Holocaust – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Kaunas Jewish Community Dedicates Concert to Righteous Gentile Lithuanian President

The Kaunas Jewish Community and the Kaunas City Museum held a concert last week called “From Čiurlionis to Today” and dedicated it to the memory of Kazys Grinius on the occasion of his 160th birthday. Grinius was president of Lithuania in the period between the two world wars. He rescued Jews from the Holocaust and he and his wife Kristina were recognized as Righteous Gentiles by the Yad Vashem authority in 2016.

Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas said: “The president was truly a very noble person. He and others wrote a memorandum against the massacre of Jews. This memorandum inspired others to rescue Jews during the war years.”

2026-11-10

Panevėžys Newspaper Reports on Dilapidated Holocaust Memorial Monuments

The Panevėžys newspaper Sekundė reported November 7 a direction marker and memorial to a Holocaust mass murder site has fallen into disrepair.

The marker and monument are made of large pieces of oak trees in a Lithuanian folk style and are in various states of decay. The wooden monuments are located along the Old Vilnius Highway and leads to the mass murder site in the Staniūnai Forest where 103 Jews were murdered.

Full story in Lithuanian here.

2026-11-102026-11-10

Lithuanian Jewish Community Informational Overview Memorandum

Historical Context

Before the Second World War, Lithuania was for centuries an important center of Jewish life and the cradle of the distinctive Litvak tradition, marked by its own culture of Jewish learning, religious thought and communal life. From June of 1941 the Nazi occupiers and their collaborators murdered some 90% to 95% of Lithuania’s Jews, one of the highest mortality rates among all Jewish communities in Europe. After Lithuania restored its independence in 1990, the surviving Jewish community (today numbering a few thousand members) renewed its public religious and cultural life. Its activities are organized through the Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC), an umbrella organization that brings together the country’s various Jewish organizations. At present the LJC unites 30 member organizations.

The LJC is a member of the European Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress.

Jewish Life

Today the Jewish community is active and through its institutions, programs and services offers activities for people of all generations.

The Choral Synagogue in Vilnius is one of only two synagogues currently functioning in Lithuania and one of the main centers of the country’s Jewish religious life. Morning and evening services are held there every day, throughout the year and on holidays. They are attended by community members as well as guests from Israel and other countries. A permanent cantor leads the daily and festive services. The community is working to strengthen the involvement of rabbis in its activities: rabbis visit regularly, and it is currently looking for a rabbi who would work more closely with younger community members.

2026-11-092026-11-10

Lithuanian Ethnic Minority Department Officials Visit Panevėžys Jewish Community

Lithuanian Ethnic Minority Department director Dainius Babilas led a delegation of his colleagues on a visit to the Panevėžys Jewish Community on October 26. They met with chairman Gennady Kofman and member Nerijus Jakštonis and the group discussed a number of issues including regular reporting by Lithuania to implement the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and measures to fight anti-Semitism. They also spoke about the activities of ethnic minority NGOs and the need to publish information about their activities, as well as other issues including Holocaust education.

2026-11-042026-11-04

Ninth Museum Honors Victims of Grosse Aktion

The Ninth Fort in Kaunas held a commemoration of victims of the Grosse Aktion on the 85th anniversary of the massacre at the fort on October 28. The commemoration organized by the Kaunas Jewish Community and the museum featured speeches, music and a dramatized documentary film. Candles were lit and stones placed at the mass murder site.

From October 28 to 29 in 1941 around 10,000 Jews were murdered in one mass murder operation. Most were taken from the Kaunas ghetto.

Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas, Lithuanian Jewish Community executive director Michail Segal, representatives of the Lost Shtetl Museum in Šeduva, Israeli embassy chargé d’affaires Shimon Pesach, French embassy chargé d’affaires Emmanuel Carnesecca, German cultural attaché Valerie Hog, deputy Lithuanian foreign minister Rūta Statulevičiūtė-Kaučikienė, Lithuanian MP Vytautas Juozapaitis, Jurbarkas mayor Skirmantas Mockevičius, Ninth Fort Museum director Marius Pečiulis and others attended the commemoration.

2026-11-042026-11-10

Happy Birthday, Valdas Adamkus

The Lithuanian Jewish Community wishes former president Valdas Adamkus a very happy 100th birthday. One hundred years of meaningful work, wisdom, love for Lithuania and human respect. Your life, civic-mindedness and dedication to Lithuania are an inseparable part of the history of our country. The Lithuanian Jewish Community holds your friendship, attention to Litvak history, culture and commemoration and your respect for the human being in the highest esteem. Thank you for your sincerity, warmth and openness. Mazl tov. Bis 120!

2026-11-042026-11-04

Dedication to Ona Šimaitė: Concert to Celebrate Lithuania’s Righteous Gentiles

A concert tour to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the naming of Vilnius University librarian Ona Šimaitė as a Righteous Gentile is coming to Vilnius November 11.

Performers include Rokas Vaitkevičius on cello, Simona Zajančauskaitė playing piano and Tadas Daujotas blowing the shofar horn.

Tickets cost 10 euros and are available here. More information here.

Time: 5:00 P.M., Wednesday, November 11
Place: Theater Hall, Vilnius University, Vilnius

2026-11-032026-11-03

New Ninth Fort Book Launched

Mexican advertising expert, filmmaker and author Roberto Valdes presented the English translation of his latest book, The 9th Fort (El Noveno Fuerte), at the Aušra Museum in Šiauliai last week. The book is an historical novel combining real events and fictional dialogue to shed light on one of the most obscure chapters of World War II. In just over 24 hours in 1941 around 10,000 Jews were murdered at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas.

The author told the gathering how the book came about and his views on the Holocaust, Lithuania and World War II.

The Aušra Museum invited attendees to take a tour of the new exhibits at the Frenkl mansion there following the book launch. Snacks were served.

2026-10-292026-11-10

Kaunas Jewish Community and Ninth Fort to Mark 85th Anniversary of Grosse Aktion

Eighty-five years ago the persecution and extermination of Lithuanian Jews began. The Nazis and Lithuanian Nazis called their mass murder operations aktionen. The Grosse Aktion, or Great Operation, was the largest single mass murder of Jews in Lithuania, where around 10,000 inmates from the Kaunas ghetto were murdered at the Ninth Fort in just over 24 hours.

The Kaunas Jewish Community and the Ninth Fort Museum invite you to mark the tragedy this year with a commemoration at the Ninth Fort in Kaunas followed by a concert at the fort called Muzik fun zikoyrn, or Music from Memory, featuring the trio Trise, saxophonist Petras Vyšniauskas, pianist Aleksandra Žvirblytė and percussionist Arkadijus Gotesmanas, performing works by Jospeh Achron, Max Helfman, Anatoly Shenderov and others as well as Jewish melodies.

The Ninth Fort Museum will screen a short documentary (by Karolina Vilkelienė, 2026) about the Grosse Aktion during the commemoration there. The commemoration at the Ninth Fort will conclude with a candle-lighting and stone-laying ceremony on the actual killing field.

The event is free and open to the public.

Time: 6:30 P.M., Wednesday, October 28
Place: Ninth Fort Museum, Žemaičių highway no. 73, Kaunas

2026-10-21

Šiauliai Jewish Community Visits Kupiškis

Members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community and guests from Germany took a trip to Kupiškis, a town with a deep and rich Jewish legacy. There they visited the Kupiškis museum and learned about the town’s cultural and historical heritage. Then they took a guided tour of Kupiškis’s central square where once three synagogues operated. Two of the synagogue buildings remain standing. They learned about Kupiškis before the Holocaust, Jewish life, traditions and history there, and that Lithuanians and Jews lived next to one another in peace before the Holocaust.

2026-10-212026-10-21

Anti-Semitism in England’s Schools

by Ben Bloch, October 20, 2026

Report set to reveal vast scale of anti-Semitism in English schools

A landmark report is set to detail the vast scale of anti-Semitism in English schools and colleges, Sky News can reveal.

The review, conducted by former schools inspector Sir David Bell, will on Wednesday set out 27 recommendations to create change, which the government is poised to accept in full.

It will call for teacher training and resources to tackle anti-Semitism in schools, strengthened guidance on political impartiality, and giving students the tools to recognize and confront online anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracy theories.

Speaking exclusively to Sky News, Sir David said he was “very struck” by the evidence of rising anti-Semitism in schools, but also the extent to which it actually goes underreported.

2026-10-21

State Media on Litvak’s Visit to Žagarė

Photo: Joanne Fedler by Vilmantas Raupelis/LRT

Lithuanian state radio and television on their website LRT.lt featured Sydney-based writer Joanne Fedler’s visit to Žagarė, Lithuania, in spite of her family’s injunction never to set foot in Lithuania.

Fedler is the author of 17 books and teaches creative writing. She operates a small publishing house called Joanne Fedler Media. She was born and raised in South Africa to a family of Litvak immigrants before coming to Australia in 2001.

In fall of 2025 she was at a month-long writing workshop in Finland and decided the family hearth, Žagarė, was too close not to visit. She told LRT a dream of her grandfather as a young man was the sign for her which sealed the deal. She decided she would honor her family by travelling to Lithuania rather than avoiding it.

2026-10-202026-10-20

First Sunday in October in Žagarė

On Sunday descendants of Jews from Žagarė who live now in Šiauliai, Vilnius and other Lithuanian towns and cities gathered in front of the statue to Rabbi Israel Salanter aka Yisrael ben Ze’ev Wolf Lipkin along with Shimon Pesach from the Israeli embassy and Rabbi Kalev Krelin.

This is an annual event. On the first Sunday in October they come together to remember the Jewish history of Žagarė, to honor the Jews who lived here and to preserve their memory. Participants also visited the mass murder sites in Naryškinas Park and at the old Jewish cemetery.

The meeting then moved on to a local café where the discussion continued.

2026-10-142026-10-14

YIVO Studied a Living Yiddish Culture. What Happened When That World Was Nearly Destroyed?

Photo: YIVO reading room at 1048 Fifth Avenue, ca. 1958. (YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

by Andrew Silow-Carroll October 11, 2026

Kalman Weiser’s new history follows the institute from Vilna to New York where it had to preserve a vanished world and cultivate a future.

When YIVO was founded in Vilna in 1925 its mission was to study a living people.

The Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut was meant to be a national university for Jews scattered across Eastern Europe and increasingly the world. Its scholars studied Yiddish language and literature, but also Jewish sociology, psychology, history and contemporary life. YIVO was interested in how Jews actually lived and in helping them navigate modernity.

When the Nazis destroyed much of that world, YIVO’s surviving caretakers were forced to ponder how and why to keep their efforts going in a new world haunted by unimaginable loss.

Their efforts are explored in Kalman Weiser’s new history “Yiddish Scholarship Comes to America: The YIVO Institute at 100.” After World War II a relocated and heartsick YIVO had to become a guardian of a nearly vanished culture, a rescuer of its texts and artifacts and an institution which could somehow make that culture meaningful to Jews who were rapidly shedding Yiddish and embracing a distinctly American, English-speaking identity–all simultaneously.

2026-10-132026-10-13

From Sukkot to Artificial Intelligence: A Meeting with Students

Last week Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky visited the Martynas Mažvydas Pre-Gymnasium in Vilnius and held an open-format discussion with students there in a tent erected outside the school. The students and the chairwoman spent several hours in the sukka discussing Jewish life after the Holocaust and today, the importance Judaism places on learning, artificial intelligence and its influence on our opportunities, as well as a number of other topics.

We’d like to thank sincerely the teachers for their invitation to come and speak and for their attention to Jewish history and identity. Likewise we are grateful to the wonderful students for their interest, keen questions and the delicious latkes they served. True friendship begins when we have the courage to question, listen to and recognize one another.

2026-10-122026-10-12

Apology

The Lithuanian Jewish Community inadvertently named a suspect erroneously in a report several weeks ago about vandalism against a Jewish partisan memorial in Kaunas. The information was not properly verified. Our deepest and sincerest apologies to the person named in this report, which has since been removed.

2026-10-092026-10-09

Commemoration of 85th Anniversary of Onset of the Holocaust in Švenčionys and Lithuania

A sizeable group gathered at the Menorah in the central park in Švenčionys on October 4 to commemorate the anniversary of the start of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Organizer of the event Kristina Sizonova began the commemoration followed by historian Nadežda Spiridonovienė who went over the historical facts with the audience. From June to November of 1941 over 80% of Jews resident in Lithuania had been murdered. By 1944 more than 200,000 Jews had been murdered in Lithuania.

Students from the Zigmas Žemaitis Gymnasium in Švenčionys gave further presentations of Jewish life there before the Holocaust.

Švenčionys Jewish Community chairman Moshe Shapiro thanks attendees for coming and invited people to lay stones, wreaths and candles on the Menorah. The commemoration then moved to the mass grave in the Platumai Forest where about 8,000 Jews were murdered, including entire Jewish communities from surrounding town and villages.

MP Emanuelis Zingeris spoke at the mass grave memorial, as did Artur Soroko from the Polish embassy in Vilnius. Chairman Shapiro ended the commemoration retelling his own family’s tragedy.

2026-10-08

UK Conservative Party Condemns Green Party over Anti-Semitic Resolution

Leader of the Conservative Party of the United Kingdom Kemi Badenoch in a closing speech for the party’s conference in Birmingham Wednesday condemned the decision Sunday by the UK’s Green Party to equate support for Israel with racism. Green leader Zack Polanski, a Jew, failed to show up for that vote on the party’s new policy. Israeli declared Polanski persona non grata following the adoption of the anti-Israel platform plank.

“You know what else is taking us backwards? The disgraceful anti-Semitism we saw at the Green Party conference in Brighton last weekend. They are seeking to erase Jewish identity. Shame on the Green Party and shame on Zack Polanski.

“Exactly three years ago today, we saw the horrific 7th of October attacks, the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.

“The Conservative Party stands with the Jewish people. We will never stop fighting anti-Semitism,” Badenoch said.

2026-10-072026-10-07

East German Town Bans Stumbling Stones

Photo: Stolperstein commemorating Nazi victim Paul Gröger embedded in the sidewalk in front of Heidenau City Hall. Robert Michael/picture alliance via Getty Images.

by Toby Axelrod, September 27

Transparent maneuver by AfD to suppress German commemorative culture, Jewish leader and Holocaust survivor says

A decision to bar the “stumbling stone” memorials to victims of the Nazis has touched a nerve in one small German town, and beyond.

At issue is a motion passed September 25 by the city council of Heidenau in the former East Germany [in Saxony] to stop installation of such memorials in local sidewalks, calling them disrespectful, and to use the town’s North Cemetery instead.

Set into the ground, the small, engraved brass Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, are meant to make pedestrians stop and think about the fate of former residents. There are currently some 116,000 stones laid in 1,860 municipalities across Europe, mostly in Germany, according to the project’s website.

2026-09-282026-09-28

Condolences

Alfonsas Bukontas died September 23. He was born Mordchelis Michnickis on September 11, 1941. Both his parents were murdered during the Holocaust in Lithuania and Bukontas was raised by Lithuanians. He was an accomplished poet, translator of German, Yiddish, Polish and even Sanskrit, and writer. He was a member of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Union of Former Ghetto Inmates. Our deepest condolences to his friends, family members and members of the Union of Former Ghetto Inmates. May his memory be a blessing.

2026-09-282026-09-28

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