Lithuanian Jewish Community

Purim 2015 reflects political struggles in Israel

This year’s Purim falls against a background of no little political drama, internationally and domestically.

The holiday, which celebrates the biblical story of Esther and the survival of the Jewish people during the Persian exile falls this year on Wednesday night and Thursday, except in Jerusalem where it takes place on Thursday night and Friday.

But while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is away in Washington battling Israel’s ancient Persian foe, various religious and political struggles back home continue apace.

2015-03-05

First poll since Netanyahu’s speech still shows Zionist Union leading Read more: First poll since Netanyahu’s speech still shows Zionist Union leading

Even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday speech at the US Congress, rival Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union party would still be the largest Knesset faction following the March 17 elections, according to a Channel 2 poll published Wednesday, the first since the Israeli leader returned from Washington.

Based on the survey — conducted among 790 respondents with a 3.5% margin of error — the Zionist Union would receive 24 seats, while the Likud would gain 23.

The Joint (Arab) List places third with 13 seats, Yesh Atid and Jewish Home follow with 12 each, and Kulanu with 8. Yisrael Beytenu and Meretz, as well as ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, would all gain 6 seats, while Eli Yishai’s new Yachad party manages to just cross the electoral threshold with 4 Knesset seats.

JCL Purim

You are invited to the Vilnius Choral Synagogue for Purim, including
readings from the Book of Esther.

Wednesday, March 4: Fast of Esther from the morning till 6:44 P.M.

Evening prayer and reading from the Book of Esther: 6:44 P.M.

Thursday, March 5: Morning prayer and reading from Book of Esther at 8:30 A.M.

2015-03-02

YIDDISH LANGUAGE PROGRAM RESUMING AT THE JEWISH COMMUNITY!

THURSDAYS 3 PM (1500), STARTING 12 MARCH 2015

The 16th annual cycle of the Vilna Yiddish Reading Circle (which doubles as an intermediate-level class) starts next Thursday March 12th 3 PM sharp (1500) at the Jewish Community of Lithuania, Pylimo 4, Vilnius, upstairs seminar room.

Everyone welcome, admission free. Only Yiddish is spoken, but non-speakers are always invited to come and listen (hearing Yiddish is good for your health!). The project is carried forward in memory of three of its stalwarts of the first decade and a half: Dr. Sheine Sideraite, Dr. Izraelis Lempertas (Yisroel Lempert) and Mr. Meilach Stalevich.

The program is led by Dr. Dovid Katz, who founded it at the Jewish Community in September 1999, and was professor at Vilnius University from 1999 to 2010, after many years of teaching at Oxford and a stint at Yale (information on his works in Yiddish studies at: www.dovidkatz.net).
Additional classes and seminars may be added in due course.
EVERYBODY WELCOME!

2015-03-02

Limmud 2015 gallery

2015-02-28

Opening of exhibition “ORT in Lithuania: Prepared for Life”

February 10, 2015, M. and K. Petrauskas Museum of Lithuanian Music

The Kaunas branch of the M. and K. Petrauskas Museum of Lithuanian Music (K. Petrausko street no. 31) invites the public to attend the opening of an exhibit called “Prepared for Life: the ORT in Lithuania” at 4:00 P.M. on March 3. The exhibit illustrates the activities of the ORT organization in Kaunas including arts and crafts courses, daily school life, student-teacher activities, snapshots from school life, reminiscences of classmates and teachers, the importance of having a profession in the ghettos during the Holocaust and ORT activities around the world and in Lithuania today. The exhibit will run until April 4. Admission to the opening ceremony is free.

The mobile exhibition in Lithuanian and English was prepared by the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum and the World ORT with the cooperation of the Lithuanian Central State Archive and is dedicated to the history of the ORT as it operated in Lithuania between the world wars. The ORT is a Jewish educational and training organization which continues to operate today around the world.

2015-02-27

Condolences

Our deepest condolences to Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania chair,
attorney Faina Kukliansky, and to her extended family, upon the death of
her beloved mother, Mrs. Klara Toides-Kuklianskienė.
Mrs. Toides-Kuklianskienė was born in Šiauliai, Lithuania in 1930, and
lived and worked in Vilnius. She spent the last decades of her
life in Israel.

Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania,
Vilnius Jewish Community,
Religious Jewish Community of Lithuania,
Religious Jewish Community of Vilnius,
The Good Will Foundation

2015-02-27

Yiddish mini-museum of old Jewish Vilna

Latest addition to our Yiddish mini-museum of old Jewish Vilna (50th artefact): an advertisement from 8 August 1919 inviting parents to enroll their children in the Hebrew high school at Zaválne 4 (the gymnasium founded by Dr. L. Epstein in 1915). That is the building we all know here today as Pylimo 4, headquarters of the Jewish Community of Lithuania Lietuvos žydų bendruomenė). At that particular stage of the Hebrew movement in Vilna, the street name retained its final Yiddish shewa vowel (later to be hebraicized to -a).

More at defendinghistory.com

2015-02-23

The Position of the Lithuanian Jewish Community on the Slogan Chanted by the Lithuanian Union of Nationalist Youth, “Lithuania for Lithuanians”

The Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community, deeply upset and concerned by recent anti-Semitic attacks in the Kingdom of Denmark and France and by the rise in neo-Nazi tendencies all over Europe, calls upon the government institutions of the Lithuanian state to take stock of the situation in Lithuania at the current time. By identifying the problem of ethnic hate early, we can prevent possible tragedy in the future.

The slogan chanted by the Lithuanian Union of Nationalist Youth, “Lithuania for Lithuanians,” although it might have made some sense in the past in a specific historical context, should have no place today in the modern person’s worldview. The negative subtext of the slogan–animosity towards other ethnicities–is obvious.

2015-02-19

Israeli Settlers Use Nazi Imagery Against Jews

Far-right group invokes notorious Goebbels propaganda film in new video

By Menachem Z. Rosensaft

Screengrab from ‘The Eternal Jew,’ a video posted online by the Samaria Citizens Committee. (YouTube)

A hideous video titled “The Eternal Jew” was posted on YouTube this weekend, and, as of this writing, has been viewed almost 100,000 times. The video, created by the Samaria Citizens Committee, a far-right settler group in Israel, is an obscene, crudely anti-Semitic defamation straight out of the Nazi Jew-baiter-in-chief Julius Streicher’s notorious pornographic tabloid, Der Stürmer.

2015-02-19

February 16 Lithuanian Independence Day Nationalist March in Kaunas Fails

Following what appeared to be a series of diversionary actions, an annual march by Lithuanian nationalists, xenophobes and neo-Nazis through the center of Lithuania’s second largest city, Kaunas, appears to have failed this year.

In earlier years the number of marchers easily reached 1,000. This year barely 300 turned out, and the march began at least an hour and a half later than planned.

The reason for the small turnout seems to be a series of false reports in the mainstream and internet social media by the nationalists themselves, apparently designed to throw off the small but equally determined mix of local and foreign observers and protestors who come each year to document and oppose the hate event.

2015-02-18

Limmud Keshet 2015 February 20-22

>>Program of the event

2015-02-18

Run-Up to the 16 Feb. 2015 Neo-Nazi March in Central Kaunas

Baltic Nazi-Glorifying Marching Season Underway

COME JOIN US IN KAUNAS, MONDAY 16 FEB. at 1 PM (1300), AT RAMYBĖS PARK, TO MONITOR, SILENTLY PROTEST, & REMEMBER THE CITY’S MORE THAN 30,000 MURDERED JEWISH CITIZENS.

Some of the media coverage to date at:

AFTER THE EVENT: JTA; 15min.lt; Alfa.lt; Balsas.lt; Delfi.lt; FB; Info.smi; Interfax; Lrt.lt (+video); Lrytas.lt; Obzor; Simon Wiesenthal Center; Stormfront; RUN-UP TO THE EVENT: i24; Defending History (+correspondence with mayor’s office).

2015-02-17

Teleconference with Naftali Bennett (Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs)

It gives us great honour to invite you to a special teleconference discussion between Jewish leaders from Europe and Mr. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs, to be held: Tuesday 17th February, 2015, at 18:00 Israel time.

This discussion follows the horrific terror attack on a Synagogue in Copenhagen and in light of the growing threats facing Jewish communities in Europe from rising anti-Semitism and Islamic terrorists.

2015-02-172019-12-10

Hundreds of tombs defaced in French Jewish cemetery Read more: Hundreds of tombs defaced in French Jewish cemetery

Interior minister decries ‘despicable act’; prime minister calls attack ‘anti-Semitic and ignoble’

PARIS — France’s interior minister said Sunday several hundred tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the east of the country, in what he called “a despicable act.

2015-02-16

Invitation to the concert

2015-02-15

Correspondence with Kaunas Mayor’s Office to 11 February 2015 | Defending History

Below, (1) the text of DH’s letter to the mayor of Kaunas, (2) the response received today from his office, and (3) our further response, in connection with the annual neo-Nazi march planned for 16 February 2015 in central Kaunas. See also section on previous marches, and our 3 February 2014 correspondence with the Kaunas police. Note that a banner featuring a major Kaunas Holocaust collaborator, the Nazi puppet prime minister Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis (reburied with full honors as a hero in Kaunas, in 2012), is depicted in a 2014 photograph used by the march’s organizers to advertise the 2015 event.

From: Dovid Katz
To: “meras@kaunas.lt”
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 12:28 PM
Subject: For the Honourable Mayor of Kaunas Andrius Kupčinskas
Dear Mayor Kupčinskas

I had the honor and pleasure of meeting with you at various memorial events in Kaunas in recent years.

Read all

2015-02-15

Finding History – and Myself – in Vilnius

The grandchild of Lithuanian Jews hidden during the Holocaust goes back

Maia Ipp writes in Tablet magazine: “In Lithuania, I felt connection – to my grandparents, to Jewish life and heritage, and to many individuals, Jews and non-Jews, who call Lithuania home.”

2015-02-13

Russian School in Vilnius Puts On Evening of Jewish Music

The Saulėtekis School in Vilnius devoted to education in the Russian language staged what school principal Reiza Zinkevičienė described as a “theatrical concert” at the Lelė Theater in the Vilnius Old Town on the evening of February 4.

The concert was also performed at the school two days earlier, and was conceived as part of on-going Holocaust education programs at the school. Principal Zinkevičienė, who is Jewish herself, said the event was organized together with Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, which has been working in cooperation with Israel’s commemorative authority Yad Vashem to train teachers from Lithuania on how best to organize and teach the Holocaust. She said several of her teachers had been to Yad Vashem for the two-week courses, and that for them, for her and for their school, this was a spiritual mission more than merely an educational matter.

2015-02-07

Israeli ambassador in Vilnius Amir Maimon on Jewish heritage, Israeli-Palestinian conflict and anti-Semitism in Europe

Israel’s first ambassador residing in Vilnius, Amir Maimon, says Lithuania should be more active in inviting tourists from his country and step up cooperation in the fields of defence and high technologies.
“Even it is very grey outside, you have a beautiful country. But I feel and sense that the average Israeli still didn’t discover Lithuania. And it will be for your side to take the necessary actions and promotion in order to attract more and more Israelis to come. Lithuania is not just Paneriai or the ghetto here in Vilnius. You have a lot to offer, but you need to ask yourself what can you do in order to be attractive to Israelis. The Israelis are well–known for their adventure characters. They like travelling, they like to discover new places,” the ambassador told BNS.

2015-02-07