The shtetl was bit just a tiwn, but a self-contained world where Jewish traditions were maintained, students attended the yeshiva, people were married and buried under the precepts of Judaism and almost everyone spoke Yiddish.
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Time: 6:00 P.M., Tuesday, December 4
Place: internet
Jewish history is an important part of the identity of Jews from Shavl and Žagarė. Last Sunday members of the Šiauliai District Jewish Community took a tour called “Jewish Houses, Trades and History.” sampled bagels and were treated to a lecture by ethno-musicologist Eirimas Velička about Jewish music.
The Šiauliai District Jewish Community also opened an exhibit Sunday on the kinder aktion in the Shavl ghetto in 1943. The exhibit is on display at the Culture Center in Šiauliai. Community members finished the day attending the play “The Thinking Heart of the Barracks” which recalled the injunction to remember.
The team of the fotmer Bagel Shop Café, now called Pylimo 4 (the street address) is pleased to announce a Sabbath celebration featuring vegetarian dishes inspired by Fania Lewando from Vilnius, the author of a vegetarian cookbook published in Yiddish in 1938.
It happens this Friday, November 14. The menu pays tribute to Lewando’s cuisine which reflects Litvak traditions. Participants are asked to donate €22 per diner, but smaller donations are also very acceptable. The point is to celebrate the Sabbath together. To suggest dishes, for more information amd to register, send an email to gut.shabbos.vilnius@gmail.com.
On October 18 Švenčionys Jewish Community chairman Moshe Shapiro, MP Emanuelis Zingeris and a number of local officials and residents as well as educators from Lithuania and abroad attended an event in Pabradė called Memory Written in Stone. The event was held by the Paribio Pažinimo Centras as part of a borader project to memorialize locations where synagogues once stood.
During this event two stone markers were erected at the site of two former synagogues. The Pabradė Fanfare Orchestra provided musical accompaniment.
by Skirmantė Javaitytė
On Friday the Kaunas Jewish Community and Liudas Mažylis unveiled a plaque commemorating the site of the birthing clinic formerly run by the Righteous Gentiles Pranas Mažylis, Liudas’s grandfather, Pranas’s wife Antanina and their daughter Liūda.
The plaque features a child’s bracelet inlaid with the inscription: “In Pranas Mažylis’s ,maternity clinic in this building from 1936 to 2025 thousands of babies entered the world. During World War II the Pranas and Antanina Mažylis family saved Jews here.” The family rescued a number of Jews.
Grandson Liudas Mažylis said at the ceremony he hadn’t been a part of it because he was born in 1954. He said his grandparents saved Liliana Levintoff, Isaac Yudelavitch, Grigory Teper and Bela Gurvitch.
The Jewish song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh performed Sunday in Simnas as the final act in the celebration of the 120th birthday of the synagogue there and of the former Jewish community in the small town.
Members of the audience had the chance to sample traditional Jewish foods and learn more about the shtetl.
Members of the Panevėžys Jewish Community and Panevėžys municipal officials visited the Lost Shtetl Museum in Šeduva October 17.
Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofmanas.presented a new Jewish calendar to museum staff.
The Judaica Research Center at the Lithuanian National Library presents a lecture by Center director Lara Lempertienė at 6:00 P.M. Tuesday, October 28, on Yiddish poet and novelist Moyshe Kulbak called “I Am This City: Moyshe Kulnak’s Vilnius” in :Lithuanian.
Lempertienė for many years has worked with Jewish texts from Lithuania and Europe and has research manuscripts in the National Library’s Judaica collection. She was graduated from Vilnius University as a philologist, studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Hebrew and Judaica Studies Center. She earned a doctorate for her thesis “Rabbinical Exegesis in the Context of Traditional Jewish Education in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”
The lecture will take place at the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum in Vilnius where an accompanying exhibit of art by Tania Mourad is on display touching on the Holocaust experience and Litvak poetry, with street graffiti transcribed into the Yiddish alphabet. For more information, call +370 5 261 6764 or send an emial to the museum at kasiulio.muziejus@lndm.lt.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Tuesday, October 28
Place: Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum, Goštauto street no. 1, Vilnius
The Vilnius Gewish Public Library will screen the documentary “The Commandant’s Daughter” featuring the recollections of Ada Gens, daughter of Vilnius ghetto Jewish Police chief Jakov Gens (aka Yakov, Jacob, Jokūnas Gens) at 6:00 P.M. Wednesday, October 22. Jakov Gens’s great-grandson Alexander Phibbs is to speak at the event.
Gens as de facto ruler of the Vilnius ghetto made controversial and lasting decisions for the survival of a remnant of Vilna Jewry. His post-Holocaust legacy was as nemesis to the FPO underground partisan organization, although Gens died in Gestapo custody. Gens displayed a clear preference for Hebrew over Yiddish as the language of the Jews in the future state of Israel.
Great-grandson Alexander Phibbs says heard his grandmother’s stories as a child but didn’t attach greater historical significance to them then. Phibbs began doing his own Holocaust research in 2008 and came across his grandmother Ada’s testimony to the US Holocaust Museum, and realized how little he really knew about Jakov Gens and the role he played in the Vilnius ghetto.
Liudas Mažylis and the Kaunas Jewish Community will unveil a plaque commemorating Righteous Gentiles Antanina and Pranas Mažylis on the façade of the Pranas Mažylis Birth Center in Kaunas next week. The couple hid Jews during the Holocaust at the birth center including Lilijana Levintoffskytė, Isakas Judelevičius, Grigorijus Teperis and Bela Gurvičiūtė.
“Back then in our family even thought about whether to hekp these poor people. WE just had to, that’s all,” the couple’s daughter Liūda Mažylytė-Rasteikienė recalled later.
Time: 2:00 P.M., Friday, October 24
Place: Putvinskio street no. 3, Kaunas
The first Sunday in October is the traditional date for remembering Holocaust victims from the Švenčionys region at the Menorah monument in the city park in Švenčionys.
The Menorah monument marks the border of the ghetto where local Jews were held before being murdered at Platumai village.
Švenčionys Jewish Community chairman Moshe Shapiro, Choral Synagogue cantor Shmuel Yaatom, members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and local officials took part in the ceremony.
A plaque commemorating Righteous Gentiles Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė, her daughter Danutė Čiurlionytė-Zubovienė and her daughter’s husband Vladimir Zubov was unveiled at Žemaičių street no. 10 in Kaunas last month. The Lithuanian state radio and television Jewish affairs program Menora documented the event.
Television program in Lithuanian here.
A plaque commemorating Samuel Kukliansky, attorney and professor of law, was unveiled on the outside of the house in which he lived until the Holocaust in the village of Veisiejai in the Lazdijau region of Lithuania last week.
His daughter and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman and attorney Faina Kukliansky attended the unveiling ceremony with other members of the family, as well as the person who initiated the plaque, Zenonas Sabaliauskas, and a large contingent of local residents.
“Veisiejai is a special place for me. My grandfather Saulius Kuakliansky, a chemist and pharmacaist, lived here. Here stands the home to which my grandmother, doctor Zisle Kukliansky,, never returned. That made today, when a plaque is being unveiled commemorating my father, law professor and attorney Samuel Kukliansky, one of excitement as well as mixed feelings. I want to thank my children and grandchildren for being there for me on this day of difficult memories and experiences, and for holding dear our family history and dor, I hope, passing it on to their children. I am very grateful also to alderman Zenonas Sabaliauskas for the beautiful idea of commemorating the footsteps left by the Kukliansky family in Veisiejai, and I am grateful to the many people who gathered here for this. Seeing them, the hope returns that those dark times perhaps will not return again,” Faina Kukliansky said.
Following the ceremony, attendees travelled to the Kuktiškės Jewish cemetery about 20 kilometers outside Veisiejai to visit the mass grave there. In November of 1941 Germans and Lithuanians murdered 1,535 Jews there.
Members and staff of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, representatives from the Lithuanian parliament and government and foreign diplomats observed the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish of Victims of Genocide at Ponar on Thursday, September 25. German Bundeswehr rabbi Elisch Mendel Portnoy joined Choral Synagogue cantor Shmuel Yaatom in saying prayers for the dead.
LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky read the contents of an open letter she co-autyhored with Jewish Lithuanian MP Emanuelis Zingeris addressed to president Gitanas Nausėda cautioning against the latter’s decision to allow a member of an anti-Semitic party to occupy the post of Lithuanian minister of culture.
KJC chairwoman Kukliansky quoted a facebook post she received that day calling for the murder of Jews.
“If we don’t stop it, this will happen. So I ask all of you gathered here not just to honor those who were murdered and lie buried here–we are standing on blood-soaked soil–but also to think about the future of our country, and what we must do to insure this never happens again,” Kukliansky said.
As on every first Sunday in October, people will gather to commemorate those who were incarcerated in the ghetto and murdered during the Holocaust in the Švenčionys region in southwest Lithuania. The gathering takes place at the city park where the ghetto once operated, and at the mass grave in Platumai village in the Švenčionėliai aldermansjip at what is generally called the polygon. You are invited to attend at 11:00 A.M. on Sunday, October 5.
Program:
11:00 A.M. – 11:30 A.M. Commemoration of victims at the Menorah statue in the city park;
12:30 P.M. Commemoration at the monument to the victims at the mass murder site in Platumai village.
Moshe Shapiro, chairman
Švenčionys Regional Jewish Community
A group of protestors gather at the Office of the President in Vilnius Thursday to protest the formation of a new government with a candidate from the Nemuno Aušra party proposed for minister of culture.
Ignotas Adomavičius has been put forward by Remigijus Žemaitaitis’s Nemuno Aušra party as a new government coalesces following real estate scandal which enveloped Gintautas Paluckas’s ruling coalition earlier this year. Žemaitaitis rose to prominence in early 2023 by making a series of facebook and other posts questioning the Holocaust in Lithuania and criticizing Jews and Israel. Lithuania’s Constitutional Court found his statements were a violation of his oath to uphold the Lithuanian constitution as a member of parliament. The comments have been widely recognized as anti-Semitic.
Adomavičius has been described as a pasta maker, whether that’s a hobby or a profession, and a graduate of an art school in Vilnius. In Lithuanian pasta is called macaroni, a synonym for nonsense He told Lithuanian state radio and television one of his priorities as culture minister will be to rebuild the “Old Synagogue,” presumably meaning the Great Synagogue in Vilnius, whose reconstruction no Jewish or Lithuanian heritage group is seeking currently. There was talk of this in the early 2000s by Lithuanian government officials, but the idea was rejected by the various Lithuanian Jewish communities at the time as a boondoggle without a congregation to serve. Jewish reporter and newspaper editor Milan Cheronskis called the proposal one for a Jewish Disneyland in Vilnius. Lithuanian state radio and television interview in Lithuanian here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community, the umbrella organization for 31 Jewish organizations in Lithuania and abroad, calls upon Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda not to approve Ignotas Adomavičius, the candidate submitted by the anti-Semitic Nemuno Aušra party and its leader, Remigijus Žemaitaitis, whom the Constitutional Court found had violated grossly his oath of office and the constitution of Lithuania.
The Lithuanian Culture Ministry is in charge of maintaining the material cultural heritage, restoration of synagogues, Jewish cultural centers and historical commemoration, and to entrust this ministry to the member of an openly anti-Semitic party would be a desecration and public derision of the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and an insult to Lithuanian citizens of Jewish descent.
Moreover, this person’s participation in the actions of the next Government would discredit Lithuania in front of our foreign partners, whose support to our country and to us, the citizens of that country, is so vitally important at this complicated time in geopolitics.
We would like to remind the president and the public that organizations such as IHRA, FRA (the EU agency on fundamental rights) and the OSCE have all recognized anti-Semitism as a crime. Lithuania has signed cooperation agreements with these international organizations and is obligated to adhere to these agreements.
Therefore we call upon the president to maintain his oath he took during his inauguration and to defend the interests of all citizens of Lithuania, including Jews, as spelled out in the Lithuanian constitution.
Executive board, Lithuanian Jewish Community
Leaders of the Lithuanian Jewish Community Emanuelos Zingeris, the only Jewish member of the Lithuanian parliament and signatory to the Act of the Restoration of Lithuanian Independence, and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky uniting 31 organizations across Lithuania and abroad have addressed an open letter to His Excellency Gitanas Nausėda, president of Lithuania, urging him not to appoint a representative of the anti-Semitic party Nemuno Aušra as minister of culture, citing several reasons outlined in the letter below.
OPEN LETTER
In recent days, following the decision to place the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania under the influence of Mr. Remigijus Žemaitaitis, we have developed profound concerns regarding the preservation of democratic values in the Republic of Lithuania.
In our considered view, Mr. Žemaitaitis incited hatred during the electoral campaign and fomented ethnic discord. The Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania has found his actions to be in violation of the constitutional order of the Republic. He therefore obtained parliamentary mandates by means of incitement to hatred.
The legacy of Lithuanian Jewry–mass murder sites, our cemeteries, museum heritage, the organization of commemorations–is being entrusted to a person who would employ it as a cover for his previously pursued anti-Semitic policies. Lithuania must not become the only state in Europe where the memory of the 94% of Lithuanian Jews who perished is subjected to such desecration.
Sophomore students from the Žeimena high school in Pabradė and their history teacher Mr. Stundza visited a Holocaust memorial to the Jews of Pabradė on September 23, the Day of Remembrance of Lithuanian Jewish Victims of Genocide. Švenčionys Jewish Community chairman Moishe Shapiro was invited to tge commemoration and spoke to the students.
The following protest is being called by people who describe themselves as the cultural community of Lithuanian for tomorrow, September 25, to protest the minister of culture proposed and delgated by the Nemuno Aušra party. Details and petition link below.
Dear people of culture,
We are protesting. We categorically oppose the Government’s shocking decision to hand the post of minister of culture over to the Nemuno Aušra party.
We believe that:
Culture cannot be used a tool for political deal-making. The Lithuanian Culture Ministry is not a token which can be exchanged for short-term political gain;
Culture is our memory, the foundation of democratic values, society’s guarantor of resilience to propaganda;
To give this ministry over to a political force characterized by populism, anti-Semitic and pro-Russian rhetoric is dangerous, both to the cultural sector and to society as a whole.
We urge: