The Lithuanian Jewish Community and the Rositsan and Maccabi Elite Chess and Checkers Club invite you to a chess tournament at 12:00 noon on Saturday, April 22 at the Lithuanian Jewish Community at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. Tournament director FIDE master Boris Rositsan, contact for further information and to register at info@metbor.lt or call +3706 5543556
Vilnius Synagogue Map Launched
“When we speak of Jewish cultural heritage, we don’t mean a foreign people who lived apart from everything and one day decided to move. We’re talking about what was in Lithuania, about the Lithuanian nation’s heritage, not just of the Jews,” Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon said Friday at the launch of map of the synagogues of Vilnius held at the ambassadorial residence. One of the goals of the map project was to show just how interconnected Jewish and Lithuanian history is.
Of 135 Synagogues, Only One Remains
The map contains a total of 135 sites of synagogues which operated before the Holocaust. Most of the synagogues were located in the Vilnius Old Town, around the Jewish area of the city centering on the Great Synagogue and spreading along Vokiečių, Gaono and Stiklių streets. There were more than 30 synagogues located in that compact area, but none of them remain. The synagogues were razed and other buildings built in their place, or the sites were used as public spaces.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Condolences
Donald Jay Rickles passed away at his home in Beverly Hills, California, April 6 from kidney failure at the age of 90. He is survived by his wife Barbara Rickles (formerly Sklar), his daughter Mindy Rickles and two grandchildren Ethan and Harrison Mann. His wife was at his side as he died. Their son Larry, born in 1970, passed away in 2011.
He was born to Jewish parents in Queens, New York, on May 8, 1926. His father Max Rickles emigrated in 1903 with his Litvak parents from Kaunas (then Kovno in the Russian Empire) and his mother Etta Feldman was born in New York City to Austrian immigrant parents. Rickles grew up in Jackson Heights, New York.
Vilna Gaon Museum on New Jewish Museum Proposal
The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum has issued a statement via press release about a recent proposal by Lithuanian officials to set up a Holocaust-free new Jewish museum in the Palace of Sports or next to it on land which contains the centuries-old historic Jewish graveyard of Vilnius.
Let’s Create a Strategic Strategy for Jewish Heritage, Not Disneyland
The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum was disappointed by information appearing in the press last week about plans by government institutions to establish another Jewish museum in the Lithuanian capital instead of assuring support for existing projects.
The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, whose sections are housed in authentic buildings closely connected with the Jewish history of Vilnius, has recently been undergoing an intense and productive period. We host international events at the highest level, for example, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance conference held on March 22 and 23, and the number of visitors is constantly growing. New permanent exhibitions are being created for installation in our historic buildings, including the opening this fall of a new Samuel Bak Museum, showcasing the Litvak painter’s life and works, and in the near future we also intend to open the Museum of Lithuanian Jewish Culture, aka the Litvak Center and a dedicated Lithuanian Holocaust and Vilnius ghetto memorial museum, which has attracted the attention of international museum organizations including ICOM.
The latter museum is to be housed in the historical building on Žemaitijos street (former Strashun street) which was listed as a cultural treasure last month. This is the building which housed the Mefitsei Haskalah library before World War II and the Vilnius ghetto library during the war. which organized cultural events inside the ghetto and served as a secret meeting place for members of the ghetto resistance organization. In 1945 Holocaust survivors established the short-lived Jewish Museum in the building, quickly shut down by the Soviet government. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum intends to reutilize the building for Holocaust education. After the museum has these additional sections, a unique route will be created for the visitor to explore Jewish Vilna.
Come Observe Passover at the Choral Synagogue
Dear Community members,
We invite you to come to a kosher Passover Seder at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius at 9:00 P.M. on April 10.
The cost is 7 euros.
Please pick up an invitation at the synagogue on workdays from 9 A.M. to 1:00 P.M.
For those who wish to pray, please come to the evening prayer on April 10 which will begin at 8:00 P.M.
Jakov Bunka Welfare and Support Foundation Opens 2017 Commemorative Tree Planting Season
The Shtetl Commemorative Garden is located in the Žemaitija National Park in Medsėdžiai village in the Plateliai aldermanship in the Plungė region of Lithuania. Go visit!
Nietzsche and Pesach: How the Exodus Ruined Everything
by Andrés Spokoiny
Frederick Nietzsche believed that the Egyptians were blond.
My apologies; I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning:
Despite what people sometimes claim, Frederick Nietzsche wasn’t an anti-Semite. To the contrary, he was strongly against the anti-Semitism that raged in Germany in his lifetime. He even said in his private correspondence that anti-Semites, his racist sister included, “should be shot”. (And you thought your family had issues…)
Yet, Nietzsche had a problem with Pesach. A big problem.
For the bespectacled professor, Jews, with their “revolt of the slaves”, had “subverted the natural order” and instituted a “morality of slaves” that is opposed to the “morality of the masters”, the latter being the natural and desired state of the world. That ushered in the “collective degeneration of man” that Nietzsche saw in his own time. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, and democracy as a whole were for Nietzsche direct results of the revolution of morality that the Jewish slaves started.
Full piece here.
Vilnius Mayor, Lithuanian PM Decree: And There Shall Be Built a Jewish History Museum Next to the Palace of Sports
Vilnius, March 30, BNS–Lithuanian prime minister Saulius Skvernelis said there are deliberations on changing the project for the reconstruction of the Palace of Sports to include a equip a building to host a Jewish history museum and for conferences. There was consideration on holding concerts and other cultural events in the project initiated by the former Government.
Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašius proposed setting up a Litvak History Museum next to the Palace of Sports which the Government is planning to renovate. “I think the Government has done the right thing in halting the untransparent bid begun earlier. But there should be a conference center there without any doubt. We just discussed that it would be more sensible if next to the conference center or partially integrated with the conference center there were a museum of Litvak history. It is probably this could be accomplished wonderfully and would become an attraction. We agreed to develop the idea further. I’m glad my opinion and the prime minister’s coincide on this,” the mayor of Vilnius told BNS after meeting with Lithuanian prime minister Saulius Skvernelis Thursday.
“It should be able to be used for conferences. Now there is a concept, a conference and concert hall, so it should be conferences and a museum,” the prime minister told reporters at parliament.
Recovering Memory: Vilnius University Memory Diploma Graduation Ceremony
Event at 3:00 P.M. on April 3, 2017
Vilnius University will host a Memory Diploma Graduation Ceremony in the small auditorium at Universiteto street no. 3, Vilnius. The ceremony is intended to honor students, staff and members of the university community who were marginalized, thrown out, not allowed to finish their education or academic work and otherwise repressed because of the actions of the totalitarian regimes or local collaborators.
The university was compelled to rethink its relation with the past after receiving a letter from Israeli professor of medicine Moshe Lapidoth in the summer of 2016, requesting a symbolic commemoration of his uncle Khlaune Meishtovski who was a student at the Mathematics and Natural Sciences Faculty of Vilnius University before the war. After eight successful semesters studying chemistry and physics, he was expelled July 1, 1941 because he was a Jew.
In 2016 the university formed a commission to do a historical study and decide selection criteria for people who were unfairly deprived of an education there. A symbolic Memory Diploma was established to remember these people. It is hoped the graduation ceremony will become a university tradition.
After preliminary study, the university determined about 650 Jews and 80 Poles were forced out as well as a professor whose wife was Jewish during the beginning of the Nazi occupation. Several hundred Lithuanians were also deprived of university study and employment.
There will be a live-stream on facebook:
Rabbi Shimshon Isaacson Teaches about Passover
You are warmly invited to attend Rabbi Shimson Isaacson’s lesson
Everything You Need to Know about Passover
at 7:30 P.M. on March 30 at the Choral Synagogue at Pylimo street no. 39 in Vilnius.
Equality and Diversity Prizes Awarded to Leonidas Donskis, Baltic Pride Organizers, Crisis Center Director
Vilnius, March 30, BNS–The fourth National Equality and Diversity Awards recognized the contributions of Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis who died last year.
The gender equality award was presented to Vilnius Crisis Center director Nijolė Dirsienė for her many years of caring for women suffering domestic violence and active work over 20 years in preventing violence. In the break-through category the Baltic Pride gay march organizers got the award, according to event spokespeople.
The ceremony held at the Royal Palace in Vilnius Wednesday handed out ten awards for achievements and initiatives over the last year.
The award for dialogue between peoples went to Vilnius Ukrainian Association chairwoman Natalija Šertvytienė for active work in expanding ethnic dialogue in Lithuania, preserving the Ukrainian ethnic identity and aid in integrating Ukraine in Europe.
LJC Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky Speaks at National Equality and Diversity Awards Ceremony
The Lithuanian Jewish Community and other ethnic communities and public organizations appreciate the National Equality and Diversity Awards includes a nomination for “Dialogue between Peoples.”
As a member of an ethnic minority, I feel a more enlightened view in society on topics such as the Holocaust and xenophobia. People are slowly coming around to asking questions, engaging in discussions and thinking about the issues. Four years ago the Lithuanian Jewish Community began the Bagel Shop tolerance campaign which opened the Community’s doors to the public and made Jewish culture and history more accessible and, of course, more attractive. When the Community opened its doors, the public opened their hearts to the Community. I would like to thank everyone who took an interest and participated in this tolerance initiative which I believe marked the beginning of a small “dialogue between peoples” revolution. I present the highly esteemed candidates for the “Dialogue between Peoples” award:
Marius Ivaškevičius, the force behind the March of Memory dedicated to the murdered Jewish community of Molėtai. A record number of people turned out to remember and honor those killed, up to 3,000 participants marched along the last route taken by the victims of genocide perpetrated by Lithuanian hands.
Lithuania’s Shoah Whitewash Project
Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem has said the Lithuanian authorities were “very culpable.”
A derelict shul in Vilnius (Getty Images)
Lithuanian parliamentary ombudsman Augustinas Normantas has refused to open an investigation into a complaint that his country’s Genocide and Resistance Center presents a revisionist version of wartime history.
Instead, the ombudsman said that the center itself must address the issue first, and “if its answer is disputed, then in a court of law.”
The complainant, Grant Gochin, has challenged the Genocide Center’s description of Lithuania’s wartime treatment of its Jews, calling it “a distortion of history and an insult to the Jewish citizens of Lithuania.”
Lesson by Rebbetzin Esther Isaacson on Blessing Food in Judaism
Rebbetzin Esther Isaacson invites you to a lesson in Russian on the blessing of food. Come, listen and let’s find out the answers together. The lesson will be held at 6:30 on Wednesday, March 29 in auditorium no. 306 on the third floor of the Lithuanian Jewish Community located at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius.
Ponar Mass Murder Site Three Times Larger than Memorial Complex
Then-president of Israel Shimon Peres at Ponar in 2013. Photo: AFP/Scanpix
Vilnius, March 27, BNS–The mass murder site established by Nazi Germany in Ponar outside Vilnius during World War II was three times larger than the memorial complex there now, Lithuanian historians have discovered.
“The memorial is only a small part of the Ponar murder operation site. It might have covered 65 hectares, but the memorial complex/museum there occupies 19 hectares,” Lithuanian History Institute researcher Saulius Sarcevičius told BNS Monday. He said researchers working at the site since last year have discovered five new mass murder pits and additional research is being carried out on two of them.
German Historian Raises Painful Question of Lithuanian Collaboration
Dr. Christoph Dieckmann. Photo by Karolina Pansevič, © 2017 Delfi.lt
Effective cooperation between Germans and Lithuanians became a fatal trap for Lithuanian Jews. It was patriots–ethnic nationalists–who murdered the Jews in Lithuania, hoping to form a strong nation-state without Jews, Russians and Poles.
So German historian Christoph Dieckmann said in an exclusive interview with Delfi.lt. Dieckmann, who works at the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt, is the author of the two-volume Deutsche Besatzungspolitik in Litauen 1941-44 published in 2011. As a member of the Lithuanian International Commission to Assess the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupational Regimes, Dieckmann raises a painful moral question: why didn’t the Lithuanian people, seeing and hearing the Jews being murdered around them, protest? He believes it’s largely due to the position of the Church, which he believes was only concerned with what to do with the property of Jewish converts to Catholicism.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Israeli Exchange Students Feel at Home in Kaunas, Lithuania
For a decade now there has been a club for Israeli young people studying in Kaunas. The club meets at what is called the Kaunas Jewish Center in the center of town. Currently about 130 students from the Lithuanian Health Sciences University attend regularly and all Jewish students in Lithuania are welcome.
The center features a synagogue, the student club and a kosher food restaurant for students, and hosts events and holiday celebrations. A mikvah for married women is to be set up before Shavuot this year. Rabbi Moshe Sheynfeld and his right-hand man Aleks Minin run the center. Minin helps with the daily tasks and making new ideas real. The founder, financial supporter and tutelary spirit of the center is William Shtern, who says he’s happy the students have found a small piece of Israel in Kaunas, their second home, where they can further their own identities, but he says he is even more glad they are meeting one another, becoming friends and even starting families.
The Kaunas Jewish Community has been working with Shtern and his center for several years now and acts as partner in certain center projects, and people from the center attend Kaunas Jewish Community events. Every Friday people from the center donate fresh challa bread for the Kaunas Jewish Community’s Sabbath dinner.
You can find out more about the Kaunas Jewish Center here.
Ponar a Precisely Built Efficient Murder Factory
Three years ago archaeological digs began and are on-going at the Ponar Memorial Complex, and in 2015 two more killing pits were discovered, previously unknown, and a more-accurate perimeter of the mass murder site was determined. Saulius Sarcevičius, director of the Urban Research Department at the Lithuanian History Institute, says these discoveries are not only new, they’re unique. “Ponar, established as a so-called base, was not just any mass murder site, but was a precisely planned–down to the finest details–and built and continuously improved murder factory. The incomprehensible action of this mechanism has literally gone to ground and the traces discovered in the reconstruction relief map makes us living witnesses to these crimes which the Nazis tried so hard to hide,” the Lithuanian History Institute historian told the audience at the first International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance conference held in Vilnius.
The Lithuanian Special Unit, or Ypatingasis būrys, subordinate to the Nazi security service, murdered around 100,000 residents of Vilnius and Eastern Lithuania based on racial considerations from 1941 to 1944, most of them Jews. The Ponar site on the edge of Vilnius is the largest Holocaust mass murder site in Lithuania and is well known internationally.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Klaipėda Jewish Community Celebrates Purim with Concert in Yiddish
The Klaipėda Jewish Community held a concert March 22 by the Klezmasters led by Lev Sandiuk and vocalist Alina Ivakh with solo performances by Mikhail Blinkov on clarinet and Aleksei Rozov on violin. The group performed songs in Yiddish as well as Hebrew, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian and even Azeri. The concert was held as a sort of joint celebration of Purim, the happiest of Jewish holidays, and the International Day of Happiness. The Purim holiday was presented to the multicultural audience. The concert went late into the night and Klaipėda municipal officials and members of the various ethnic communities in Klaipėda thanked the organizers for the good time had by all.
For more, see here.
New LJC Project to Make Recommendations on Anti-Semitism at EU Level
Remembrance. Responsibility. The Future. These are the sequential steps leading to real changes in society. The future of democracy and tolerance depends on memory and responsibility assumed, allowing for moving forward. A step towards the future–after surveying, judging and adopting expertise from the best initiatives aimed at fighting discrimination–this is the goal of this new start-up project.
The new project is called Development and Publication of Recommendations for Actions to Fight Anti-Semitism and Romophobia in Lithuania.
The project is supported by the Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft foundation or EVZ in Germany. This foundation supports systematic and long-term studies of discrimination against and marginalization of Jews and Roma in Europe.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community has brought together a group of leading experts from among Lithuanian human rights organizations, community activists, academics and specialists from abroad. This group is undertaking to come up with effective and valuable recommendations on actions for fighting anti-Semitism and Romophobia in Lithuania.