lzinios.lt
Next year a new book about Chiune Sugihara, Japanese consul in Lithuania and rescuer of thousands of Jews, is scheduled to be published in Japan. The author is Dr. Simonas Strelcovas, historian and professor at Šiauliai University in Lithuania who researched the hero at Japanese archives and only recently returned home. The book is to appear in Japanese.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
A plaque has been unveiled on the western façade of the A. Martinaitis Art School at Šv. Gertrūdos street no. 33 in Kaunas with the inscription: “In this building the first Lithuanian table tennis championships took place organized by the athletics club Makabi.”
Lithuanian Table Tennis Association director Rimgaudas Balaiša said at the unveiling ceremony Kaunas was the cradle of table tennis in Lithuania. Young people imported the game from abroad and by 1922 Kaunas began to see its first enthusiasts. In 1925 the first ping pong tournaments were held in Lithuania. A year later the Ping Pong Committee was established in the Lithuanian Athletics League. And here on March 12 to 13, 1927, the Makabi Club decided to hold the Lithuanian Ping Pong Championship. Makabi was the pioneer in this historic activity.
The Jewish Makabi Club was established on October 19, 1920 in Lithuania. It was the most affluent of any ethnic minority sports organization. The winners in the ping pong championship they held were Ona Gurvičaitė and Josifas Šimensas.
kauno.diena.lt
Full story here.
On November 23, in celebration of Lithuanian Military Day, long-time friend of the Kaunas Jewish Community Raimundas Kaminskas and the Kaunas Council of Lithuanian Sąjūdis held a commemoration of Lithuanian Jewish soldiers at the Jewish cemetery in the Žaliakalnis neighborhood of Kaunas. On November 23, 1918, Lithuanian prime minister professor Augustinas Voldemaras signed Decree No. 1, establishing the Defense Council and the first regiment of the Lithuanian military. The Lithuanian military was officially re-established on that day.
The Lithuanian embassy to Israel and the Lithuanian Foreign Minister held a conference called Lithuania and Israel: Past, Present, Future at the Peres Peace Center in Tel Aviv on November 24, 2016. The conference discussed Lithuanian Holocaust studies, progress in commemorating victims, current activities of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and Lithuanian citizenship restoration issues.
Lithuanian ambassador to Israel Edminas Bagdonas spoke about increasing partnership between the two countries in his opening speech. He noted Litvaks in both countries are making great contributions to this. Lithuanian ambassador-at-large Dainius Junevičius emphasized the change in attitude towards the country’s history by the public and especially young people. Ronaldas Račinskas, executive director of Lithuania’s International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania, spoke about progress in Lithuanian Holocaust research and commemoration. Vytautas Magnus University lecturer Robert van Voren presented his studies into the Holocaust in Lithuania and spoke about parallels between Lithuania and the Netherlands. Yad Vashem representative Dr. Arkadi Zeltser addressed the state of monuments for commemorating Holocaust victims in Lithuania. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky provided an overview of the current situation and activities of the community. She also field a large number of questions from the audience about the Litvak legacy and heritage in Lithuania.
The fall tennis tournament of the Makabi Lithuanian athletics club was held November 27 at SEB Arena in Vilnius, with 10 athletes (7 male, 3 female). The matches were held with a minus 2 handicap. Danielius Merkinas was the overall winner. In the women’s group promising young professional tennis player Alisa Gaivaronskytė took first place. Valentina Finkelšteinienė and Tatjana Podkolzina took second and third in the women’s.
In the men’s, the brothers Kęstas and Norbertas Faktorovičius took third. The best player among veterans was Grigorij Khiterer, followed closely by Faktorovičius and Eduardas Gurvičius. All contestants received participation prizes and the women got flowers as well. The awards ceremony and dinner followed the competition.
Ana Brodskaja, a member of the Vilnius Jewish Community, passed away on November 27. She was born October 14, 1934. We send our condolences to her friends and family.
Two weeks ago representatives from the United States embassy in Vilnius visited Kaunas. They toured the Seventh Fort and met at the Sugihara House museum with Sugihara Foundation founders Ramūnas Garbaravičius and Egidijus Aleksandravičius, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas and reporter Birutė Garbaravičienė. Ted Janis of the American embassy expressed satisfaction the Kaunas and Lithuanian Jewish Communities, the Kaunas municipality, the Seventh Fort collective and Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon had combined forces to commemorate the Holocaust victims of the Seventh Fort at the mass grave site. They also spoke about the situation regarding Holocaust education in Lithuania, the importance of the Sugihara museum and Jewish life in Kaunas.
Aleksandras Vitkus, Chaim Bargman. Holokaustas Žemaitijoje. – Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijos institutas, 2016. – 488 p.
The book’s authors go into fine detail in their descriptions of the mass murders in Žemaitija (the historical Samogitia, western Lithuania), having collected testimonies from witnesses several years ago. Žemaitija is composed of 6 districts plus the Klaipėda region (historical Memel). They collected information about Kretinga (12 rural districts), Mažeikiai (8 rural districts), Raseiniai (12 rural districts), Tauragė (13 rural districts), Telšiai (9 rural districts) apskritis, the western section of the Šiauliai district (10 rural districts) and the Klaipėda region. The cyclopedia includes about 70 locations where mass murders took place and monuments now stand.
bernardinai.lt
Full story here.
On December 1 the Lithuanian Embassy in the UK in cooperation with University College London invited the public to the annual Litvak Days in London.
The program of the sixth annual Litvak Days included an evening of Yiddish song performed by Polina Shepherd at University College London and a conference on Jewish languages (Yiddish and Hebrew) in Lithuania held at the Lithuanian embassy.
“Lithuania puts a lot effort into promoting and preserving the rich heritage of Lithuanian Jews. We regard the Litvak Days events in London as a platform which facilitates cultural links between the UK’s British, Lithuanian and Jewish communities”, Lithuanian ambassador Asta Skaisgirytė said.
Litvak Days in London were attended by Jonathan Arkush, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews; Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community and Arkady Rzegocki, ambassador of Poland. Dainius Junevičius, ambassador-at-large, conveyed a message from the Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius.
Full story here.
We’ve received some angry emails about the barbed wire which has appeared on the synagogue fence. The main point seems to be that it’s not aesthetic. Of course it’s not. And it doesn’t fit in with our unique synagogue built in 1903 with its architectural authenticity.
Many students and teachers from Vilnius and Lithuania visit our synagogue. Tourists also visit. This year more than 5,000 guests visited the synagogue.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community celebrates all the traditional Jewish holidays at the synagogue. Our guests also celebrate with us, including foreign ambassadors and members of the Lithuanian Government and members of parliament. We are working actively with public organizations in the European Union which are involved in insuring the security of Jewish communities around the world. The security system at the Vilnius Choral Synagogue was set up based on their recommendations and continues to be improved. In Europe armed professional security service personnel guard synagogues.
Because of security concerns, we are asking everyone to adhere to rules for visitors at the Choral Synagogue, which are posted in three languages on the LJC website, lzb.lt, and will be posted at the synagogue in a visible location.
Concerning the barbed wire, we thought about it deeply, and of course we don’t like it, but we decided the most important consideration is safety. For that reason this quick and inexpensive temporary solution was adopted. At the same time, plans for a new fence are being drafted, one that doesn’t clash with integrity of the architectural style but does meet security requirements. The project will be a prolonged process, because we must ask permission from and harmonize the project with the Cultural Heritage Department to remove the old fence and build a new one. We hope to complete it next summer. We are in charge of the synagogue and we are concerned for the safety of worshipers and guests, and we don’t want events to repeat here in Vilnius which have occurred elsewhere. Here are some examples.
In Copenhagen a killer attempted to gain access to a Jewish event with about 80 participants, mainly children. No one knows what would have happened if not for the man who sacrificed his own life to stop the killer.
Over one week last July there were eight attacks on synagogues in Paris. In the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, a crowd of 400 watched as one synagogue was fire-bombed.
During the attacks in Paris a kosher food market was heavily damaged and looted, as was a pharmacy. There were signs with the inscriptions “Death to Jews” and “Cut the throats of the Jews.”
A synagogue in Wuppertal, Germany, which had been rebuilt after being destroyed in Nazi Germany’s Kristallnacht in 1938, was attacked with Molotov cocktails.
In Mumbai (Bombay) in 2008 a group of terrorists walked through the city shooting people in cafés and hotels as they made their way to the Chabad Lubavich Center, where they killed the young rabbi and his pregnant wife.
Once I was flying back from Israel to Vilnius, and my fellow passenger complained the entire trip about how security checks at Ben-Gurion International Airport were an affront to his human dignity. No argument could convince him that it was for his own safety. So we apologize to those who are offended by the barbed-wire fence. I know no arguments will convince them that this is for your own security, just as my fellow passenger on the airplane could not be convinced.
Simas Levinas, chairman
Vilnius Jewish Religious Community
by Efraim Zuroff
Lithuania is a country known for the great reverence and care with which family graves are treated. Earlier this month, on All Saints’ Day, all the cemeteries in the country were full of visitors bringing flowers and lighting memorial candles, and there were huge traffic jams near the larger ones in the major cities. Yet, unfortunately, this praiseworthy sensitivity does not extend to all the graves in Lithuania, and certainly not to many of the more than 200 mass murders sites of Holocaust victims scattered along the length and breadth of the country.
One such neglected mass murder site is that of Vėliučionys on the outskirts of Vilna (Vilnius). I had visited the grave together with Lithuanian writer Rūta Vanagaitė in the summer of 2015 as part of our research on Lithuanian complicity in Holocaust crimes and the sad state of some of the murder sites, for our book, Mūsiškiai, which was published earlier this year.
Although a marker on the road pointed to a mass grave, it was misplaced, there was a large garbage dump right nearby and we never would have found the location without the help of a local resident who often picked mushrooms in the forest and knew where the murder had taken place.
by Geoff Vasil
The “discussion” organized by the Vilnius city council on November 29 on whether to change an earlier decision to name a street after a Lithuanian Nazi leader in the center of Vilnius was an unmitigated disaster.
In fact, there was no evidence the Vilnius municipality organized anything at all. The main force and the only real announcer of the event was Vilnius City Council member Mark Adam Harold, aka Mark Splinter, a British expatriate who has been trying to get the street renamed to no effect for some time. Harold himself denied he was the organizer, but he was the main speaker and spoke bravely and forthrightly in favor of changing the street name.
The whole point seemed to me to be to shame Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius with media attention into relinquishing his blocking the proposed change. Unfortunately only scant and local media attention was shed, the event having been all but suppressed until one day before it happened, leaving interested parties believing they had been excluded from the supposedly public forum.
Readers will recall mayor Remigijus Šimašius promised in writing to specify a location in Vilnius by October 20, 2016, for erecting a monument to Holocaust rescuers. No such site has been named to date. Instead the Vilnius municipal body claims work is going forward behind the scenes on creating the actual monument. One assumes they will place it in a dark forest far from public sight, as things stand now, sometime in the summer of 2047.
Because of the short notice given, the Lithuanian Jewish Community was unable to send a speaker to the Vilnius municipality’s discussion renaming Kazys Škirpa Alley held in Vilnius on November 29. Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky sent a statement which was read out loud at the discussion which follows.
The discussion initiated by the municipality of Vilnius being held today, “Should We Change the Name of Kazys Škirpa Alley?,” might have been called something else. Why not ask the citizens of Lithuania if they want to have public spaces in Vilnius named after suspected Holocaust perpetrators instead?
On the one hand, the very concept of the discussion appears strange. Does Lithuania have no one of whom to be proud, so that we can only lionize a person famous for his anti-Semitic statements, his vision of a Lithuania free of Jews and his idealization of Hitler’s Germany?
On the other hand, for most of society Kazys Škirpa doesn’t signify much, and the forum being held should theoretically at least shed some light on different aspects of his personality. Hopefully historians unafraid to express their positions and not subservient to the right-wing have been invited to participate. Were state institutions which use the word “Jew” in their titles invited to participate? Probably not.
When we marked the 75th anniversary of the Holocaust in Lithuania, there was a conference at the parliament where the historian A. Kasparavičius said all of the “power” in the Provisional Government of Lithuania and the Lithuanian Activist Front was in Škirpa’s hands. The historian noted Škirpa made no attempt to hide his enchantment with Germany and spent more than 10 years there, working as consul and later as military attaché. It was during this period, between 1933 and 1934, when Škirpa’s documents sent from Berlin to Kaunas show how enthralled he was with the policies being carried out by Germany. “He had many problems because of this. President Antanas Smetona even raised the question of relieving K. Škirpa from diplomatic service at the end of the winter in 1939,” Kasparavičius said. But Škirpa wasn’t fired. He created the Activist Front in Berlin. Members of the Front sought to liberate Lithuania from Soviet occupation and organized the uprising in 1941. They foresaw a free Lithuania without Jews. It was Škirpa’s idea to create the Tautinio darbo apsaugos batalionas [TDA, National Labor Security Battalion] who shot thousands of Jews without trial at the Seventh Fort in Kaunas.
After the Soviets occupied Vilnius in 1940, Kazys Škirpa organized the nucleus of the Lithuanian Activist Front in Berlin. LAF propaganda followed official fascist propaganda, which led to Lithuanians’ active involvement in perpetrating the Holocaust. He was named [Lithuanian] prime minister in the uprising of June 23, 1941. In accepting the post of prime minister, Škirpa included in his government Rapolas Skipitis and Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis. His government included 11 ministers: 4 from Vilnius (Vytautas Bulvičius, Vladas Nasevičius, Vytautas Statkus, Jonas Masiliūnas), 6 from Kaunas (Juozas Ambrazevičius, Jonas Matulionis, Adolfas Damušis, Balys Vitkus, Juozas Pajaujis, Vytautas Landsbergis-Žemkalnis), resident of Berlin Rapolas Skipitis, plus comptroller Pranas Vainauskas. [Prevented from leaving Berlin, his minister Juozas Ambrazevičius was appointed acting prime minister in Kaunas.]
The position of the Lithuanian Jewish Community regarding the question posed by the discussion is clear: the name of Kazys Škirpa Alley must be changed. If only to honor all Lithuanian citizens.
As this discussion takes place, the Lithuanian Jewish Community yet again reminds readers there is still no monument to rescuers of Jews, to Righteous Gentiles, in Vilnius. Neither are there public places in the city named after famous Litvaks who contributed to establishing Lithuanian statehood and strengthening democratic institutions. Lithuanian history textbooks still make no mention of 600 years of shared Lithuanian and Litvak history. What sort of priorities is the Lithuanian state setting for itself?
Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman
lzinios.lt
Namajūnai in the Pasvalys region of Lithuania, where Kazys Škirpa was born 121 years ago, has erected a stone monument to commemorate him. Namajūnai is a village with one house right on the Lithuanian border with Latvia. Kazys Škirpa, the first Lithuanian volunteer soldier, politician and public figure, was born there in 1895. He died in 1979. Alderman Algimantas Mašalas of the Saločiai aldermanship where Namajūnai is located said the wise people of Pasvalys had been calling for years for commemoration of the birthplace of their most famous [sic, infamous] native son, Kazys Škirpa.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Stupidity so bravely jumps upon the soap-box in Lithuania now that there is nothing left to be surprised at, except perhaps that there are people still surprised at stupidity. But there are worse things than stupidity. This happens when politicians instead of making a decision attempt to hide cowardly behind political discussions.
This happened in Vilnius yesterday when the city municipality held a discussion called “Should We Change the Name of Kazys Škirpa Alley?” The municipality announced the discussion was being held because “arguments have arisen in society about the name of Škirpa Alley.”
What can this sort of political discussion change, except that Lithuania as a European state will attract greater shame? Do we really need to discuss whether only an anti-Semite who personally shot innocent people is bad or whether those who inspired him to the act might also be bad, in the 21st century in Vilnius, on whose city limits is the Ponar mass grave where all the Jews of the city were shot?
It’s beyond absurd to hold this sort of political discussion. Colonel Kazys Škirpa began his career as a hero, he was the first volunteer soldier, and later became ambassador to Berlin. Kazys Škirpa would have remain a hero forever if he hadn’t been the leader [sic, founder] of the anti-Semitic Lithuanian Activist Front which called for the murder of Jews.
No political discussion can deny this fact. As with other facts in our painful 20th century history.
Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius instead of making a decision to change the name of the street is hiding behind a political discussion by several people especially selected by the city. This draws 21st century Lithuania into yet another shameful conflict. With our own history just as much with the values which Lithuania adopted entering the European Union and NATO.
Commentary broadcast on Lithuanian National Radio.
by Sergejus Kanovičius
For our freedom and yours, we heard this motto during the independence movement in 1990 inviting everyone–Lithuanians, us Jews, and others–to rally to fight for independence. And we rallied, believing that in that Lithuania–the Lithuania of today–we would all be equal, and not just before God. We thought we’d be equal before memory, and before our history. As brothers and sisters. Are we equal in memory? Are we equal before history?
What about today, when discussion has come up whether it is worth honoring with a street name a volunteer soldier who fought for Lithuanian independence, the first to raise the tricolor on the castle tower almost a century ago, a man who commanded a different sort of movement, one which systematically and openly called for freedom only for some, before and after the June Uprising.
His ideology and that of his organization, the Lithuanian Activist Front, was inseparable from that of the battle for independence. For independence without Jews–without me, without my father, my grandparents and of those for whom there are annual bureaucratic gatherings to feel ashamed beside the larger pits, or beside those for whom the television cameras await.
by Robert van Voren
In the summer of 2015 Vilnius municipality removed four Soviet statutes on the Green Bridge linking the suburb Šnipiskes with the city center. The statutes represented farmers, students, industrial workers and “defenders of peace”, depicting Soviet soldiers who liberated the city from the Nazis in 1944 and subsequently imposed the second Soviet occupation. The statutes were a prime example of Soviet realism and for Soviet standards quite innocent: there was little heroism to be seen, no images of political leaders like Lenin or Stalin, just examples of four classes of Soviet citizens being part of Soviet life. Yet for Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius they depicted a lie and for that reason should not be retained: “The statues represent a lie. Their heroic portrayal of the Soviet people – that is all a lie … The statues are a mockery of the real people who had to live during the Soviet period.”
I remember some 6-7 years ago an exhibition of Soviet design was held in one of Vilnius’ museums. My stepson was then a young adolescent, and walked around in a world that had ceased to be and images of which had almost disappeared from every day life. A brand new Moskvich was standing in one of the halls, household tools that were dysfunctional yet in a strange way beautiful, and in one corner a television screen showed a clip of residents receiving their brand new flats in Fabioniškės. People were smiling, dancing, happily receiving their key and entering the flat for the first time. “That is all fake, right?” my son asked, “of course they were not happy, they are acting.”
The fact is that people were happy, very happy even, finally being able to move in a brand new flat, often coming from a noisy crammed kommunalka, and have their own private environment. What is a lie is to pretend that people were not happy. Soviet life was maybe much more grey than life in an open society based on the rule of law, but millions of Lithuanians led happy lives, even if alone because they knew no other.
Vilnius City Council member Mark Adam Harold is part of a municipal event at the Vilnius Old Town Hall for Tuesday, November 29, 2016, to seek public comment on a proposal to rename the street named after Lithuanian Holocaust collaborator and chief of the Lithuanian Activist Front based in Berlin in 1941, Kazys Škirpa.
Harold’s facebook page contains the instructions: “If you would like the opportunity to speak during the public forum at Rotušė, Didzioji g. 31, on November 29th at 18:00, please tick this box. The first twenty applicants will be given one minute each from the podium.”
A separate post by a South African Litvak living in the United States contains more detail:
“220,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered at the instigation of Škirpa and his cronies. The country of Lithuania is littered with honors for Škirpa, and for other murderers of Jews. Multi-year efforts to have a main Street in Lithuania’s capital city of Vilnius, currently named named to honor the Škirpa, is now culminating in public hearings by the Vilnius City Council.
“The Vilnius City Council was unable to decide for themselves if honoring Jew murderers is appropriate.
“Here is a link to a comment form where you can provide your opinion to the Vilnius City Council. It is in English, you just need to answer and hit submit. Please try to be somewhat respectful:
The event is advertised as a discussion with Vytautas Landsbergis, Sergey Kanovich, Darius Udrys, Lithuanian historians and others. Public comment will be sought afterwards. Conspicuously absent from the speakers’ roster: any representative of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, the International Commission on Assessing the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania or even Vilnius mayor Remgijus Šimašius, who hasn’t kept his earlier commitments in writing to name a site in Vilnius by October 20 for erecting a statue to commemorate the heroes of World War II in Lithuania, those who rescued Jews. The Lithuanian Jewish Community is to issue a statement to be read out loud at the event.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites members of the public and representatives of interested institutions to submit their comments per the form linked above and to attend the event.
More event information here.
Škirpa with Hitler celebrating the latter’s 50th birthday
April 21, 1939
Firefighters have extinguished fires in Israel’s third-largest city Haifa which forced tens of thousands of residents to flee their homes. Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld reported there were another 14 small wildfires still burning in locations around the country Friday. He said residents of a settlement in a forest near Jerusalem had been evacuated overnight. Five people have been arrested in connection with the fires. They began three days ago at the Neve Shalom community near Jerusalem. Dry winds spread the fire at locations around the outskirts of Jerusalem. The northern limits of the city of Zikhron Ya’akov also saw flames. No victims have been reported there but at least 100 homes have been damaged. National leaders have raised the possibility the fires were started intentionally and constitute acts of terrorism.
The patroness of the Lithuanian Youth Days taking place next year on June 23 to 25 will be St. Edith Stein. Who was she? What can we learn from her?
On October 11, 1988, Pope John Paul II canonized her. Edith was born October 12, 1891, in Breslau (now Wrocław), the eleventh child (seventh of surviving children) born to the affluent Jewish family of Zygird and Augusta. Jews celebrated Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, that day. Many say this foreshadowed the rest of her life. When she was 2 her father passed away. Her mother was forced to take over the family business and take care of her many children herself. Augusta was very religious, a hard worker and strong-willed, and Edith followed her example her entire life. Truth be told, her mother wasn’t able to impart faith to her children; when Edith was fourteen she stopped believing.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
