An exhibition of the famous Israeli photographer Zif Koren pictures is opened in Vilnius city municipality.
Passover is the major Jewish spring holiday celebrated in remembrance of the Jews’ liberation from slavery in Egypt. One often hears the name “Pesakh” used interchangeably for the same holiday, a word which, not coincidentally, refers to the Christian holiday of Easter in different forms in different European languages and cultures. Pesakh means “to pass over,” hence the English name of the holiday, Passover. In Hebrew and Aramaic there is another closely related word which sounds almost the same and means “I will have mercy, I will have compassion.” Both meanings come together in the Old Testament Book of Exodus, where the Jewish children are “passed over” by the angel of death and do not suffer the fate of the Egyptian children, demonstrating the mercy of the Most High.
Passover is first of all a holiday for teaching children Jewish history and culture. The Passover Seder is a dinner where the two prerequisite Passover offerings are savored: matzo bread, and bitter herbs. The matzo reminds us the Jews fleeing Egypt had no time to wait for their bread to rise, and the bitter herbs are tasted to remind us of the bitterness of slavery during the time of the Jews’ sojourn in Egypt.
There are special rules which apply when Passover begins on the Sabbath, as it does this year, on the evening of April 3. The holiday lasts for eight days.
“Jaunystės Vilnius,” or “Vilnius of Youth,” tells the story of a city in a rural Polish province during the period between the two world wars which had its own rhythms of daily life and which has been completely forgotten in contemporary legends. The filmmakers have attempted to bring to lost Yiddish-speaking Vilne to today’s viewers.
Newspaper pages in five languages and archival footage tell the story of Vilnius in the period from 1925 to 1939 as residents of the city from that time remember their schools, their crushes, their dates and their families. They do so through the medium of their native Yiddish language. Strange details from that landscape emerge, such as the only Jewish girl on her street who ate bread with butter everyday, arousing jealousy…
Directed by Vaidotas Reivytis
Screenplay and scenes by Jonas Morkus
The filmmakers have also made four documentary films in a series called Saulėlydis Lietuvoje [Sunset in Lithuania] about the history of Lithuanian Jews.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community, the Vilnius Jewish Community and the
Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium send their greetings out to everyone on this
Passover and
invite YOU to a Seder
to begin at 6:00 P.M., April 3, 2015
at the Radisson Blue Hotel Lietuva at Konstitucijos no. 20 in Vilnius, Lithuania
Alanas Levinas will be master of cermemonies with performances by the
students of Sholem Aleichem and the Fayerlakh ensemble.
You may buy tickets from Julija Lipšic in room 206 at the LJC at Pylimo 4
in Vilnius, telephone 8 659 52 604, and from Ruth Reches, Hebrew teacher
at the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium, by contacting her by telephone at 8
686 89 530.
Tickets for adults are 15 euros and for children aged 3-15 just 10 euros.
Tickets will be on sale from March 23 till March 31 exclusively.
The number of tickets is limited!
Dear Friends,
You are kindly and cordially invited to meet film director from Australia
Rod Freedman
Who will be presenting his documentary “Uncle Chatzkel”
In Vilnius Jewish Public Library, Gedimino pr. 24,
on March 30, at 3 PM
(Please mind that screening of the same documentary with Lithuanian sound and communication providing interpretation services with Rod Freedman will be held on the same day at 6 PM)
Film director from Australia Rod Freedman presents his documentary “Uncle Chatzkel” in Vilnius Jewish Public Library.
On Monday, March 30, 2015, at 3 PM guests of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library will have a rare opportunity to meet a famous film director and producer from Australia Rod Freedman – an independent director, producer and executive producer whose documentaries have won many Australian and international awards and screened in dozens of film festivals. Rod is particularly interested in stories about people and their life’s journeys. Rod’s most recent film as producer is ONCE MY MOTHER, showing in the 2015 Vilnius International Film Festival in the ‘Lithuanians Abroad’ program. Rod’s grandparents were Jewish Lithuanian.
The deputy CEO of the World Jewish Congress, Maram Stern, was in Turkey this week to take part in the re-opening ceremony of the Great Synagogue of Edirne, which was restored for $2.5 million and is the first synagogue to open in Turkey in two generations. Guest of honor at the ceremony was Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç.
Turkey’s Jewish community head, İshak İbrahimzadeh, attended the morning service conducted by Davud Azuz, who had led the last service at the synagogue 46 years ago. An estimated 250 people attended the service in the temple, which has a capacity of 1,200. “I would like to thank those who contributed,” Azuz said, referring to the community effort to re-open the Great Synagogue.
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani sent a letter to the leaders of the P5+1 group, including US President Barack Obama, as negotiations contuned in Switzerland over a possible agreement aimed at preventing Iran from building an atomic bomb
The content of the letters was not known, but Rouhani also phoned the leaders of Russia, China, Britain and France, his office said.
“We are acting in the national and international interest and we should not lose this exceptional opportunity,” he reportedly told British Prime Minister David Cameron by phone, the presidency said.
In testimony before a key US Congressional committee on Tuesday, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder warned that radical Islam was fueling the flames of a new anti-Semitism engulfing Europe, and criticized the United States for failing to lead the fight to extinguish the threat.
Appearing on behalf of WJC – representing more than 100 Jewish communities worldwide – before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, Lauder said: “In order to defeat this new flame of radical Islamic terror and survive, the United States must lead. The United States can and must speak loudly and clearly to condemn this evil for what it is – the radical Islamic hatred of Jews.”
The Grand Edirne Synagogue in Turkey that went through renovation from 2010 until the beginning of 2015 with funding from General Directorate for Foundations will open its doors again on March 26th after a special ceremony. Jewish community head, İshak İbrahimzadeh, who visited the synagogue before the opening ceremony, said the opening of the restored synagogue was a milestone that made him very happy.
Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç and Turkey’s chief rabbi, İshak Haleva, will attend the opening, along with many other Jewish community members from both Turkey and abroad. Faina Kukliansky Lithuanian Jewish (Litvaks) Community chairperson was invited byDeputy Prime Minister of Turkey H.E. Bülent Arınç to take part in the ceremony marking the reopening of the historic Grand Synagogue of Edirne, a town known as Adrianople in ancient times; became the second capital of the Ottoman Empire in the 14th century A.D. before Istanbul, and it preserved its importance as the most prominent imperial city in the Balkan domains for centuries to come. Jews lived for at least twenty centuries in Edirne, a city that once was the center of Jewish life in the Balkans Region. However, today there aren’t any Jews living in the city.
The Grand Synagogue in Edirne was built during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II by the architectural model of the famous Leopoldstädter Tempel in Vienna in Moorish style and opened to worship in 1907. It was known as the second largest synagogue in Europe at that time. However, it fell into disrepair in the following decades and finally abandoned in 1983.
by Dovid Katz
We have this week made available two more videos from late 1990s expeditions to record the language, memories and world view of the last Yiddish-speaking Litvaks in Belarus. These videos are of return trips in 1998 to friends made in previous years, this time accompanied by the famed Lithuanian documentary film maker and Holocaust educator Saulius Beržinis, founder of the Independent Holocaust Archive of Lithuania.
One video is of the famous Litvak Yiddish author, Hirsh Reles (1913—2004), a native of Tsháshnik (Časniki, northeastern Belarus). Speaking in his apartment in Minsk, he talks about his father, Leybe, of Kovno (Kaunas) who himself dreamt of becoming a writer and moved to Vilna for that purpose. When things didn’t work out, he relocated northeastward to Tsháshnik, where he worked as a teacher, and was the one and only misnáged (non-hosed, Litvak in the popular religious sense) in town. He was trusted to read the Torah in the synagogue (it’s the same for both) but not to lead in prayers, because there are differences between the Litvak and Hasidic rites (even today here in Vilnius…).
>>Letter from High Representative,Vice-President Federica Mogherini
Dear Friends,
Please find attached a letter from High Representative/Vice-President Federica Mogherini addressed to Moshe Kantor, following their meeting and correspondence.
The letter suggests that she will work closely with First Vice President of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, and coordinate their efforts in the fight against Antisemitism.
We have been informed by the cabinet of Commissioner Jourova that the Commission’s initiatives to fight Antisemitism will include the following key elements:
Almost certainly, what happened yesterday in the White House briefing room is provoking joy among Palestinians, concern if not fear in Israel, and urgent “taking of views,” as the British put it, in foreign ministries worldwide.
For the first time in decades, Washington is not reflexively and unconditionally standing with Israel.
As a matter of fact, the Obama administration is explicitly doing the opposite.
Repeatedly, President Obama’s aptly-named spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters Thursday the U.S. is “rethinking” and “re-evaluating,” and “reconsidering” its decades-long, unwavering support of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The days of Washington automatically supporting Israel at the UN, striving to protect it from international isolation may be over: “That foundation has been eroded,” said Earnest. “It means that our policy decisions need to be reconsidered.”
And the president’s spokesman was happy to provide everyone with the reason for America’s change of heart: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pre-election declaration earlier this week that shattered, finally, the idea of “the peace process.”
I use those quotation marks deliberately. The peace process has been a fiction for many years, if it was ever real at all.
But it was a fiction nearly everyone had an interest in perpetuating: negotiations leading to “two states, living side by side in peace and security.”
Opening of the Embassy of Israel in Vilnius and Political consultations between two foreign ministries, led by political directors Rolandas Kačinskas and Alon Ushpiz, are signs of solid and profound relations that Lithuania and Israel enjoy today, according to Lithuania’s MFA.
Both countries are determined to promote common goals and to further strengthen bilateral relations in areas of foreign and security policy, economy and trade, science and education, people-to-people contacts, culture, tourism and others.
Rolandas Kačinskas, political director at the Lithuanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, shares his insights on the prospects of Lithuanian-Israeli cooperation.
Dovid Katz’s new article (in Yiddish) on the differing Jewish names for the city Vilnius, and the cultural origin and background of each, has just appeared in connection with an old bookbinder’s ‘spine stuffing card’ made from title pages containing all three Jewish traditional names. The article points out that Vilna Jewish books started using a fourth name for the city in the final pre-Holocaust years.
The article, whose Yiddish title translates “Vilno, Vilne, Vilna — the three together in a Vilna bookbinder’s hands: three (factually four) names for the city used by its own Jewish residents”
is at:
by Geoff Vasil
Afunny thing happened on the way to the neo-Nazi march. I saw a man walking towards me, and thought I knew him. Apparently he thought the same thing, and we both said hello in Lithuanian as we passed one another. As I pondered how we might know each other, it came to me: I had seen him at an earlier neo-Nazi march, probably the one in Kaunas a month earlier. He thought I was a fellow marcher, apparently, or at least not an enemy to the cause.
But what is their cause? What does staking out a Lithuanian place in history, or taking pride in a mythical genetic complement, or taking pride in a language to which they have made zero contributions actually mean?
I was in a bit of a hurry. The reason was, besides leaving the house a little late, I wasn’t sure exactly when the march was supposed to start. In Kaunas the Lithuanian news portal Delfi.lt (a trans-Baltic phenomenon with URLs made with TLDs for Latvia and Estonia as well) had either been a victim or perpetrator/purveyor of disinformation (and is there a difference?) and had misdirected both the fascist youth and their would-be opposition to attend a march there on February 15th instead of the usual February 16th, the pre-World War II day of Lithuanian independence which, paradoxically, was called and is called the Day of the Restoration of Lithuania, a reference to the mediaeval Grand Duchy thereof rather than to the pre-World War II state of the same name made into a Soviet republic in 1940 and then again in 1945. Is the third time a charm?
