The Lithuanian Jewish Community is pleased to announce the our annual Amehaye summer camp for 2021:
June 28-July 2 Children aged 7-10 (day camp), register here;
July 5-July 9 Ages 10 to 13 (including overnight), register here;
August 2-August 6 Ages 14 to 17 (overnight), register here;
July 18-July 23 Jewish scouts (overnight).
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For more information send an email to amehaye2021@lzb.lt or call +370 601 46656.
by Victoria Sideraitė-Alon
The old Jewish cemetery in the Šnipiškės (Shnipishok) neighborhood in Vilnius wasn’t destroyed in a single day. Back at the turn of the 19th to 20th century, the remains of 700 Vilnius Jews buried there were exhumed and reburied in a different part of the same cemetery during construction in the surrounding area.
Later during the Soviet era during the mid-20th century when work went on to extend what is now Šeimyniškių street, encroaching again on the old Jewish cemetery, these 700 burials were again exhumed and sent to a different grave. They were rediscovered in 2003 during construction of apartment houses next to Vilnius’s King Mindaugas Bridge. At the time, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairman Simonas Alperavičius resolved to have these 700 reinterred at the still-operational Jewish cemetery on Sudervės road in Vilnius. The reburial ceremony was attended by LJC officials and rabbis. The new grave there was marked with four posts.
The deportations of Lithuanian residents touched every ethnic group in the country, the Jews included. On 14 June 1941, some 3 thousand Jews were exiled from Lithuania.
In the fall of 1941, a train carrying a cargo of exiles from Lithuania rolled in to the foreign and cold city of Syktyvkar. Ravaged by famine and disease, they had travelled thousands of kilometres in tightly sealed cattle cars. Entire families would die from starvation. Those deported on orders from Joseph Stalin, the ‘Father of Nations’, included the Abramovičius family of Jews from the town of Tauragė (Taurogi shtetl): mother Taube-Leja and her three kids, the oldest son Leibas aged 12, the middle son Abramas, 8, and the youngest Aronas, just five.
The city of Utena in northeast Lithuania has a new piece of public art, a bronze heart, to recall the birth there of Bernard Lown, Nobel prize winner and famous cardiologist who invented the defibrillator.
The statue comes as part of a project by cultural historian Sandra Dastikienė called “Old Neighbors” intended to bring public attention to the Jewish community’s legacy in the Utena region.
“To heal communication between the Lithuanian and Jewish peoples, we have to start at the grassroots level, from the culture of the small towns or shtetls, where both separate communities lived together in peace for centuries. It was that, namely neighborliness, that I want to emphasize with my project in Utena, Anykščiai, Molėtai and Dusetos,” Dastikienė said.
Lown was born in Utena on June 7, 1921, to a family of Jewish merchants. Fearing growing anti-Semitism and seeking a better life for their children, his parents took the family to the USA in 1935. Bernard Lown studied medicine there and was graduated in 1945. He passed away earlier this year in February at the age of 99.
June 9, 2021–European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen addressed thousands participating in the 2021 American Jewish Committee (AJC) Virtual Global Forum. She reiterated the Commission’s commitment to fighting antisemitism, fostering Jewish life, Holocaust remembrance and strong EU-Israel partnership.
“After taking office as Commission president in 2019, I stepped up Europe’s fight against anti-Semitism. This is why, later this year, the Commission will adopt its first-ever ‘EU Strategy on Combating Anti-Semitism and Fostering Jewish Life’ … All European students should learn about the Holocaust, no matter their background, family history or country of origin. … We want to foster Jewish life in Europe in all its diversity. We want to make sure that Jews are free to follow their religious and cultural traditions. … The European Commission has significantly increased the budget for preventing and addressing anti-Semitism and fostering Jewish life, and we will also take action if European money is used to call into question Israel’s right to exist.”
Full speech here.
Union of Former Concentration Camp Prisoners member Sulamita Lev celebrates her birthday June 7. She has been an employee of and volunteer at the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the LJC Social Center for many years.
We wish her a happy birthday, much happiness and good health, strength of spirit and joy. We wish you many meaningful years to come and that you would always remain as you are, young at heart.
Mazl tov!
The newspaper Šiaulių Kraštas published the incredible story of Sulamit’s life and rescue from the Šiauliai ghetto two years ago. The text is available in Lithuanian here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community congratulates Rūta Ribinskaitė for successfully defending and taking first place among final works for earning a bachelor’s degree at the International Relations and Political Science Institute of Vilnius University. Her work was titled “(Un)Fading Stereotypical Images of Jews: A Qualitative Analysis of the Internet News Site Delfi.lt.”
She told us: “Thank you for the opportunity to connect with the Jewish community, to acquire a lot of information, to gain experience and get to know members of the community, which led to my successful completion of studies.”
Way to go, Rūta.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky has participated in the commission for the final supervisory assessment of work done to restore the synagogue in Žiežmariai, Lithuania. Work on the ground floor is now complete.
Work on the building is drawing to an end and the synagogue is set to begin hosting educational, cultural, tourist and other public activities. Following completion, it could become an important community site and tourist attraction.
Currently the synagogue is hosting an exhibit of reproductions of drawings by Dora Pilianskienė. She came from Žiežmariai and as a young Jewish woman left her hometown, but at an advanced age began drawing and painting images she cherished from Žiežmariai. Her relatives have bequeathed her works to the Žiežmariai Culture Center.
Isaac Herzog has been elected Israel’s 11th president, with 87 votes of Knesset’s 120.
The Jewish agency head, former Labor chief and son of 6th president defeated educator Miriam Peretz and said he’ll work to “build bridges” within Israeli society and with Diaspora.
Isaac Herzog, the chairman of the Jewish Agency and former head of the Labor party, was elected Wednesday as Israel’s eleventh president.
Herzog defeated Miriam Peretz, a social activist who overcame the loss of two of her sons in battle to become an Israel Prize-winning educator, with 87 votes, the most a presidential candidate has ever won, to her 26.
In the secret election, in which all 120 MKs were eligible to cast votes, three abstained, three votes were disqualified and one lawmaker, Ra’am chair Mansour Abbas, did not vote.
/Translation from the Lithuanian language/
Fresh at the GRRCL’s helm, Bubnys opens about the connection between the June Uprising and the Holocaust, Noreika’s personality, and historic truth
‘There is no such thing as the absolute historic truth. And I do not believe there can be any on principle,’ said Arūnas Bubnys, the new head of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania (GRRCL). In his interview with the LRT.lt portal he also spoke about the challenges the Centre had faced, and the plans to boost the GRRCL’s prestige.
Bubnys did not have an easy accession to the post of the GRRCL’s director. After a conflict with the staff that had ran for a few months, Adas Jakubauskas, the Centre’s director for nine months, was fired in early April. The Parliament approved this decision by a majority vote, however Bubnys’s nomination as the new head was immediately met with allegations from the parliamentary opposition.
Members of the Choral Synagogue minyan were treated to a breakfast made by the Bagel Shop Café at the Lithuanian Jewish Community with LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky in attendance on the first day of calendar summer, June 1.
United States representative Brad Sherman (D, Sherman Oaks, California) has asked the Lithuanian ambassador to the United States for clarification regarding claims by the Lithuanian Government the pro-Nazi prime minister in the Lithuanian Provisional Government of 1941 was somehow exonerated by the Congress in the 1970s.
Congressman-Sherman-to-Ambassador-Plepyte-Letter-Response1Correspondence leading to the latest letter:
Dear Community members,
This year we’ll mark the 80th anniversary of the onset of the Holocaust in Lithuania. The Lithuanian Jewish Community is creating a digital chronicle to help the broader public understand how Litvaks lived before the Holocaust and what happened to their communities beginning in 1941.
We are asking you to share the stories and photographs of your relatives who lived in the Lithuanian shtetls and died in the mass murders in 1941 or the years following.
Everyone is invited to participate by sending copies of photographs and short texts including biographies and descriptions of murders to info@lzb.lt or zanas@sc.lzb.lt
Please indicate the names of people in photographs, locations and dates if available.
“From Lazdijai to Hollywood: The Joseph Achron Phenomenon” is a lecture celebrating Joseph Achron’s 135th birthday.
Joseph Achron (or Akhron, 1886-1943), the violin prodigy and composer born in Lazdijai, Lithuania, charmed audiences in Warsaw, Grodno, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Kiev and other cities around Europe, and went on to play Carnegie Hall. Having achieved fame in New York and Los Angeles, he remains little known in Lithuania. A close friend of Jascha Heifetz and Arnold Schönberg, he was humble on stage. He composed his greatest hit, Hebrew Melody, in barely an half hour.
How did his religious family support the young virtuoso’s musical career? What did Tsar Nikolai’s mother present as a gift to Achron? What did Achron contribute to the creation of professional Jewish music? Find out the answers and other interesting matters in Kamilė Rupeikaitė’s lecture “From Lazdijai to Hollywood: The Joseph Achron Phenomenon” at 3:00 P.M. on May 25.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community extends our deepest condolences on the death of long-time Lithuanian diplomat Edminas Bagdonas to his surviving family members.
Edminas Bagdonas, 58, passed away Saturday in Vilnius following a battle with illness. He was one of the most remarkable of Lithuanian diplomats after the country achieved independence in the early 1990s. Most recently he served as Lithuanian ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. He has been active in Lithuania’s diplomatic corps since 1994 and has served as ambassador to Israel and Belarus.
His admirers have called a “statesman with a capital S.” Litvaks in Israel remember him well for his communicability, professionalism and sense of duty.
Arie Ben-Ari Grozendsky, the chairman of the Association of Lithuanian Jewish in Israel, has sent the following condolences as well:
Happy birthday to Fania Brantsovskaya, our living link with former Lithuania before the Holocaust. A Jewish partisan, she kept fighting after the war, educating generations about the truth of what happened. Most of us at a certain age in adulthood begin to slow down, to rise more slowly from our chairs, to walk more cautiously. Fania never did. She still walks with a spring in her step as if she were a teenager, with a smile for everyone and ready to talk to anyone without regard for social status. Happy birthday, Fania. Mazl tov! Bis 120!
As Jews prepare for the Sabbath this Friday, blessing the wine and the end of the week with prayer, we would like to bless Israel with a more peaceful situation as a cease-fire comes into effect after 11 days of thousands of rockets raining down from the Gaza Strip. We will light candles and say a blessing for Israelis to hold peace and a peaceful life dear. Shabat shalom!
“What we are depends on what the Sabbath is to us. The law of the Sabbath day is in the life of the spirit what the law of gravitation is in nature” Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) writes on page 89 in his book “The Sabbath” (1951).
On Fridays Jews in Israel always wish one another “shabat shalom,” the peace of the Sabbath, and Lithuanian Jews wish the Jews in Israel and everywhere the same thing. Shabat shalom!
Illustration: Shavuot: The Harvest by Harry Lieberman, c. 1934
Greetings on Shavuos (Shavuot) or the Feast of Weeks with an educational video in Lithuanian about the holiday.
by Birutė Vyšniauskaitė, lrt.lt
“It was very cozy and even fun because all the neighbors gathered in one hiding place. We also took in a married couple from the neighboring building because they didn’t have anywhere to hide after the danger signal,” Litvak woman Dusia Lan Kretchmer told Lrytas.lt about the Hamas rocket attacks on Tel Aviv Wednesday night. She left Lithuania about 50 years ago.
Kretchmer said she was in disbelief Hamas rockets were targeting Lod, the city on the way towards Israel’s main Ben-Gurion International Airport, on Wednesday.
“I have taught chemistry for twenty years in this city. Over that entire time I have witnessed Jews and Arabs living together in peace. Many times I have celebrated holidays with the city’s communities, Arabs celebrated their holidays with Jews, Jews with Arabs. So many Arabs live there, I can’t wrap my head around why Hamas would take aim at their own people,” she said.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
We invite you to a virtual Sabbath discussion at 7:00 P.M. on May 15 of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot or Shavuos, moderated by Vijamas Žitkauskas. We will discuss the significance and traditions of the Feast of Weeks as it is known in English. The discussion will be held in Russian and prior registration is required. Registration form here.