by Anthea Gerrie, Hewish Chronicle, August 24

The Jews of Šeduva were murdered 84 years ago. Now a new museum will commemorate their shtetl way of life

Eighty-four years ago more than 600 Jews, men, women and children, of the shtetl of Šeduva in rural Lithuania were executed in the forest outside the town. Now the finishing touches are being made to a museum which will commemorate the shtetl way of life which was extinguished in the Holocaust, not just in Seduva or Lithuania, but all over Eastern Europe.

The Lost Shtetl Museum will use cutting-edge technology to recreate the sights and sounds of everyday pre-war Jewish life, based on the history of Šeduva and more than 200 similar small Lithuanian towns, and the thousands more communities in neighboring Latvia, Belarus, Poland and Ukraine which were wiped off the map forever.

The opening date of September 20 is significant, preceding Lithuania’s Holocaust Remembrance Day by just 72 hours. Yet the true date of the yortsait for Šeduva should be a month earlier, according to Jolanta Mickutė, head of education at the museum,

She says the Jewish residents of the country’s rural shtetls were among the first victims of the Nazis, aided by local collaborators in the summer of 1941: “The Jewish community of Šeduva was executed in Liaudiškiai Forest over two days, August 25 and 26: 664 men, women and children.” It was the second mass murder of the town’s Jews that month, following the initial slaughter of 150 men including the town’s last rabbi, Mordechai Henkin, in neighboring Pakutenial Forest

The victims were honored by the descendants of survivors at an opening dedicating the building as a memorial site to the lost community. They were preceded by president of Israel Isaac Herzog whose ancestors also hailed from Šeduva. He came on August 5 to affix a mezuzah to the door in a country where tens of thousands were lost when the buildings the mezuzahs were supposed to protect were destroyed following the annihilation of their occupants.

Full text here.