Lithuanian Jewish Community

Jewish Headstones Removed From Vilnius Church, Returned to Jewish Cemetery

As restoration took place on the Evangelical Reformist Church [used as the Chronika cinema in Soviet times] on Pylimo street in Vilnius, it was discovered Jewish cemetery headstones had been used for the front stairs leading to the main entrance. They have been returned to a Jewish cemetery, the Lithuanian Cultural Infrastructure Center reported.

When restoration work began, local residents noticed some kind of inscriptions on the stones. Experts from the Lithuanian Jewish Community were able to determine the origins of the stones from the shallow inscriptions, in some places barely visible. They approached Lithuania’s Cultural Heritage Department and commission was formed which determined the stones were actually Jewish grave markers. The stairs were removed and the monuments were sent to the old Jewish cemetery.

2022-08-162022-08-16

Lithuanian News Site on Pakruojis Synagogue

Pakruojis Synagogue is a Monument to All the Jewish Houses of Prayer Which Stood in Lithuania

15min.lt, reprinted from a facebook user

It’s believed there were about 500 or 600 different Jewish houses of prayer in our country, although no one knows the exact number. There might have been more than 100 synagogues in Vilnius alone.

Most of Lithuania’s synagogues were wooden, but today we only have about a dozen. On the other hand, no other European state has so many surviving wooden synagogues.

The question of restoring these historically and culturally very valuable wooden buildings is coming up more and more. One wonderful example of a restored wooden synagogue stands in the town of Pakruojis. After walking through its interior and getting a closer look at its careful restoration, I was pleasantly surprised at what had been returned from the ravages of time, people’s neglect and even fires.

Full text in Lithuanian here.

2022-08-16

Condolences

Roza Kamrazer from Šiauliai passed away at the age of 89 on August 11. We extend our deepest condolences to her friends and family.

2022-08-16

Father and Trainer Eduardas Šeras Talks of Son Who Won Silver at Maccabiah

I’d like to present a person who, as Lithuanian Makabi president Semionas Finkelšteinas says, performed a small miracle at the recently finished World Maccabiah Games in Israel.

Daniel Šer is the silver medal winner in the junior chess competition. Daniel is 13, but he was playing against 16, 17 and 18-year-olds. A silver medal which just missed becoming gold by a hair, since Daniel collected the same number of points with the gold medal winner from the USA, and according to the rules, a tie like that means other indicators are taken into account, something is always kind of a lottery, and this time it wasn’t in our favor.

It was a great competition, very good results and a very high assessment not just for the medal won, but also because news reached us that the organizers of the competition and the chief referee sent the final results to the International Chess Federation along with the request to present Daniel the title of candidate master for his excellent playing in the competition.

2022-08-152022-08-15

Upcoming Israeli Festival Offers Sandy Opera, Moshe Dayan’s Missing Eye and VHS Memories

Photo: “Sun & Sea,” the beachside opera that spotlights climate change, winner of the 2019 Venice Biennale Golden Lion, will be performed at the 60th Israel Festival, September 15-19, 2022

60th year of annual Jerusalem event aims to break down walls between performers and audiences

by Jessica Steinberg

It’s the 60th year of Jerusalem’s iconic Israel Festival, and, befitting such a milestone event, this year’s celebration will look, sound and appear different from previous iterations.

For starters it will take place in September rather than its perennial June date, and over the course of 10 days, September 15 to 22, instead of the three weeks over which the event was formerly held.

Rather than hopping between spaces throughout the city, nearly all performances will take place in the environs of the Jerusalem Theater, the historic location for early Israel Festivals, befitting an event that once set the standard for all Israeli cultural events, said Itay Mautner, the new co-artistic director of the festival.

Full story here.

2022-08-152022-08-17

Book Review: Come to This Court and Cry

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2022-08-152022-08-17

Sabbath Times

The Sabbath begins at 8:40 P.M. on Friday, August 12, and concludes at 9:59 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.

2022-08-122022-08-12

Jerusalem of the North Orchestra Camp

The Jerusalem of the North youth orchestra camp will take place from August 15 to 25 at the Preila Library in Preila on the Curionian Spit in Lithuania under the tutelage of renowned Lithuanian conductor professor Donatas Katkus, Martynas Švegžda von Bekker, Dalia Dedinskaitė, Gleb Pyšniak and Darius Mažintas. The 10-day orchestra workshop will conclude in a joint concert with Vilnius’s St. Christopher Orchestra and the new orchestra made up of young participants, performing a jointly-prepared program of Jewish music.

“The Jewish culture of education means the book, music and sports. It’s not for nothing that the Jewish people have been literate for more than 5,000 years. The Lithuanian Jewish Community is happy the orchestra convened at this camp will perform Jewish music. That there aren’t many Jewish children attending the camp this year is, I think, a tourism mistake. Israeli families would love to vacation in Nida while their children attend camp and learn. There should be greater state support brought to these sorts of private and NGO initiatives. The children and adults who will prepare this concert will learn about Jewish composers. We all know how to talk about tolerance, but not all of us know how practice tolerance through deeds. The LJC and the orchestra are doing tolerance, which is what the state institutions should be doing,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky explained.

2022-08-122022-08-12

Request for Help

The Lithuanian Jewish Community has received a request from a teacher and vice-principal from the Dniepropetrovsk Jewish school in the Ukraine. She is in Lithuania at the current time with her 28-year-old son. They are looking for a place to live either for free or at a small cost. They will have no place to live on September 1. If you can help or know who can, please contact Ruth Reches by email at ruthreches@gmail.com.

2022-08-112022-08-12

Happy Birthday to Tatjana Archipova-Efros

We wish a very happy milestone birthday to our long-time member and WWII veteran Tatjana Archipova-Efros. Mazl tov. Bis 120!

2022-08-10

Litvak Descendant Jenny Kagan Opens Interactive Holocaust Exhibit in Kaunas

Litvak descendant and artist Jenny Kagan has opened an exhibit telling her family’s story during the Holocaust. The “Out of Darkness” exhibit’s main motif is that of a box, the one in which her parents Joseph and Margaret hid, among the few survivors of the Kaunas ghetto. Through interactive objects and audio/video installations the exhibit tells her family history. She told BNS she wanted to provide exhibit goers with a real emotional experience. She added that while the story is a narrative, she comes from a theatrical background and decided to make the experience a theatrical one. The exhibit was first installed in the atmospheric Viaduct Theatre in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2016.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2022-08-10

The 15th of Av: Love and Rebirth

The Jewish mini-holiday of Tu B’Av

Our sages proclaimed the 15th of Av [Friday, August 12 in 2022] as one of the two greatest festivals of the year, yet they ordained no special observances or celebrations for it . . .

The 15th of Av is a most mysterious day. A search of the Shulchan Aruch (Code of Jewish Law) reveals no observances or customs for this date, except for the instruction that the tachanun (confession of sins) and similar portions should be omitted from the daily prayers (as is the case with all festive dates), and that one should increase one’s study of Torah, since the nights are beginning to grow longer, and “the night was created for study.”

The Talmud tells us that many years ago the “daughters of Jerusalem would go dance in the vineyards” on the 15th of Av, and “whoever did not have a wife would go there” to find himself a bride. And the Talmud considers this the greatest festival of the year, with Yom Kippur a close second!

Full article here.

2022-08-102022-08-10

Memory Wars

Lithuanian Archive reference LCVA R683, aprašas 2, byla2 lapas 80

“Memory Wars” are fought worldwide. The United Nations and Jew-haters everywhere appear to have reasonable certitude that Jews do not have much of any historical link to Israel, and should not “occupy” Israel. History is a tool of propagandists, able to be rewritten to fight any current conflict and to re-frame a national identity. Soviets did it, North Korea does it, Putin does it, Lukashenko in Belarus does it. But no government in the world has developed historical revisionism into the art form that Lithuania has. They have created an entire government agency to rewrite history, called “The Genocide Center.”

Lithuanian Government

The following is an excerpt from a text by the Center for the Study of the Genocide and Resistance of Residents of Lithuania (the Genocide Center) titled “On Accusations against Jonas Noreika (General Storm), March 27, 2019, Vilnius”:

2022-08-10

Five EU Countries Who Shouldn’t Be Throwing Stones

Efraim Zuroff

Accusing Russia of rewriting the Holocaust for its current propaganda is fair, but not when you’ve always whitewashed the Holocaust for your own purposes

Several days ago I was shocked to learn that five heads of state from Lithuania, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Poland, all post-Communist Eastern European countries, had recently beseeched the leaders of the European Union to step up efforts to “preserve historical memory.” It was addressed to the European Council president, European Commission president and the Czech prime minister, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency.

For the past three decades since their transition to democracy, these countries have excelled in grossly distorting their own respective histories of the Holocaust. Yet the quintet of leaders now maintains that the Kremlin “is seeking to rewrite history and use it to justify its aggression against sovereign states.” Thus they urge the bodies of the EU to take a leadership role in “preserving historical memory and preventing the Russian regime from manipulating historical facts.” They contend that this concern “is particularly relevant in light of Russia’s intensive use of history for propaganda purposes in the context of the war in Ukraine.”

Full editorial here.

2022-08-092023-02-14

Condolences

Izraela Blataitė, honorary citizen of Šarnelė, Lithuania, has passed away in Israel. We extend our heartfelt condolences to her family and loved ones.

2022-08-08

Sabbath Times

The Sabbath begins at 8:54 P.M. on Friday, August 5, and concludes at 10:19 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region.

2022-08-052022-08-05

Genocide Center Sets Up Information Stand at Mass Murder Site Near Trakai

The controversial Lithuanian Genocide Center erected an information stand about the mass murder of the Jews of Trakai next to the mass murder site in the Varnikai village in the Trakai district on August 4, 2022.

The stand was erected at the request of directorate of the Trakai National Historical Park.

It contains information including 297 names of those murdered at the site on September 30, 1941. The Genocide Center claims the actual number of those murdered at the site on that day was 1,446, a figure likely taken from the Jäger report.

The stand says the Ypatingasis unit (still notorious in its original Lithuanian form in Holocaust testimonies in numerous languages, literally “the special unit,” or Sonderkommando in German) under the command of SS officer Martin Weiss and Vilnius Ypatingasis commander Balys Norvaiša murdered more than a thousand Jews from Trakai and surrounding towns and then got drunk and sang songs at a local cafeteria.

2022-08-052022-08-05

Tisha b’Av on Saturday

Tisha b’Av, the 9th day of the month of Av on the Hebrew calendar, falls on Saturday, July 6 this year.

Tisha b’Av commemorates the destruction of the First Temple of Solomon ca. 587 BCE and the Second Temple in 70 CE in Jerusalem and is traditionally a day of fasting and mourning. Observance includes five prohibitions, the main one being a 25-hour fast. The Book of Lamentations is read in the synagogue followed by the recitation of kinnos, liturgical dirges for the Temple and Jerusalem. Since the day has become associated with other major Jewish tragedies, some kinnos recall other events, including the murder of the Ten Martyrs in ancient Rome, pogroms against medieval Jewish communities and the Holocaust.

According to tradition, the sin of the Ten Spies is the real origin of Tisha B’Av. In the Book of Numbers, 13:1-33 when the Israelites accepted their false report of the Promised Land, they wept, thinking God could no help them. The night the people wept and wailed was the ninth day of Av, which then became a day of weeping and misfortune for all time, according to tradition, following which the Jews were made to wander the desert for 40 years.

2022-08-03

Roma Holocaust Memorial Day Marked in Lithuania

Around 4,300 people of Roma and Sinti ethnicity were murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp complex on the night of August 2, 1944. In 2015 the EU parliament resolved to make this day the Roma Holocaust Memorial Day in memory of the approximately 500,000 Roma and Sinti murdered in Europe.

World War II and its genocide of the Roma did great harm to the Roma living in Lithuania and left agony in its wake for the Roma community. In 1942 Nazi-occupied Lithuania undertook mass arrests of Roma, and the arrestees were taken to concentration and labor camps in France and Germany. About 1,000 Roma were deported from Lithuania, most of whom returned to Lithuania after the war. Roma were murdered in Lithuania. The majority were shot in Pravieniškės, but they were also murdered en masse outside Švenčionys in the Šalčininkai region in southeast Lithuania. Near Vilnius in the Kirtimai village a caravan of Roma was liquidated, although the exact number murdered is not known. About 500 Roma were murdered during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, about one in three. The Nazis murdered Roma families they encountered travelling, but didn’t report how many they killed, so the figure of 500 could be significantly larger.

The Roma Community Center marks August 2 annually. Below is the story told by Anastazija Jablonskienė-Bagdonavičiūtė’s daughter Elžbieta. She was the only survivor from her family, she was away when the Nazis came for them. She hid during the war and survived. Anastazija had 18 children.

2022-08-02

Arkadijus Vinokuras’s Discussion Club on Wins at World Maccabiah Games

The #ŽydiškiPašnekesiai discussion club moderated by Arkadijus Vinokuras will meet on August 10 to discuss the recent victories by Lithuanian Makabi Athletic Club athletes at the World Maccabiah Games in Israel.

The Lithuanian team made one of its best showings ever, winning 6 medals last month.

The club was active in interwar Lithuania from 1920 to 1940. It was originally founded in 1916. In 1926 the club had 83 branches throughout Lithuania, encompassing 4,000 members. It published a newspaper twice per month and had its own sports stadium. The club was reconstituted on January 8, 1989, at a general meeting at the calculator and business machine factory in Vilnius.

Speakers will include Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club president Semionas Finkelšteinas, table-tennis medal winner many times over Rafael Gimelštein and others.

The panel discussion will be held in Lithuanian at the Bagel Shop Café at 5:00 P.M. on August 10.

2022-08-02