A ceremony to open an exhibit about Ludovik Zamenhof, the medical doctor who invented the language Esparanto, was attended by a number of people including Polish Institute deputy director and Polish embassy chief advisor Pavel Krupka, and bishop emeritus Jonas Kauneckas. Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman also attended the ceremony. The exhibit will run till April 15.
The mobile exhibit “One Century of Seven: Lithuania, Lite, Lita” created by the Lithuanian Foreign Ministry and the Lithuanian Jewish Community has gone on display at the Chicago Culture Center. The ceremony held jointly by YIVO and the Lithuanian consulate in Chicago honored senator Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) for his efforts including the return of Torah scrolls and YIVO archives. Durbin is the most influential Lithuanian-American in American politics. His mother Anna Kutkin aka Ona Kutkaitė hailed from Jurbarkas.
The exhibit illustrates the history of the Jews of Lithuania from their arrival in the Lithuanian Grand Duchy in the 13th century until today. Creators of the exhibit Pranas Morkus and the designer Victoria Sideraitė-Alon were able to show exceptional details in Jewish relations with local inhabitants of other ethnicities and to showcase important Litvaks.
Many Litvaks live in America and many visited the exhibit.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to a Sabbath celebration with Righteous Gentile Ona Landsbergienė’s great-grandson Gabrielius Landsbergis. LJC executive director Renaldas Vaisbrodas will moderate.
The Sabbath ceremony will be held on the second floor of the LJC at 6:30 P.M. on Friday, March 23. The number of seats is limited and registration is required. Call 8 678 81514
Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT has begun airing a series called “Righteous Gentiles,” presenting the stories of Lithuanians who rescued Jews from the Holocaust. Almost a thousand Lithuanians have now been officially recognized as Righteous Gentiles, per capita the largest percentage in any country. According to the national television broadcaster’s site, the series will tell hitherto unknown stories of Lithuanian heroism during the Holocaust.
Video and more information in Lithuanian available here and here.
Virgilius Sadauskas has been fired at academic ethnics ombudsman.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community welcomes this win for common sense and is grateful to the 29 MPs from the Liberal, Conservative, Social Democratic and Peasants factions for initiating a vote of confidence in Sadauskas.
The LJC feels the actions by this public servant, offering a monetary reward for collecting information “about people of Jewish ethnicity who contributed to deportations and torture,” incited ethnic discord and fall under the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism adopted by the European Parliament on July 1, 2017.
We hope this decision becomes an example of best practices in the continuing fight against anti-Semitism and other forms of hatred in our country at the national and community level.
In a secret poll, 77 MPs voted in favor of firing Sadauskas, 17 voted against and 13 abstained. Three ballots were ruined.
Loss and renewal, the lot of victim and resistance, extermination and rebirth: these are the themes the writer Abba Kovner (1918-1987) wrote about from his own experience.
The first biography of the poet and partisan leader written by Dina Porat won the National Jewish Book Award for explaining history and bringing it to life.
Kovner was born in Oshmyani on March 14, 1918, a Lithuanian town in Belarus about 50 kilometers from Vilnius. After making aliyah to Israel following the war, he was often presented as a poet and prose writer, but Litvaks remember Kovner as a partisan leader who went on to help found the modern state of Israel.
In 1927 his parents moved the family to Vilnius and Kovner attended the Tarbut Gymansium. This building now houses the Lithuanian Jewish Community. He received a Jewish education there, including Hebrew and exposure to modern literature, and began to write poetry while in high school. In 1939 he was admitted as an auditor of classes at the Arts Faculty of Vilnius University. He engaged in illegal Zionist activities during the Soviet occupation of 1940. He became leader of the Ha-Shomer Ha-Tzair Zionist youth movement.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet and Jewish partisan Abba Kovner, the Lithuanian Jewish Community March 14 unveiled a memorial plaque in his honor. The LJC is housed in the same building where Kovner attended high school until 1935, the former Tarbut Hebrew Gymnasium. The ceremony was attended by chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, fellow Jewish partisan Fania Brancovskaja and Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon, among others. Brancovskaja told the small gathering her memories of the Jewish leader.
Position of the Lithuanian Jewish Community
March 13, 2018
Today the parliament of the Republic of Lithuania is scheduled to consider announcing 2019 the Year of the Jews. What the Lithuanian Jewish Community thinks about this is apparently of interest only to members of the media, not the initiators of the Year of the Jews measure.
The writers of the measure have not consulted with the LJC, the largest Jewish organization in Lithuania, at any stage of their initiative, which compels us to question the contents of the proposed resolution and its sincerity. The laconic legislation contains nothing that doesn’t happen every other year, except for, one supposes, allocation of funding for a special commission or commissions. We hope if the measure is adopted it won’t turn into the formation of yet another commission which takes students on Holocaust “excursions” through mass graves during Sabbath.
With no prospect of learning the plans and intentions of the authors of the idea first-hand, this strange initiative looks like some sort of atavism of former times, as when Thursdays were fish day. On other days the people were not provided fish, but on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Lithuania, is the issue of Jews really so uncomfortable and uninteresting? A whole slew of important dates for Lithuania and the Lithuanian Jewish Community are yet to come this year, including the 30th anniversary of the reestablishment of the Community; the 100th anniversary of the unification of Lithuanian Zionists, who supported Lithuanian statehood; the 75th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto and the 115th anniversary of the founding of what is now Vilnius’s only working synagogue. We therefore call upon the authors of this Year of the Jews to begin that year this year, to celebrate 100th anniversary of the modern Lithuanian state together with the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community esteems the progress of the state in solving issues topical for all of us, but political games using the Jews but not including the Jewish community are not an appropriate way to insure effective dialogue between ethnic Lithuanians and Jews.
Lithuanian Jewish Community
Pylimo g. 4
LT-01117 Vilnius
T:+370 5 261 3003
info@lzb.lt
www.lzb.lt
The Lithuanian Jewish Community expresses our deepest condolences to Tobijas Jafetas, former member of the board of the LJC and former chairman of the Union of Ghetto and Concentration Camp Prisoners, on the loss of his beloved wife Elena Zagorskaitė, with whom he lived for 60 years, had children and took pride in their grandchildren. We are deeply saddened and wish the family strength in their loss of their beloved wife, mother and grandmother.
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.
