History of the Jews in Lithuania

Irish Professor Attacks Monument to Jewish Partisans in Kaunas with Hammer

Irish Professor Attacks Monument to Jewish Partisans in Kaunas with Hammer

Police were called Wednesday to Ožeškienės street nos. 19 and 21 in Kaunas after construction workers prevented a man from destroying an art installation there with a hammer. Neighbors called the police and told the media the perpetrator is a citizen of the Republic of Ireland who teaches at Kaunas Techological University. They also said this isn’t the first time he’s vandalized the tribute to Lithuanian Jews and Jewish partisans from the Kaunas ghetto. This time he was caught on video, which was played on the national evening television news in Lithuania.

The Kiemo galerija, or Courtyard Gallery as it’s known began 12 years ago and was the brainchild of resident Vytenis Jakas. He started collecting stories from local oldtimers in both buildings who told him many of the residents were Jews before they were rounded up and murdered. One such couple was Juda Zupavičius and Dita Sperling-Zupavičienė. Dita’s brother Hirsh, their mother and Juda’s comrade Ika Grinberg, the son of the owner of the building, also lived there.

In the summer of 2014 Dita travelled from Tel Aviv to Lithuania with the hope of commemorating her husband Juda and his fellow members of the Kaunas ghetto resistance during the 70th anniversary of the liquidation of the Kaunas ghetto.

Read more
Presentation of Faina Kukliansky’s Book in Palanga

Presentation of Faina Kukliansky’s Book in Palanga

Faina Kukliansky will present her book “Dainos iš mėlynos užrašinės” [Songs from the Blue Notebook] in Palanga Friday at the Palanga summer reading room and will sign copies. The book is a family history comprising three generations of Litvaks, from her grandparents who survived the Holocaust, to her father who spent his youth in a concentration camp to Faina’s sister Sulamita and Faina herself, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and accomplished attorney.

“People sometimes ask me why I spend so much energy on the issue of history and the place of the Jews in the world, and all the more so since most of my people are no longer with us. All I can say is my goal: to preserve their memory. We don’t have my parents’ candelabrum anymore, in which every Jewish family lights their Sabbath candles. All we have left is memory and respect,” Kukliansky said.

Time: 6:00 P.M., Friday, August 28
Place: Palanga summer reading room, Vytauto street no. 72, Palanga

Holocaust Remembrance in Rokiškis

Holocaust Remembrance in Rokiškis

The Jews murdered August 15 and 16, 1941, in Rokishok were commemorated on August 16, 2026, in this small northern Lithuanian town and former shtetl. The Rokiškis Regional History Museum invited the public to attend a “Road of Memory” procession from the ghetto next to the Rokiškis manor house (where the museum is now housed) to the Velniaduobė forest about 4 kilometers outside town where the Jewish population was slaughtered.

Rokiškis Regional History Museum staff spoke at the beginning, midway and end of the procession. Participants places inscribed with the names of victims at the memorial stele marking the mass murder site where around 3,200 Jews, 6 Lithuanians and 1 Pole were killed.

Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman was in attendance and said no Jewish family was untouched by the Holocaust. Rokiškis regional municipality council member Vytautas Saulis spoke about the Soviet trials of Lithuanians who murdered Jews held in 1965, and said the main question hadn’t been addressed: why?

According to Lithuania’s International Commission to Asses the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupations in Lithuania, which is behind the Road of Memory initiatives throughout Lithuania, around 75% of the town’s population was Jewish before they were murdered.

Read more
Lithuania Betrays American Alliance

Lithuania Betrays American Alliance

by Grant Gochin

A Lithuanian state institution took an American administrative record, hardened it into an exoneration and published the result as a verdict of the United States. It has defended that claim since 2018. On August 19, 2026, ninety-nine days after Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told US Congress the wording had been corrected, the claim was still online in Lithuanian.

Everything that matters is in documents Lithuania itself has supplied.

What America Actually Decided

In 1974 the Immigration and Naturalization Service examined allegations concerning Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, acting head of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government, and interior minister Jonas Šlepetys. Commissioner Leonard Chapman reported that no information of an evidentiary nature had been elicited from the sources contacted; the names were removed from the active list and the investigations deactivated. He also said new meaningful information would reactivate the investigation.

Read more
Vilnius Printed It. LGGRTC Kept the Myth.

Vilnius Printed It. LGGRTC Kept the Myth.

by Grant Gochin

A Lithuanian university published the contradictory wartime record in 2005. The Centre was told, and kept publishing.

Vilnius University Press published the wartime record in 2005. Thomas Remeikis assembled the American Legation dispatches from Stockholm and the Lithuanian material carried inside them; the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University appears on the imprint, and the introduction is signed Chicago-Vilnius, 2004. 1 Twenty-one years later the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania cannot describe the Lithuanian material in those documents as Soviet, inaccessible, or newly discovered in a foreign archive. That matters now, because the Centre is the state body expected to supply historical authority in the prosecution of Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Vilnius charged over a Facebook post. Its disclosure conduct in that case is set out in Show the File.

Publication establishes availability. It does not prove that a particular official at the Centre read this volume. The correspondence set out below establishes something different and harder: the Centre received direct documentary challenges to the historical claims it went on publishing, and answered them.

Read more
Show the File

Show the File

by Grant Gochin

Eight days before Artur Fridman’s next hearing, Lithuania’s state history center should disclose the research behind any historical premise used against him.

The next hearing in the criminal case against Artur Fridman is scheduled for August 26. He is innocent, and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. Before the Vilnius City District Court hears more historical evidence, Lithuania should answer a simpler question: what research file, if any, supports the state history being carried into the case?

The prosecution began with a Facebook post. On May 9, 2024, Fridman stood at Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. He wrote about Soviet victory, Lithuanian partisans, and Lithuania’s heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Algirdas Ramanauskas filed a complaint with the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office on July 16, 2024. On January 8, 2025, authorities imposed a written undertaking restricting Fridman from leaving Lithuania. On October 30, 2025, prosecutor Kristina Minko signed charges in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Criminal Code Articles 170² §1 and 313 §2. The formal indictment runs twelve pages; the broader pre-trial file runs to roughly 220. The Vilnius City District Court opened the trial on March 5, 2026.

Read more
Biržai Marks 85th Anniversary of Start of Holocaust

Biržai Marks 85th Anniversary of Start of Holocaust

Sėla Museum director Edita Landsbergienė and museum staff held a Holocaust commemoration at the site of the former synagogue in Biržai/Birzh last week. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman, Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Shelly Hugler Livne, a representative from the city’s mayor’s office and others spoke at the event.

A procession walked from the city about 3 kilometers to the mass grave marked in Pakamponys Forest.

The commemorative ceremony and procession were followed by the premiere of an opera called Kitas Miestas [A Different City] at a local high school gymnasium about the pre-Holocaust Jewish community in Birzh and how they were murdered in the Holocaust. An internet stream of the opera will be made available here.

Read more
Plaque Commemorating Litvak Photographer Shimon Bajer Unveiled in Kaunas

Plaque Commemorating Litvak Photographer Shimon Bajer Unveiled in Kaunas

A plaque commemorating Litvak photographer Shimon Bajer (1893-1942) was unveiled Thursday on Freedom Alley, Kaunas’s main pedestrian walking mall, at his former residence at Laisvės alley no. 97 (formerly no. 58). Bajer was one of the most famous figures in Lithuanian photography in the period between the two world wars and pioneered studio photography in the country. He photographed Lithuanian president and later dictator Antanas Smetona and Lithuania’s chief rabbi Rozensen, among others. Shimon and his Raja were murdered in the Kaunas ghetto in 1942.

Photographs by Gediminas Pašvenskas courtesy the Kauno Diena newspaper and website.

Read more
Photographer Shimon Bajer Celebrated in Kaunas

Photographer Shimon Bajer Celebrated in Kaunas

A plaque commemorating Jewish photographer Shimon Bajer (aka Bayer) will be unveiled in Kaunas at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, August 13, at his former residence at Laisvės alley no. 97 (formerly no. 58). The Kaunas Jewish Community invites the public to come remember this important Kaunas photographer from the interwar period. Bajer and his wife Raja were murdered in the Kaunas ghetto in 1942.

Nobel Prize Winner Aaron Klug to be Remembered in Vilkomir

Nobel Prize Winner Aaron Klug to be Remembered in Vilkomir

The Ukmergė Regional History Museum invites the public to the town of Želva in the Ukmergė (Vilkomir) region at 11:00 A.M. on August 11 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Aaron Klug, who won the Nobel prize for chemistry. Želva is the Klug family hearth. At the age of two Aaron Klug and the rest of his family immigrated to the Union of South Africa. While he later said he remembered almost nothing about Lithuania, he often expressed pride in his Litvak roots and did related family stories from Želva. His grandfather on his father’s side was a cattle merchant. In 1982 Klug was awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry for his work on biological macro-molecular structures. Queen Elizabeth II knighted him in 1988.

Names Read in Klaipėda

Names Read in Klaipėda

The names of 1,225 people buried at the desecrated Jewish cemetery in Klaipėda were read out at a ceremony held in the first week of August called “Voices of the Departed.” A symbolic headstone was also erected there in their honor.

Master of ceremonies Nerijus Gedminas said: “This was the Klaipėda Jewish cemetery and ritual funeral home right up until World War II. The Klaipėda Jewish community was annihilated during the Nazi occupation and its material legacy was largely destroyed as well. The post-war Soviet government set up a secret radio jamming station in the former [sic] cemetery called No. 61. Jewish headstones were used as construction material and for the bases of the antennae.”

Klaipėda Jewish Community chairman Feliksas Puzemskis said: “On the eve of Klaipėda’s birthday we want to give the city a list of the people who built this city and who are buried in this cemetery. Many visitors from around the world come here looking for their roots. Until now there hasn’t been a database for visitors to check whether their relatives are buried here. To accomplish this, organizers and money were required, but more importantly, the right person to undertake this work. We were very fortunate that Klaipėda University invited in professor Ruth Leiserowitz, thanks to whom this list has been reconstructed. She compiled a priceless treasure house of information.”

Read more
Rendezvous with Living Family History in Panevėžys

Rendezvous with Living Family History in Panevėžys

The Panevėžys Jewish Community received visitors from France: Mr. Matt Nguyen and his mother. The warm meeting with Community members was more than just a search for roots, it was a return to the place where their family called home more than a century ago.

Nguyen’s father was Maurice Hendel, aka Moshe Lozer Gendel, who immigrated from Panevėžys to the United States in 1922, although the family hearth isn’t Panevėžys but Pastovys now in Belarus (Postavi). Following the path of Rabbi Yosef Shlomo Kahaheman, the Hendel family moves to Panevėžys during the First World War. Moshe’s future wife Rochel Lea Tuvman moved later from Vidžiai, Lithuania, to Panevėžys. They built a family together in Panevėžys, traces of which remain to this day.

Moshe died at the Panevėžys Jewish Hospital in 1938 and was buried in the city’s Jewish cemetery. The cemetery was destroyed during Soviet times to build a city park. Moshe’s mother, sister and daughter-in-law remained in Panevėžys during the Holocaust and were murdered there.

Read more
I Was Not the First to File

I Was Not the First to File

by Grant Gochin, August 4, 2026

Since 2015 I have filed forty-nine formal submissions with Lithuanian state bodies. Eight lawsuits and international filings. Eleven to the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre. Five criminal complaints under Article 170-2. Eleven institutional submissions. Two to the Commission of Journalist Ethics. Twelve letters. Not one produced a finding on the merits.

Lithuania’s answer has been consistent. I am a foreigner with a grievance. The controversy is manufactured. In February 2025 Laurynas Kasčiūnas–member of the Seimas, former Minister of National Defence, newly elected chairman of the Homeland Union–called me a Russian agent and called me trash.

That answer rests on a premise: that the file begins with me.

It begins in Paris on December 30, 1921, in a letter signed by Leo Motzkin.

I know that because of a book almost nobody reads. In July I borrowed it through interlibrary loan from Duquesne University. Herbert von Truhart, Völkerbund und Minderheiten-Petitionen, Vienna and Leipzig, 1931. I could locate no openly accessible full-text scan. To consult the complete inventory you borrow the physical volume.

Read more
Jewish Heritage Walking Tour in Palanga

Jewish Heritage Walking Tour in Palanga

The Palanga Jewish Community is pleased to announce a guided tour of the traces of Jewish life in Palanga. The tour starts at 4:00 P.M. on Friday, August 7, at the main entrance to Birutė Park, by the gates, Vytauto street no. 19. The walking tour will proceed from there through the city and end up at the city square and the plaque commemorating the former synagogues there. The tour is free and open to the public, but registration is necessary. Please indicate the number of people in your party while registering by sending an email to palangoszb@gmail.com or by calling+370 682 55164.

Condolences

With great sadness we report the death of Arie Ben-Ari Grozdensky on July 29. He was born in 1946. He was chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel, a member of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, a long-time supporter of the Litvak community and a member of the board of the Goodwill Foundation. Born and raised in Lithuania, Grozendsky and family were able to repatriate to Israel in 1972. He was a tireless defender of Litvak heritage and proponent of Holocaust justice and remembrance. His grandparentsm uncles and cousins were murdered in the Alytus region in Lithuania.. The Lithuanian Jewish Community and chairwoman Faina Kukliansky extend our deepest condolences to his wife Bella, children, grandchildren, many friends and the entire Litvak community. May his memory be a blessing.

Voices of the Departed

Voices of the Departed

The Klaipėda Jewish Community will hold a ceremony at the old Jewish cemetery there to name the names of 1,225 people buried there and to unveil a monument to the lost Jewish community and lost Jewish graves. Ruth Leiserowitz will speak about the history of Jewish cemeteries in Klaipėda, formerly known as Memel. The Jewish actors troupe Shatil will perform as well.

Time: 4:00 P.M., July 30
Place: Old Jewish cemetery, Sinagogų street no. 13, Klaipėda

Holocaust Commemorations in Šiauliai and Kužiai

Holocaust Commemorations in Šiauliai and Kužiai

The Šiauliai District Jewish Community commemorated the establishment of the Šiauliai ghetto 85 years ago, its liquidation several years later and Holocaust victims buried at the mass grave in Kužiai on July 20.

The International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes in Lithuania organized the procession to the Kužiai mass grave in the Luponiai Forest.

Šiauliai District Jewish Community chairwoman Rašella Galinienė addressed the gathering at the ghetto site in central Šiauliai and Choral Synagogue cantor Shmuel Yaatom performed kaddish. Šiauliai deputy mayor Justinas Švėgžda also spoke about the need to keep memory alive.

The commemoration continued indoors at the Chaim Frankl villa where Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky spoke about how her mother, an inmate at the Šiauliai ghetto, was marched with other prisoners to Radviliškis, where they were put on trains and sent to different concentration camps. Her mother was sent to the Stutthof concentration camp in what is now Poland surviving against all odds the barbarity of the camp.

Read more