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.

Photo: celebrate. My grandfather, Jonas Noreika, is in the third row. My mother, then two years old, is among them. Source: Silvia Foti, The Nazi’s Granddaughter (Regnery History, 2021).

by Silvia Foti

An open letter to Liam, on his bar mitzvah

Dear Liam,

You do not know my background and what I carry, as I know your background and your family history. You barely know me, and there is no gentle way to tell you who I am. I read about you in an article your cousin Grant Gochin published in The Times of Israel, about your family and mine. I am writing to a boy I have met just once, for a singular moment, at your cousin Grant’s home, to bless you shortly after the day you were called to the Torah and became a man. I am the granddaughter of the man whose orders helped empty your family’s world of Jews.

My grandfather was Jonas Noreika. He governed the Lithuanian district of Šiauliai, where the town of Papilė lies. He signed orders that confined its Jews and gave away what was stolen from them. Your family was murdered inside the system he ran. Tsile Gochin, the sister of your great-grandmother Sarah, was one of them. My grandfather bears responsibility for her murder, and that of your cousins, relatives, friends and neighbors.