The director of the Goodwill Foundation and members of the American Jewish Committee are grateful to have had the opportunity to meet with Lithuanian parliamentary speaker Loreta Graužinienė.
Events to commemorate the victims of the Lietūkis garage massacre took place in Kaunas on the last, very hot weekend in June. Seventy-five years have passed since this atrocity. On June 24 we remembered and honored the victims of the mass murder before a monument set up at the site of pogrom by the Kaunas Jewish Community 10 years ago. A commemorative concert was held at the Kaunas State Philharmonic on June 26 with a special program by the male vocal artists Quorum. Members of the Kaunas Jewish Community were joined at the events by Kaunas residents and representatives of social organizations, the municipality and the Catholic Church. Raimundas Kaminskas and Julija Iskevičienė, representatives of the Kaunas section of Sąjūdis [Lithuanian independence movement] expressed sorrow, solidarity and the hope the brutality and the mass murders would never happen again. The priest Robertas Pukenis and deputy mayor of Kaunas Vasiliy Popov expressed the same sentiments. Scouts from the Kaunas area honored the victims with a Lithuanian folk song.
Dear Friends,
Together with the entire Jewish people and, indeed, the world, we are in mourning today for one of the greatest writers, teachers, and human rights activists of our age. Elie Wiesel not only survived the Shoah–he transcended its horrors and became the voice first of its survivors and then of the conscience of humankind.
Below are my recollections of, and tribute and farewell to, my friend and mentor for more than 55 years, published in Tablet Magazine. The link is:
May his memory be a blessing and a source of strength to his beloved wife Marion, his son Elisha, daughter in law Lynn, his grandchildren, his stepdaughter Jennifer, the entire Jewish people and to us all.
Menachem Rosensaft
Arab terrorists overtake family traveling in their car and open fire, killing Michael Marc of Otniel, wounding three other family members.
One person was killed and three others wounded in a shooting attack at the Adorayim Junction south of Hevron in Judea.
The fatality has been identified as 40-year-old Michael “Micki” Mark rom the nearby town of Otniel, who was traveling in his car with his family when it was targeted.
His wife Chavi was seriously wounded in the attack, and was evacuated to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital with multiple gunshot wounds to her upper body.
Full story here.
Dear members,
This year the Lithuanian Jewish Community will be actively involved in the European Jewish Culture Day program and is organizing different events to present the Jewish languages and Jewish cultural heritage to the public. European Jewish Culture Day will happen September 4, 2016.
The Bagel Shop Café will have on offer Jewish culinary heritage and is asking you to recall dishes made by your parents and grandparents, to find handwritten recipes (including in Yiddish) and to share them. We will prepare the best examples and offer them to the public during the event, and publish the recipes and descriptions.
by Geoff Vasil
“Don’t get too close!” an attractive and sunburned young Lithuanian warned at the edge of a large pit just behind what was the Great Synagogue of Vilnius. He’s friendly and it quickly becomes clear he’s the lead archaeologist on the dig, but he’s just as quick to point out he’s formally the lead archaeologist, but Dr. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford in Connecticut is the real force behind the whole initiative.
Mantas Daubaras is doing his doctoral thesis at the Lithuanian Institute of History on a Neolithic site far to the west in Lithuania. He has no personal connection to Jewish Vilna and approaches it as he would any site, dispassionately.
“Yesterday we found what we think is the ritual bath,” he explains, pointing to a small hole in the top of what looks like a vaulted brick ceiling. They sent a camera in to take a look and found a large space terminated by rubble and fill. Does it connect to the Great Synagogue? He doesn’t know yet, but it looks as if it extends right up to the line where they think the back wall of the synagogue once stood.
Canada’s young prime minister Justin Trudeau announced the country would send NATO troops to Latvia to counter alleged Russian aggression. He made the announcement on the eve of the national Canada Day celebration in the context of a tripartite summit with the presidents of the United States and Mexico. President Obama earlier at that summit urged Canada to make a greater contribution to NATO forces, saying “the world needs more Canada.” Canada plans to send more than 500 troops for a semi-permanent rotational deployment. The Russian embassy in Ottawa calls the move “Cold War saber rattling” and a waste of money and resources.
NGO Monitor reports on a vote in the Dutch parliament to end funding to NGOs which support the boycott of, divestment from or economic sanction of the state of Israel.
On June 16, a majority of the Dutch parliament demanded that the government review and halt, as soon as possible, all direct and indirect funding to radical NGOs which support BDS against Israel.
NGO Monitor played a decisive role in these events, which marked the first time any European framework has imposed oversight on NGO funding from a government body. In March, NGO Monitor’s staff traveled to the Hague and met with a group of Dutch MPs from different parties to present information on government grants to political NGOs. This began a process that led to the vote to end funding to NGOs which support BDS.
Full article in Dutch here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community is tremendously grateful to Judah Passow for his initiative in bringing the 350-year-old Torah scroll back to Vilnius.
Those assembled at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius June 27 waited in anticipation of something extraordinary: for the carrying in of a 350-year-old Torah scroll, from the period when the Vilna Gaon walked among us, a witness to the Vilnius of the 17th century, experiencing all the passages and changes together with the Jews, used for innumerable bar mitzvah ceremonies until it ended up in the Vilnius ghetto during World War II, and miraculously survived the Holocaust.
In 1960 professor Passow of the University of Philadelphia in the United States came to Vilnius after receiving support from the Rockefeller Foundation to commemorate Jewish communal life behind the iron curtain. Jews in Vilnius asked him to take with him one of two Vilnius ghetto Torah scrolls to survive the Holocaust, uncertain about the future of Jewish life in the Soviet Union. That’s how the Torah entered into the Passow family and was used in three bar mitzvahs. The family protected the scroll for 56 years. Last year the professor’s son, London-based photojournalist Judah Passow, came to Vilnius for an exhibition of his photographic works and spoke with LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky. This year he’s come back with the Torah scroll with a silver ornament his mother made.
The concert by klezmer band Mazel Tov from Cluj, Romania, June 29 at the Lithuanian Jewish Community was a great success with a large turnout and heavy applause. Romanian ambassador to Lithuania Dan Adrian Balanescu welcomed the audience and noted Romania’s current presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. In May IHRA member-state representatives met in Bucharest and adopted a definition of anti-Semitism. The ambassador said Romania’s presidency will continue to focus on fighting Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.
The concert in Vilnius was held on the 75th anniversary of the massacre of Jews in Iaşi, Romania, the largest mass murder of Jews in Romania. About 14,000 Jews were murdered. Before World War II some 800,000 Jews lived in Romania. After the war there were 400,000. Today there are 4,000.
The Kaunas and Šiauliai Jewish Communities thank Goodwill Foundation chairs Faina Kukliansky and Rabbi Andrew Baker as well as Vytautas Višinskis and Indrė Rutkauskaitė for their wonderfully organized and productive meeting of the Goodwill Foundation,
May he live in health to 120!
Levas Jagniatinskis and his family were active participants in the reestablishment of the Lithuanian and Vilnius Jewish Communities around the time of Lithuanian independence from the Soviet Union. In 1992 he was elected to the Community’s Council of World War II Veterans and worked with recompense, putting finances in order and organizing events with the veteran’s council and the executive board of the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Those first years were financially hard for the Community, and so he donated his car three times per week winter and summer, parking it in the courtyard of the LJC for use by the Community. He was very active in preparing documents for the Claims Conference and tried to find greater funding for the Community. His son was one of the organizers of the Community’s union of scholars, Vilnor, and later became its director. When he left, the union stopped operating. The family’s third generation, his granddaughters, began attending children’s events put on by the Community, and now, in adulthood, continue their activities, trying to mitigate the losses from the Holocaust.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community announces with deep sorrow the loss of Michailas Sverdlovas, a member of the LJC Social Center, on June 28. He was born on February 15, 1927. Our deepest condolences to his family members, friends and loved ones.
The Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum is proud to present an exhibit of sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973). The sculptures are on loan from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Chicago Art Institute and museums located around the world. The exhibit opens June 1.
Museum director Markas Zingeris said organizing the exhibit was fraught with difficulties. “This exhibit, dedicated to the 125th birthday of the sculptor, was carefully planned over several years. To put it playfully, it would have been easier to get the president of France here than to borrow sculptures from Paris museums. First we had to convince representatives of the Pompidou Center and the Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme to consent to the transport of 5 sculptures and 2 paintings by Lipchitz. Once we had agreement, we had to ensure proper conditions for transporting the art works, since some of the sculptures are made of very fragile materials,” Zingeris recalled.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Panevėžys Jewish Community express our deepest condolences to Tamara Antanaitienė over the sudden and unexpected death of her beloved husband Tautvilas Antanaitis.
“If we want to comprehend why some Lithuanians actively aided the Nazis in murdering Jews, we must first understand instead of condemning, moralizing or getting carried away by emotion.” This statement by Alfredas Rukšėnas, an historian studying the Holocaust in Lithuania and a researcher at the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania, might shock you. But in the scientifici discipline of history, as in criminology, the most important problem is to understand the criminal’s motivations and external factors which give rise to the event. And the motivations which caused good-hearted young men to murder unarmed people, Jewish children, women and the elderly, could be horribly simple.
Full piece in Lithuanian here.
Vilnius, June 27, BNS–A 350-year-old Torah scroll used in Jewish religious services in the Vilnius ghetto has returned to Vilnius. British photojournalist Judah Passow decided to turn the scroll over to the Lithuanian Jewish Community for use in the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius.
“What’s important is not the [scroll itself], but that he decided to give the Torah to our synagogue. The Torah belonged to his family, it was safeguarded during the war and the entire time. Boys became men during bar mitzvah in front of this Torah and began to read from this Torah, so it is a great honor for us,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky told BNS. According to Jewish religious tradition, Torah scrolls must be written by hand. Kukliansky said this Torah will replace the one currently being used, which is worn out.
Passow, whose roots are in Ukraine and Poland, told how Lithuanian Jewish community representatives gave the scroll to his father, a professor at an American university in Philadelphia, almost six decades ago when he visited Vilnius in 1960.
Police protect wounded skinheads. Photo courtesy FOX news
At least ten people were wounded, two with life-threatening wounds, during a neo-Nazi rally in front of the state capitol building in Sacramento, California Sunday.
A white nationalist group called the Traditionalist Worker Party and a neo-Nazi group calling themselves the Golden State Skinheads assembled just before noon local time for the march they planned to make across the capitol grounds, but were met by counter-protestors carrying anti-Nazi signs.
Fights broke out before the planned march began and lasted for about 20 minutes despite a heavy police presence, including officers on horseback. Armed battles were conducted with knives and baseball bats leaving at least seven stabbing victims, two of them in grave condition, and a total of 9 hospitalizations. One of the neo-Nazis was allegedly stabbed in a major artery and might not survive.
by Lee Gancman
KRASNAYA SLOBODA, Azerbaijan –“Not good,” Rabbi Yona Yaakobi says in Hebrew, expressing his distaste while pointing to a grave featuring a statue of a man who died in 1988.
Carved in white marble, the nearly life-size statue of the deceased portrays him staring ahead, cane in hand, flanked by two pots of artificial flowers. Just below, on a black tombstone, is inscribed the man’s name, date of birth and the day he died in Hebrew. But lower it is engraved again much more prominently in Russian.
“All of this is influenced by the Muslims who got it from the Russians,” Yaakobi continues.
Although this particular grave is among the more ostentatious in the three cemeteries of Krasnaya Sloboda, an all-Jewish town in the mountainous north of Azerbaijan, it is surrounded by hundreds of others showing lifelike pictures of the dead in various poses, sometimes bordering on the absurd.
“I knew all of these people personally. I know the story of each one of them,” Yaakobi laments as he strolls past a large tombstone depicting a middle-aged man in a business suit reclining on a throne-like chair. “This guy for instance went fishing one day, and when he cast his line, it ended up hitting some wires, he got electrocuted and died.”
