With deep sadness we report Oleksandra Toizer passed away on March 10. She was born January 9, 1925. A long-time member of the Vilnius Jewish Community, she was a volunteer doctor. Our condolences to her daughter Larisa Filatova.
Vilnius Jewish Community member Mere Leja Zagin passed away March 5. She was born May 29, 1927. Our condolences to her husband Chaim and son Levas.
Klaipėda Jewish Community member Vera Dveira Štok passed away March 8. She was born on April 6, 1925. Our deepest condolences to her daughter Genia.
Passover Seder by Malcah Zeldis, © 2018
Natalja Cheifec invites you to attend her lecture on Passover in Russian at 6:00 P.M. on March 14 at the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
Short synopsis:
-How the Jews were enslaved in Egypt
-How the Egyptians oppressed the Jews
-Moses, the leader of the Jewish people
-Why the Jews needed liberating
-How G_d punished the Egyptians, the 10 plagues
-Preparing for the Passover holiday: why yeast is avoided
-Celebrating Passover:
*matzo
*four cups of wine
*required elements of the Passover table
*why leavened foods are not eaten or drunk on Passover
To register, see goo.gl/JbypwU
A concert called Small Conversations in the Middle of Europe will be held at the Lithuanian Jewish Community at 6 o’clock on March 15.
Performing will be the violinists Boris Traub (Lithuania) and Boris Livshitz (Switzerland) and the pianist Rūta Mikelaitytė-Kašubienė (Lithuania). The program will feature the premiere of Giedrius Kuprevičius’s “Small Conversations,” Alexander Zazirski’s Mazurka, Mikhail Bronner’s Jacob’s Ladder and pieces by Mikhail Kokzhayev, Dov Seltzer and others.
A chess tournament will be held to celebrate Lithuanian Independence Day at 3:00 P.M. on Sunday, March 25, at the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Boris Rositsan, FIDE master, will be tourney director. For more information and to register, write to info@metbor.lt or call 8 655 43 556.
Everyone who wants to experience and learn the true spirit of this holiday is invited to come celebrate Passover at 7:30 P.M. on March 30. The seder will include a large selection of kosher Italian and French wines. One ticket costs 15 euros if you buy it before March 25, 20 euros after that and there’s a family package for 40 euros (for parents and children). Preschool-age children admitted without tickets. Tickets are available at the synagogue from 9:00 A.M. to 8:00 P.M. every day except on Sabbath, and at the LJC from 10:00 A.M. to 5:00 P.M. on workdays from Liuba on the second floor.
Clients of the LJC Social Programs Department may pick up matzo between 11 and 3 o’clock on workdays from March 15 to March 29 in the computer classroom on the first floor.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community sends deepest condolences to Social Programs Department director Michailis Segalis who just lost his beloved grandfather.
Lipmanas Orlovičius, a member of the Klaipėda Jewish Community, passed away on March 10. He was born June 9, 1939.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community sends our deepest condolences to his widow Ema and their children.
The Panevėžys Jewish Community and city of Panevėžy celebrated International Women’s Day, March 8, with a concert at the Art Gallery, also celebrating the 100th birthday of the Republic of Lithuania and tolerance. Violinists Boris Traub and Boris Livshitz (the latter from Switzerland) and pianist Rūta Mikelaitytė-Kašubienė performed.
Dear members,
The Lithuanian Jewish Community will hold a ceremony to unveil a plaque commemorating Jewish partisan leader and poet Abba Kovner at 1:00 P.M. on Wednesday, March 14, 2018, outside the LJC conference hall on the second floor at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. Participants will include chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Jewish partisan Fania Brancovskaja and Punchos Fridberg, who will speak about Kovner in Yiddish.
You are invited to attend a brief meeting in the conference hall following the unveiling.
Books link us to freedom, books connect us to the world.
–Yitzhak Rudashevski, December 13, 1942, Vilnius.
Teaching the Holocaust to children is a difficult matter. At what age is it appropriate to expose children to man’s greatest inhumanity to man and the horrible atrocities which took place throughout Europe, culminating in the calculated genocide of millions of people? The Maus comic book was one approach, but children aren’t stupid and they get the full impact of the horror anyway, despite the window dressing.
Teaching adults the Holocaust can be just as problematic. A large body of Holocaust literature including straight histories, survivors’ testimonies and even theological works, not to mention a signficant cinematic canon, can lead to burn-out quickly, the Holocaust hangover syndrome. It is too much to take in all at once, the mind rebels.
Some Holocaust commemoration projects and museums have recognized the old maxim, that a picture is worth a thousand words, and often an object–an abandoned shoe, a lost set of house keys, a broken doll–speaks louder to the soul of the visitor than any text, photograph or video.
“Lithuania is slowly restoring the country’s rich legacy of synagogues. Synagogues are still standing in towns, the former shtetlakh, where not a single Jew has remained. Braver and cleverer mayors and communities, encouraged by the Lithuanian Cultural Heritage Department and the Lithuanian Jewish Community, have begun restoring what has now become the priceless Jewish legacy, wiped out by the Holocaust. The synagogues are coming back and are being used for the cultural needs of the towns.
“Lithuanian public television channel Kultūra is producing a series called Reflections devoted to heritage. On this page you will find and be able to watch a film about restored synagogues. At the beginning you will see the oldest surviving wooden synagogue in Lithuania, restored in 2017. The synagogue operated as such until World War II, when the Holocaust exterminated the Pakruojis Jewish community. The regional administration of Pakruojis has renovated the Pakruojis Jewish synagogue and adapted it for public use. The project was financed by Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein. The restorers did great work and the interior is dominated by characteristically Jewish elements of decor and Jewish ethnic symbols, and the painting is filled with floral and faunal motifs. The former aron kodesh of this synagogue is especially decorative and impressive.
“After the Pakruojis synagogue, you will also see restored synagogues of Kaunas and Joniškis in the film”
Video program in Lithuanian here.
The Israeli embassy sponsored a free concert to celebrate Purim in Panevėžys.
Mayor Rytis Račkauskas spoke before the concert and said: “As Lithuania celebrates one hundred years since the restoration of statehood, Israel is also marking its own celebration of 70 years. But we are connected by more than shared celebrations. I am impressed by our beautiful cooperation and warm communication with the embassy. Soon Panevėžys will experience an Israeli film festival, and today I am pleased to welcome you to this concert which is also a gift from the Israeli embassy and ambassador Amir Maimon. I’d like to use this occasion to thank the ambassador for this cooperation and bringing our cultures together.”
Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon thanked those who attended to listen to the performers Iris and Ofer Prtugaly from Israel. After the concert Maimon, Račkauskas and the musicians attended a Purim celebration with the Panevėžys Jewish Community.
Ambassador Maimon said the Israeli embassy is planning to hold a cinematic event called “Israeli Cinema in Your City” in Panevėžys in May.
The Israeli embassy and the CIty of Panevėžys invite you to a performance by Israeli jazz musicians Iris and Ofer Portugaly at 5:00 P.M. on Friday, March 2.
The concert is free and open to the public. It will be held at the Art Gallery in Panevėžys.
Dear parents,
Kids aged 4 to 13 are invited to attend a Purim carnival at the Lithuanian Jewish Community at 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, March 4. Kids should come in costume and there will be a program of events, gifts and traditional Purim treats. For more information email sofja@lzb.lt or call +37067257540
Se you there!
The Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Vilnius Religious Jewish Community hosted a Purim spectacular at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius February 28 including a reading of the Book of Esther accompanied by audio-visual aids in English and a concert.
The cold snap enveloping Eastern Europe precluded a large number of children turning out, but those who did had adorable costumes, including a small bear, a policeman, at least one doctor, a king with golden crown and perhaps the most contemporary costume, a slightly older child wearing a Guy Fawkes mask and seemingly dressed in full-body ninja attire. Some adult women also dressed up, including synagogue regular Ruth Bloestein with wig, hat and ultra-rosy cheeks sitting in the women’s gallery.
Rabbi Sholom Ber Krinsky began the event slightly after the starting time of 6:30 and presented a number of gift baskets to leaders in the Community including Vilnius Jewish Religious Community chairman Simas Levinas and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky. He also greeted Litvak guests visiting from Israel in the women’s gallery. He followed with an animated reading of the Book of Esther during which he exchanged hats with children in the wings, first adopting an undersized top hat and then exchanging it for a London bobby’s helmet about three sizes too small for him. While he read from the scroll, a projection television system played a series of comic panels from the story of Esther in English.
Yitzhak Rudashevski’s Vilnius ghetto diary is one of the most important testimonies to reach us from the Vilnius ghetto, an authentic eye-witness account of history as it happened. The Lithuanian Jewish Community went to extreme efforts to insure the diary finally be published in Lithuanian translation.
“I think my words are written in blood,” the young Rudaashevski wrote in his diary inscribed in school notebooks. After reaching the age of 15 in the ghetto, Rudashevski and his family were murdered in Ponar.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community hosted a chess tournament on February 25 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Lithuania. Chess players young and old flocked to the tournament. Tournament director and FIDE master Boris Rositsan and Lithuanian Chess Federation president Aleksandras Černovas told those who came the chess player is a person who never abandons hope. Chess player and Lithuanian MP Julius Sabatauskas, who often organizes chess tournaments in Alytus, Lithuania, attended and competed, and said he was very happy to see the Lithuanian birthday celebration at the LJC with so many people there. Former prime ministerial advisor and veteran Lithuanian journalist Vilius Kavaliauskas spoke about Litvak history and former late president Algirdas Brazauskas’s trip to Israel, during which Brazauskas made a controversial apology to the Jewish people for Lithuanian complicity in the Holocaust. Kavaliauskas accompanied PM Brazauskas on that trip and recalled how the late prime minister said Lithuania lost her greatest and brightest people to the Holocaust. Where would Lithuania be now if they had lived and worked for her future, he wondered.
