by Nataliya Zverko
ru.DELFI.lt

We met Gennady Kofman at a former girls’ school which now serves as the headquarters of the Panevėžys Jewish Community. Reporters were seated and served tea and cookies in a friendly atmosphere, with only the silent photographs on the walls before us to remind us 95% of the Jews resident in the Lithuanian city were murdered in the Holocaust.

Gennady Kofman, a native of Zhitomir, Ukraine, has been chairman of the Panevėžys Jewish Community since 2001, having returned to the city in 1972 after being graduated from the Kaliningrad Military Aviation School. For a long time he served in the post of software engineer for the Panevėžys military airfield’s radar system, and later flew transport missions in Afghanistan and Armenia. When Lithuania regained independence in 1991, he stayed here, and found himself in a new reality.

Full story in Russian here.