Support for WWII-Era Jewish Rescuers

For the second year now the Lithuanian Jewish Community has been administering a program called “Support for Jewish Rescuers during World War II.” LJC chair Faina Kukliansky is the curator of the program and it is implemented by the LJC Social Center team: Social Center director Alan Levin and coordinators Ema Jakobienė and Mikhail Segal.

Jewish rescuers live throughout Lithuania and it hasn’t been an easy assignment for the Social Center to track them all down and inform them of the support program, get their consent and organizing record-keeping, logistics and other matters necessary for implementation. Many people have moved and many letters are returned to sender. In some cases we had to begin the search for a given person from scratch, follow up bad leads and then start over again. Meanwhile time has been ruthless: of the 110 rescuers who were sent a letter with information about the program, 96 turned out to be still alive…

Now we can announce with joy that support has reached 96 rescuers. The support to each rescuer totals 250 euros. The total sum of support is 24,000 euros.