens its doors, the Choral Synagogue and other locations to visitors on this day with lectures, musical performances and authentic Jewish food. This year the event will take place on the eve of the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashanah. Stay tuned for the full program.
August 2 is observed as the day of remembrance of the genocide committed against the Roma in Europe.
“Roma, as with Jews, the disabled, homosexuals and Communists, were considered unworthy to live by the German Nazi regime. They were persecuted, deported as forced labor and murdered. It is believed about one-half million Roma were murdered during the Holocaust. … Only in 2015 did the European Parliament adopt a resolution recognizing the genocide committed against the Roma during WWII and naming August 2 as the day of remembrance of the Roma genocide. In 2019 the Lithuanian parliament included August 2 on Lithuania’s list of observed commemorative days.”
Lithuania’s Roma Community Center can be found here.
Two LJC children’s summer camps took place in July, full of activities and fun. Not only did the kids have a chance to shake off state restrictions for fighting the virus by getting a little wild, they also learned a lot. The LJC camps among other things taught Jewish history and tradition. The kids learned to make challa, visited the Ninth Fort Holocaust site in Kaunas and engaged in other learning activities.
About the event
Learn about the extraordinary connection to one chess table with Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman, Lithuanian Jewish Community; Shulamit Rabinovich, San Francisco engineer; Dudu Fisher, Israeli-based world-renowned entertainer; Grant Gochin, South African wealth Manager and Silvia Foti, Chicago journalist.
We will reveal recently discovered facts about the Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust denial by the Lithuanian Government, and present new paths to education about the horrors of the past.
The table WILL talk.
We will conclude the program with Dudu Fisher chanting Kaddish.
When: 10:00 A.M. PST, 1:00 P.M. EST, 7:00 P.M. South Africa, 8:00 P.M. Israel, September 12, 2021
Representatives of the Lithuanian Government have also been invited to attend and speak.
For more information and to register, see http://israelusa.org/table-of-truth/
The Vilnius Jewish Public Library will screen the film Black Honey about Vilnius partisan and Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever created by his granddaughter and actress Hadas Kalderon of Israel. She will retell stories she heard directly from him and talk about film and filming. The screening is open to the public and will take place at 7:00 P.M. on August 8. The Vilnius Jewish Public Library (not affiliated with the Lithuanian Jewish Community) is located at Gedimino prospect no. 24 in Vilnius with entry through the alley and to the right.
Register by calling (8-5) 219 77 48 or sending an email to info@vilnius-jewish-public-library.com
The film is in English, Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles.
The Sabbath begins at 9:05 P.M. on Friday, July 30, and concludes at 10:32 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to an evening of poetry and music at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius at 6:00 P.M. on Tuesday, August 11. Sergejus Kanovičius will read selections of his prose and poetry accompanied by Boris Kirzner on violin.
A US Army chaplain examines one of hundreds of Jewish Torah scrolls, stolen from all over Europe by Nazi forces, in Frankfurt, Germany in 1945. Photo: Irving Katz/US Army Signal Corps/FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Seventeen scrolls, manuscripts, and community records [pinkasim] which were stolen from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe during WWII have been recovered, the Department of Justice announced Thursday.
Why it matters: “The Scrolls and Manuscripts that were illegally confiscated during the Holocaust contain priceless historical information that belongs to the descendants of families that lived and flourished in Jewish communities before the Holocaust,” acting US attorney Jacquelyn Kasulis said in a statement.
• “This Office hopes that today’s seizure will contribute to the restoration of pre-Holocaust history in Eastern Europe.”
The big picture: The documents were found through a Brooklyn auction house which had them for sale. In addition to the 17 artifacts recovered, four more are believed to exist: three in upstate New York and one in Israel.
• The records date from the mid-19th century to World War II and were looted from Jewish communities in Romania, Hungary, Ukraine and Slovakia.
• According to an affidavit in the case, the artifacts were believed to be “lost for all time” prior to being offered for sale at the New York auction house.
Full article here.
Have you visited what we’re calling Cvi Park, on Petras Cirkva Square in Vilnius? Come enjoy the company and authentic Israeli street food, and watch how they dance to bachata music on hot July evenings.