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Lithuanian Jewish Community Statement on Genocide Center’s Newest Report on Kazys Škirpa
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Sad news has arrived from Šiauliai: Righteous Gentile Meilutė Zofia Kalendraitė-Levinskienės has passed away. The Lithuanian Jewish Community extends our deepest condolences to her family, including her husband, children, grandchildren, her sister who is also a Righteous Gentile and to her many friends.
Her father Andrejus Kalendra, enthusiastic about the ideas of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, organized the rescue of the Gordimer family from the Šiauliai ghetto. Andrejus Kalendra was a man who was known and respected throughout the area. He organized the operation to save the family together with other members of his family and friends following the Children’s Aktion in the ghetto on November 5, 1943. Six-year-old Sholem was carried out the ghetto in a potato bag and hidden at the Kalendra estate near Žarėnai. He remained there until the summer of 1945.
Due to the efforts of the Kalendra family, their friends and their acquaintances, the entire Gordimer family was saved and went to the USA in 1945.
The Lithuanian Writers Union reported Dovydas Judelevičius passed away at the age of 95 on September 23, 202, in Vilnius. Dovydas Judelevičius was a member of the union, a literature and theater critic and a translator. He was born October 5, 1925, in Kaunas.
NEW YORK–During a Sukkot celebration for students at the Hohe Weide Synagogue in Hamburg, an individual wearing a military-style uniform hit one of the students in the head with a shovel, gravely injuring the student who was taken to the hospital. Police providing security for the synagogue apprehended and arrested the attacker, according to the Hamburg police.
In response, World Jewish Congress president Ronald S. Lauder declared:
“As we mark the one-year anniversary of the Yom Kippur attack in Halle, Germany, which left two dead, I am saddened to learn that once again, this time on the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, a German Jewish community is confronting a violent, anti-Semitic act of terror. While thankfully, police on the scene acted quickly to stop the attacker from committing further violence, the security presence was not enough to deter this attacker from gravely injuring someone.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community will be closed October 4 and 9 for the holiday of Sukkot.
July 19th, 1922.
Beba Epstein is born.
In 2017, a bundle of Jewish documents was found hidden in Lithuania, which are now being digitized as part of the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections. One of them is the autobiography of a secular middle-class Jewish girl in the 1930s, whose life was not unlike that of many children today. While her experience doesn’t reflect the circumstances of every Jewish child at the time, we can learn a lot through her account. But first, let’s meet her!
Full interactive experience here.
ELTA
Lithuanian member of parliament Audrys Šimas violated the principle of respect for the human being and the state enshrined in the State Code for Behavior by Politicians, according to the Lithuanian parliament’s Ethics and Procedures Commission who investigated Šimas’s apparent use of a sieg heil-style Nazi salute during a vote which offended the Jewish community.
The ethics watchdogs recommended Šimas avoid actions which could be seen as disreputable, offensive or derisive towards different people or groups of people.
The ethics commission voted Wednesday against Šimas with 5 members in favor, one against and two abstaining. Šimas, who participated in the meeting, said it had been a spontaneous action which he himself hadn’t even noticed.
“I raised my hand spontaneously. I have apologized for my action,” he told the ethics commission. He also said he had contributed personal funds to commemorating Holocaust victims in Biržai, Lithuania, and called the uproar over his unintentional action “purely a political game and attack.” Parliamentary Ethics and Procedures Commission member Ona Valiukevičiūtė said she was convinced the parliamentarian had acted innocently and hadn’t intended to offend anyone.
by Aušra Maldeikienė
A half-year before her death, my aunt, who was then over 90, made a very unexpected comment: “Maybe it was a good thing they deported us to Siberia.” I simply froze for a second, unable to believe my ears, and my aunt went on: “Maybe God won’t be so wrathful when I die, and will forgive, because father gave that Jewish girl back to her relatives after three months. Maybe we have atoned for our guilt that way, because we were afraid of the neighbors.” That’s how I learned, three-quarters of a century from that horrific year 1941, another detail about the history of my family and also of my nation. A tragic detail.
The Holocaust isn’t just a great tragedy for our nation, it is the main stroke in the painting of our country’s future. The moral judgment of the Holocaust shows more than anything else the sort of society in which we live, and also what sort of future awaits us. There are two choices: either we honestly realize our moral responsibility for those events and, having come to terms with our limitations, create an ethical community, or we continue to look for justifications for what happened, and keep murdering over and over in that way. Not those who lie buried for decades along Lithuania’s dirt roads and forest margins, but now murder ourselves.
“How Did It Happen? Rūta Vanagaitė Interviews Christoph Dieckmann” is a book which every right-thinking Lithuanian needs to read. The book isn’t hysterical, every sentence is based on historical footnotes, the questions aren’t loaded, often compel thought, and the historian’s answers are terse and conspicuously complete. The authors of this book can be proud. Incidentally, the authors are a German historian who has been researching the Holocaust in Lithuania for over 20 years and Rūta Vanagaitė, whose reputation an aggressive mob has tried to ruin, but who remains unbowed.
The book is worth reading if you want to know how it all happened. But the most important thing isn’t just that: it’s not the tragic history of the Holocaust itself (which is more or less known) which compels reflection, but the raising of moral dilemmas concerning it or just the attempt to tie them together. “History is neither black nor white, it has many shades of grey,” Dieckmann says in the book, and it is exactly that messy, swampy wandering along the grey roads of considering the tragedy which lets us connect the past and future.
Seeking to answer the question of why during the war the absolute majority of the Jews who had lived here for centuries and almost 200,000 POWs were brutally, inhumanely violently murdered during the war, we have to take into consideration the souls of simple Lithuanians and the principles guiding the Lithuanian elite at that time, and the direction indicated by the moral compass, by the Church.
Full review in Lithuanian here.
Sukkot is a holiday when Jews remember their liberation from slavery in Egypt and their journey to the Holy Land. The holiday has two meanings: the mundane meaning of harvest and the sukka, Hebrew for tent, the temporary dwelling of the forefathers after they left Egypt.
The Panevėžys Jewish Community will celebrate Sukkot at 2:00 P.M. on October 4 at Community headquarters.
Members, partners, friends and children are invited to take part. Children will receive gifts. There will be a food service for everyone with fall harvest foods.
The Rokiškis people’s theater Nutildyta mūza will present a skit directed by Neringa Dainienė.
Panevėžys Jewish Community members will be provided masks and disinfectant.
Admission is 3 euros.
We eagerly await you in holiday high spirits. Please tell us if you plan to attend this event at the Panevėžys Jewish Community.
Gennady Kofman, chairman
Panevėžys Jewish Community
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky spoke at the Lithuanian president’s ceremony to award the Lithuanian Cross of the Life-Saver to those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust on Lithuania’s Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Genocide.
§§§
Your excellency, honorable Mr. president Gitanas Nausėda, honorable first lady Diana Nausėdienė,
Honorable rescuers of Jews and family members, honored Holocaust survivors and dear guests,
It is a great honor for me to speak to you including in the name of the Lithuanian Jews words of gratitude to those who rescued Jews for the light of humanity they gave during the darkest of times. It is thanks to these greatest of people that I stand here today.
So many Lithuanians surrendered themselves to an unprecedented, systematized hatred during World War II, becoming henchmen sowing death or kowtowers in their native land. So giving the honor due and commemorative tribute to those who found themselves at a dead end of human values, to those who opened the gates of hope to the people were condemned to death, to those innocents sentenced to death, is the least our generation and the next generation can do.
The story of the rescuers needs to do more than sleep in the history textbooks, more than simply be celebrated in statues. The priceless lesson of humanity which these heroes gave us, gave Lithuania and gave to the entire international community is no less important today when democracy, civic-mindedness and historical truth are drowning in the rhetoric of crisis or getting lost in the maze of political narratives and interests.
Even in what seemed a hopeless situation, balancing between the suppressed truth and the sanctioned lie, the example of the rescuers reminds us there is always a choice between killing and saving. The choice to save was the choice made by about 900 Lithuanians based on basic conscience. This was a voluntary choice, neither purchased nor sold, but based on a free mind unfettered by fear and uneclipsed by false promises.
In marking this the Year of the Vilna Gaon and the Year of Litvak History, I invite you again to remember our heroes. I hope the name of each rescuer of Jews will inspire us, illuminate our consciousness with hope and belief, and strengthen our peoples and the generations building bridges of historical memory.
Before Yom Kippur, please forgive me if I unintentionally hurt people. I wasn’t sensitive enough, I can admit that right now. I needed to exert myself to better recognize and understand others, to become more sensitive. “I’m sorry” is the most miraculous phrase which could ever be uttered. It is a bridge between war and peace and is the foundation for the survival of humanity.
Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman,
Lithuanian Jewish Community
B”H
Sunday, September 27
5:45 P.M. Meal before fast
6:46 P.M. Start of fast
6:30 P.M. Kol Nidre prayer
Monday, September 28
10:00 A.M. Shacharit
12:30 P.M. Iskor (remembrance prayer)
5:30 P.M. Mincha
6:30 P.M. Final prayer Neila
7:55 P.M. End of fast/meal
Donations in the memory of loved ones (as written in the Izkor prayer) will be accepted on Sunday from 4:00 P.M. in the synagogue
by Arkadijus Vinokuras
I read the ramblings of MP professor Arūnas Gumuliauskas, the title of which should have been “How I Love Lithuania Tortured by Her Enemies.” He writes like a professor. I say “like” because there is doubt on the quality of the text itself. Because his entire long text could be expressed in a single sentence: “Everyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy and an agent of the Kremlin.” Back in Soviet times a CP member would have written it like this” “Everyone who thinks otherwise is an enemy and an agent of Washington.”
The generalized “all” dominates in the text, probably stemming from the elementary fear of naming specific liars and agents. Because it might turn out some of these unnamed critics aren’t lying. And they aren’t any kind of agent. Hence the author would be dressed down naked in court for libel. The professor had a good command of this sort of jargon back in Soviet times, in 1987 when he defended his doctoral thesis “Activities of the Lithuanian Communist Party in Developing the Theater Arts in the Republic.” That was the same year the Lithuanian Freedom League held a meeting under the Adam Mickiewicz statue in Vilnius. Forgive me, I’m not trying to joke around, but it is seriously difficult to impossible to think about Gumuliauskas as some sort of sincere nationalist. But this is not surprising, he is, after all, a member of a party which doesn’t confess any ideology, not even basic political morality.
So sometimes the Lithuanian Peasants/Green Union pretend they’re on the left, sometimes on the right, but its members agree on one thing at least: democracy is just stage decoration which can be toyed with as one likes. So it’s also no surprise that the search for and discovery of enemies lurking around every corner is programmed into this part. Gumuliaksuas is no exception.
Violin master Gidon Kremer gave a special concert for members and friends of the Lithuanian Jewish Community September 24 which included Schumann’s sonata for violin and Polish-Jewish composer Meczyslaw Weinberg’s 24 preludes adapted for violin by Kremer himself.
During the concert photographs flashed across a screen by Antanas Sutkus, a renowned Lithuanian photographer, of the faces of Lithuanian Jewish survivors, adding to and adding significance to painful and unforgettable Jewish history. This was music for the heart and soul. The Lithuanian Jewish Community sincerely and deeply thanks Kremer and Osokin for the extraordinary concert. Because of fears of the virus, audience members were evenly spaced around the hall and wore masks.
We recall Latvian classical violinist gave his first recital in Vilnius way back when. Kremer’s orchestra travels the world giving concerts on the world’s great stages with the best orchestras and conductors.
Dear Holocaust survivors,
Ladies and gentlemen,
We are gathered here today to pay our respects to the hundreds of thousands of Lithuanian Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust.
Shoah means catastrophe. But this is not just the tragedy and catastrophe of the Jewish people. The Shoah is Lithuania’s. This is the Shoah of all mankind. This is a Shoah of our humanity, compassion and ambivalence.
Here alone in Paneriai, we, the state of Lithuania, lost tens of thousands of our fellow citizens with whom we built the independent Lithuanian state together. Fighting together in the battles for independence, suffering together the young state’s most difficult years, together putting our hopes in the future of an independent Lithuania.
We lost talented scholars, artists, poets, doctors, businesspeople and artisans, teachers and clerics. Me lost elders who preserved the memory of hundreds of generations living together in friendship, and we lost the children who would have been this country’s future.
I thank all of you who walked with the Lithuanian Jewish Community today along the route taken by 70,000 men, women and children 77 years ago.
While the bodies of the victims of Ponar, reduced to ashes, will not rise again, no attempts to burn the pages of history will liberate our fellow citizens from the guilt dwelling in the subconscious over the murder of the Jews, nor will it relieve the suffering of the experience of the Holocaust even of the generation which came after.
No actions will return the lives of the more than 200,000 people of Lithuania lost during the Holocaust while words, whether in Lithuanian or Yiddish, will only briefly return a glimmer of the crown of the Jerusalem of Lithuania.
The memory of the Holocaust, however, isn’t just filled with shame for one side and pain for another. Its memory awakens our conscience and our duty to the future: to remember and honor the dead, thus imparting some sense to the victims of senseless hatred, lessons written in innocent blood for humanity. As long as we’re alive we must insure through joint effort, testifying to the memory of the Holocaust victims, the tragedy of Ponar never recurs, and that it doesn’t become the object of new and error-filled forms of hatred.
As we recall the events of that era of pain, it’s just as important to remember those giants of the spirit. I don’t know how many times now here in Ponar I’ve talked about Liba Mednikienė, a heroine of Lithuania’s battles for freedom. Finally now, during the Year of the Vilna Gaon and the Year of Litvak History, a monument to her memory, to this Lithuanian patriot murdered at the hands of Lithuanians, has found a home in the town of her youth, Širvintos.
Today hope is reborn, listening to the words of the president and prime minister and watching the soldiers pay tribute to Lithuania’s Jewish victims of genocide, hope that our society and out state have matured, have reached a new stage in the dialogue between Jews and Lithuanians, devoted wholly to learning and recognizing historical justice. We have an history inherited and shared from the time of Vytautas the Great, and so I believe commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust and being an indivisible part of it will become, eventually, not a matter of just marking an event or opportunity, but an issue of civic dignity and our view of the world.
Thanks to all of you for being here today with us, the small Lithuanian Jewish Community, for blazing a path in remembering those who were innocent and were sentenced to death.
Faina Kukliansky
September 23, 2020
Ponar, Lithuania
The Lithuanian Jewish Community congratulates the six winners of the highest award given by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, “Carry Your Light and Believe.” The winners this year were Marijus Jacovskis, Birutė Banevičiūtė, Aldona Elena Puišytė-Grigaliūnienė, Gintaras Grajauskas, Gediminas Gelgotas and Liubomiras Laucevičius.
Culture minister Dr. Mindaugas Kvietkauskas awarded the honors at a ceremony at the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture September 22.
The Utena regional administration in northeastern Lithuania decided to celebrate 2020 as the Year of the Vilna Gaon and Litvak History with a project called “Signs of the History of the Jews of Utena.” Project events were scheduled to coincide with European Heritage Days 2020 from September 11 to 20.
One of the first events was the unveiling of a street sign on Žydų gatvė (Jewish Street) in the town of Utena with the name of the street in Hebrew and Yiddish. Earlier a portrait of kosher butcher Kavinskis appeared on a wall next to the street to recall the formerly large Jewish community there. Between the two world wars most of the central parts of the town was inhabited by Jews. Nobel prize winner Bernard Lown, the inventor of the defibrillator, came from Utena.
Utena regional administration mayor Alvydas Katinas said at the unveiling ceremony Lithuania and Utena are on the right path: “Jewish commemorations, cherishing Jewish history and culture and keeping up cemeteries–this activity should become a daily one. I believe honoring Jews shouldn’t be limited to just memories or knowing how many Jews lived in Utena and how they lived here. Our work primarily should testify to the fact Jews live with us in the here and now.” LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, MP Emanuelis Zingeris and others including many local residents attended the ceremony as well.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community is holding a concert at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius featuring world-famous violinist and orchestra leader Gidon Kremer and the talented young pianist Georgiy Osokin on September 24 as part of commemorations of Lithuania’s Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Genocide. The classical music concert is scheduled to begin at 6:00 P.M. on Thursday and will include works by Polish Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and an exhibit of photographs of Holocaust survivors by Lithuanian photographer Antanas Sutkus.
Registration is required and space is limited. Please send an e-mail to info@lzb.lt to register.