Learning – Page 40 – Lithuanian Jewish Community

Forgotten Exodus Tells Stories of Jews Expelled from Poland in 1960s

Records of the Polish Communist government’s post-Holocaust anti-Semitic purges to be preserved via video interviews, written narratives and archival materials

by Michelle Rosenberg, Jewish News

A new initiative dedicated to capturing and disseminating the untold stories of Jews who fled Poland in the late 1960s following a wave of anti-Semitic purges was officially launched today.

The Forgotten Exodus project is committed to gathering testimonies from victims, many of them Holocaust survivors, to document their experiences and ensure their history is not erased.

Its mission is to shed light on the then Polish Communist government’s anti-Semitic campaign in 1968, a significant yet largely unknown chapter in modern European history.

Commemorating the 55th anniversary in 2023, it marks the deeply dark time when up to 20,000 of the remaining post-Shoah Jewish population of around 30,000 were stripped of their citizenship, forced out of their jobs and driven out of Poland.

2023-05-222023-05-22

Happy Birthday to Fania Brancovskaja

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky visited Jewish partisan Fania Brancovskaja at home to personally give the Community’s greetings on two special occasions: Fania’s birthday on May 22 and Victory Day, marking the end of the Holocaust in Europe. Fania Brancovskaja was a Jewish partisan who fought the Nazis in Lithuania. Since the end of the Holocaust Fania has devoted her life to keeping the memory of the victims alive and teaching the new generations about what happened. Mazl tov. Bis 120!

2023-05-22

Lithuanian MP Thrown Out of Party for Anti-Semitic Statements

Lithuanian MP Remigijus Žemaitaitis says his party’s ratings will suffer following the decision to cast him out for making anti-Semitic statements, the Lithuanian news agency ELTA reports.

He belonged to the Freedom and Justice party and was elected to his fourth term in the Lithuanian parliament in 2020.

Žemaitaitis says his removal will harm that party’s popularity and claimed he accounts for around 6% of the support the party enjoys in the Žemaitijan region in city council and mayoral elections.

2023-05-222023-05-22

This Is a NATO Ally?

by Grant Gochin

The civilized world has confirmed that Jonas Noreika was a mass genocidal Holocaust perpetrator. The world’s most authoritative body on the Holocaust, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) issued this statement on 11 April 2019: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/statements/statement-center-study-genocide-and-resistance-lithuania

Again on 7 July, 2020, IHRA issued this statement about Lithuania’s Holocaust fraud: https://www.holocaustremembrance.com/statements/ihra-statement-rehabilitation

On 27 March, 2019, Lithuania’s own Presidential Commission affirms Noreika’s crimes here: https://www.komisija.lt/en/a-response-to-the-statement-of-the-genocide-and-resistance-research-centre-of-lithuania-of-27-march-2019-on-the-accusations-against-jonas-noreika-general-vetra/

Full text here.

2023-05-192023-05-19

Oldest Tanakh Sold at Sotheby’s for $38.1 Million

The New York Times reports the oldest-known surviving Tanakh sold for $38.1 million at the Sotheby’s auction house in New York City on May 17. The Sassoon Codex as it is known is nearly complete and contains the 24 books of the Jewish Tanakh (the Torah, Prophets and Writings) including the first ten chapters of Genesis. Experts have dated it to the late 9th or early 10th century.

Full story here.

2023-05-192023-05-19

Exhibit of Shtetl Artworks by Simon Karczmar

The AP Gallery in Vilnius’s Užupis neighborhood is holding an exhibit of drawings and paintings by Simon Karczmar featuring shtetlakh. He was born in Warsaw in 1903, left France for Israel in 1962 and died in 1982. His grandfather with whom he spent his vacations as a youngster lived in the shtetl Divenishok near Vilnius/Wilno.

AP Gallery is located at Užupio street no. 4 in Vilnius. The exhibition called Luminous Shtetls opens at 6:00 P.M. on May 31. No information was provided on when the exhibit ends.

2023-05-192023-05-19

LJC Chairwoman Greets Veterans

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman made home visits to greet WWII veterans on the occasion of Victory Day this year. Usually the LJC holds an event on May 8 and/or May 9, VE Day and Victory Day, respectively, at the LJC in Vilnius under the aegis of the Seniors Club, but our aging soldiers are finding it more and more difficult to make that trip, so chairwoman Kukliansky went to them instead. She visited 99-year-old Community member Eliziejus Rimanas and Aleksandras Asovskis who will celebrate his 102nd birthday in the next few days.

2023-05-18

Pages from Music History: Anna Varshavski

Sarah Matz took the married name Anna Varshavski aka Anna Lvovna Warsaw. She was a singer and a philanthropist. She was born in Vilnius in December of 1896 when it was part of the Russian Empire. Her parents Jehuda and Fradel Matz owned a Jewish publishing house. She began studies at the Berlin Conservatory in 1920. In 1928 she set up an amateur choir in Kaunas which grew in reputation and size and eventually included around 50 members, coming to be known as the Jewel of Joel Engel Choir. They performed throughout Lithuania and on state radio. The choir disbanded in 1936. Varshavski also contributed to setting up the New Jewish Theater in Vilnius. She and her family were put in the Kaunas ghetto in 1941, and she was murdered at the Klooga concentration camp in Estonia in 1944.

http://yiddishmusic.jewniverse.info/varshavskianna/index.html

Tsum Hemerl (Avrom Reisen – Avraham Moshe Bernstein)

Anna Varshavski & “Engel-Chor”

Columbia DMX 301 (WJLX 8)

2023-05-172023-05-17

Jewish Scouts Attend Vilnius Regional Jamboree

Jewish scouts under scout leader Adomas Kofmanas joined more than 500 scouts from throughout the Vilnius region for a two-day jamboree over the weekend on the shore of Laumenas Lake. They learned rhetoric in debates and tried out different arts, crafts and skills including making jewelry, leatherwork and painting in acrylic. The paintings were mainly of the cat which has become the symbol of Vilnius’s Užupis neighborhood and were hung up in a sort of ad hoc art gallery/alley in the forest. They played capture the flag and sang around the campfire in the evening. The ever-growing number of Jewish scouts celebrated the Sabbath with prayer. Adomas Kofmanas’s group meets regularly at 3:00 P.M. on Sundays and young people who might be interested are encouraged to attend. For more information, write an email to skautai@lzb.lt.

2023-05-172023-05-17

What Do You Know about Litvak Writers?

Arakdijus Vinokuras’s monthly quiz asks that question at the next quiz scheduled for 2:00 P.M. on Sunday, May 21 at the Bagel Shop Café in Vilnius. This quiz will be dedicated to the three Litvak writers Icchokas Meras and the recently deceased Grigoriy Kanovitch and Markas Zingeris, may they rest in peace. It will be streamed on facebook as well.

2023-05-172023-05-17

Makabi Table Tennis Team Takes 2nd Place in Lithuanian Competition

The Lithuanian Makabi Athletics Club’s women’s table tennis team took second place in Lithuanian play-offs held last weekend in VIlnius, meaning they’re now in the upper league in Lithuania and will play next year against the top dozen teams. Neta Alon made a strong showing and won 3:0 against the favorite. Makabi team players won against the teams from Šiauliai and Utena and only lost to Jonava.

This is the first time Makabi ping-pong players have risen to the upper leagues in Lithuania.

Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium students Uosis Račinskas and Jokūbas Kačerginskis won in team-play championship in the under-12 category. They began playing two years ago under the tutelage of Neta Alon, and are now training under Khen Alon. In singles-play Uosis Račinskas placed 5th in Lithuania and Jokūbas Kačerginskis 6th.

2023-05-16

Lithuania’s Self-Generated Problem

Photo: Poster honoring Kazys Skirpa. Translation: “A Nation which respects itself should know its heroes: Diplomat Colonel Kazys Skirpa First volunteer who raised the flag of Lithuania on Gediminas Tower on January 1, 1919, the head of the Lithuanian Activist Front, organizer of the June 1941 uprising. The Nation knows its heroes!”

Hate against minorities is supposedly illegal in Lithuania. Lithuanian MP Žemaitaitis spewed obscene tropes against Jews which did not make sense in the 1200s, nor in 1941, and not now, either. In subsequent posts, Žemaitaitis called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Lithuania.

The Austrian, German, American and Israeli ambassadors issued statements condemning Žemaitaitis, as did the prime minister of Lithuania. The Lithuanian Jewish Community has requested Žemaitaitis be referred to the public prosecutor for hate crimes charges.

Superficially, the case is straightforward. The crimes are obvious, the law is clear, there is no question of his guilt. Hate is simply hate. But, the Government of Lithuania has a problem.

2023-05-152023-05-18

Happy Birthday

We wish a very happy birthday to Sergejus Kanovičius. Mazl tov. Bis 120!

2023-05-10

Two Hundred Historians Back Polish Holocaust Expert under Attack

In a letter of support, historians and scholars worldwide said that the Polish attack on Holocaust scholar professor Barbara Engelking harmed attempts “to understand the processes that allowed the Holocaust to take place.”

Two hundred historians, including senior Holocaust scholars from Israel and around the globe, signed a letter in support of professor Barbara Engelking, a Polish historian who has been under attack in her homeland after she said the Poles did not do enough to help Jews during the Shoah.

“We, the undersigned scholars of the Holocaust Era, the Second World War, and Modern and Jewish History, express our firm support for Professor Barbara Engelking and for academic freedom, in the face of an unbridled and unfounded attack by politicians, media, and other public figures. … We can attest to the fact that she is a scholar of impeccable personal and professional integrity. Her scholarship adheres to the highest academic standards, for which she has earned worldwide esteem,” the historians wrote.

2023-05-10

Lithuanian MP Denounces Israel for Razing Palestinian School EU Financed

Lithuanian MP Remigijus Žemaitaitis, chairman of the Freedom and Justice Party formed of two rival liberal parties to contest municipal elections in Vilnius in 2014, denounced Israel’s destruction of a school in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The US, Israeli and German ambassadors called for him to apologize for the remarks, first made on facebook on Monday, May 8, repeated in parliament Tuesday, the same day Israel started bombing the Gaza Strip in what it calls Operation Shield and Arrow. Despite the demands of the ambassadors and his fellow MPs, Žemaitaitis said he won’t apologize.

On Tuesday he told parliament assembled: “I want to emphasize this school was fully financed by the European Union, by Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Bulgaria, Germany, Spain and the other countries. … And if we believe that it’s alright to allow in the 21st century some country to blow up or destroy these kinds of sites of another country, then ask yourselves, what sort of moral and political values do you live by today? Mine are much higher than you think.”

2023-05-102023-05-11

Litvak Community Leaders Mark Victory Day in Israel

On May 8, VE Day, or Victory in Europe Day, the heads of several constituent communities in the Lithuanian Jewish Community, including LJC chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas and others, marked the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps and the capitulation of Nazi Germany to allies during a trip to Israel.

Shmuel Yatom, the chairman of the Vilnius Religious Jewish Community, performed a prayer prayed by victims on the way to Treblinka in Sderot, Israel.

The Litvak leaders are in Israel for workshops sponsored by the European Commission for more effective implementation of the EC’s strategy for fighting anti-Semitism and fostering Jewish life in the European Union.

They visited Sderot on the border with the Gaza Strip which saw Israeli counter-attacks last night and into the morning of May 9. The Israeli town is known as Israel’s bomb shelter capital because of frequent rocket attacks from Gaza. They also planned to meet the mayor of Ashkelon, and to take part in a ceremony honoring Mordechai Aneliwicz, an organizer of the Warsaw Uprising. The LJC is planning a joint conference with the Poland’s Jewish Historical Institute this fall to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the destruction of the Vilna ghetto.

2023-05-092023-05-09

Lithuanian Jewish TV Program Features Faina Kukliansky’s Herring Appetizer Recipe

The Jewish program Menora on Lithuanian state television has included a segment on the popular Jewish appetizer made with minced herring. This particular herring appetizer is truly Litvak in nature. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman put on a kitchen apron and shared her family recipe for making the snack with the Lithuanian television audience. The segment is included in the April 30 broadcast available in Lithuanian here.

2023-05-082023-05-08

Markas Zingeris in Memoriam

The Jewish discussion club #ŽydiškiPašnekesiai invites the public to attend a special panel to remember Markas Zingeris, who died unexpectedly recently.

Over fifty years of work Markas has left us a rich inheritance: thoughts, ideas, texts, books, plays, poetry and the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum, where he served as director since its inception for several decades. His keen insights and very rational thinking had a deep influence on the development of Lithuanian society and politics following independence as well as before. He always demonstrated a spirit of openness, tolerance, rationality and ethical behavior.

Panelists to include Emanuelis Zingeris, Markas’s brother and MP; Emilis, Markas’s son; Violeta Davoliūtė, professor of philosophy and the history of ideas at Vilnius University, cultural historian, Holocaust researcher and colleague of Markas and Gytis Padegimas, a famous Lithuanian theater director who was a close confident (appearing via internet at the discussion club). Actor, popular writer and journalist Arkadijus Vinokuras will moderate the conversation which will be live-streamed on facebook with the help of his son Saulius.

The event is to take place at the Bagel Shop Café at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius at 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, May 10. The live-stream will be made available on facebook by following this short URL: https://rb.gy/uok94

2023-05-052023-05-05