Learning

Vytautas Mikalauskas Art Gymnasium Students Commemorate Holocaust Day in Panevėžys

Vytautas Mikalauskas Art Gymnasium Students Commemorate Holocaust Day in Panevėžys

Panevėžys students marked International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust. Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman was invited to speak at the event.

“Today like never before young people must know, understand and remember. This is the only hope that this indescribable horror not repeat itself, it is the only way to bring us out of darkness,” Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor Elisa Springer said.

At the event, Elena Adelina Kofman served as moderator, and said the systematic mass murder and genocide of the Jews, also known as the Shoah, saw the greatest percentage of victims over a very short period in Lithuania. Around 96 percent of Jews were exterminated in Lithuania, around 200,000 people. She said that made this commemoration especially important.

Read more
Invitation to Mark International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

Invitation to Mark International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust

January 27 is International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, recalling the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust. The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites Lithuania’s educational and scientific community to join us in the campaign #WeRemember/#MesPrisimename and to remember the victims, eye-witnesses and heroes of the Holocaust who lived in the cities and towns of Lithuania.

We invite you to engage actively in International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust and to spread the news about the importance of this day among the various educational communities and institutions of general, higher and professional learning. Assign the activities of this day to teaching young people about the memory of Holocaust victims and organize encounters with the older members of the Jewish communities who remember and won’t let these horrific periods of history slip into oblivion. We invite you to pay special attention to remembering those who rescued Jews. Their courage set an example of humanity for future generations.

You can find educational materials, testimonies and stories told by survivors and other useful information which will help present the story of the Holocaust in an interactive and understandable way to young people on the Lithuanian Jewish Community’s webpages lzb.lt, lzb.lt/en and lzb.lt/ru, and at our virtual initiative @AtmintiesKalendorius on our facebook page.

You can also take part in the campaign by visiting the mass murder sites in your local area and by taking photos there and posting them to your social media with the hashtags #WeRemember and/or #MesPrisimename. Take a photo of yourself holding a piece of paper or a sign with the inscription #WeRemember and/or #MesPrisimename. Also, on the eve of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, join the global campaign by adding a #WeRemember frame to your social media profile. Frames can be found at #WeRemember and/or #MesPrisimename.

#WeRemember #MesPrisimename #Neveragain #NiekadaDaugiau #HolocaustMemorialDay

Thank you,

Faina Kukliansky, chairwoman
Lithuanian Jewish Community

Moshe Kulbak’s Mesiekh ben Efrayim Translated and Published in Lithuanian

Moshe Kulbak’s Mesiekh ben Efrayim Translated and Published in Lithuanian

Lithuania’s Odilė publishing house has translated and printed a Lithuanian translation of Yiddish writer Moshe Kulbak’s book Mesiekh ben Efrayim under the title Mesijas, Efraimo sūnus. The description by internet vendor knygynas.biz says:

Classic of Lithuanian and world Jewish literature Moishe Kulbak (1896-1937) is known to Lithuanian readers as the author of the wonderful poem Vilne. Finally for the first his prose has appeared in Lithuanian, the novel Messiah ben Efraim. This is one of the most famous and most original of Kulbak’s Yiddish works. It was written in Berlin in 1922 and is suffused with magical realism, something which hadn’t been seen before. The author’s vital and innovative imagination connects surrealistic and expressionistic images here with the oral tradition and strong mystical spirit of Lithuanian Jews. This ensemble recalls the impressive paintings of Marc Chagall.

The novel Messiah ben Efraim is based on a Jewish legend which comes from the Talmud that there are always 36 hidden just men living in the world without whose unseen actions the world would pass away [lamed-vavnik tzadikim or lamed-vavniki]. Kulbak creates a story about these holy people living in historical Lithuanian [Grand Duchy] lands–in Belarus and Žemaitija. Elderly miller Benya, Simkha the rabbi who ran away from his community, the philosopher-bum Gimpel, Christian sauna operator Kiril–these souls trapped in the world seeking the light, guided a strange unease embark on a journey without any explicable destination. During this fantastic trip filled with humor and mystical experiences the cause of this unease driving on the travellers gradually comes into focus: it’s the impending advent of the Messiah to the land of Lithuania.

Read more
Filmmaker Emilis Vėlyvis Calls Izaokas Best Lithuanian Art Film in 30 Years

Filmmaker Emilis Vėlyvis Calls Izaokas Best Lithuanian Art Film in 30 Years

LRT.lt, August 30, 2021

Jurgis Matulevičius film debut “Izaokas” has been playing for three weeks now at Lithuanian movie theaters and has received much praise from average moviegoers and film-industry colleagues as well, according to a press release by the makers of the film.

“Although the category of art film is not my favorite, the film Izaokas is in my opinion the best work in this category over the last 30 years of Lithuanian cinema. Bearing in mind that this is the first full-length feature by the director, he should be given another medal as well for talent,” film director Emilis Vėlyvis said.

Full article in Lithuanian here.

The film tells the story of an LAF volunteer who murders a Jew named Izaokas, or Isaac, during the Lietūkis garage massacre in Kaunas in 1941 and who is haunted by the memory for years. The IMDB entry for the film says:

Read more
UN General Assembly Adopts German-Israeli Proposal against Holocaust Denial

UN General Assembly Adopts German-Israeli Proposal against Holocaust Denial

Deutsche Welle

Ambassadors of Israel and Germany say denying the Holocaust threatens peaceful coexistence worldwide. Their appeal comes 80 years after the Wannsee Conference where Nazis discussed the extermination of Europe’s Jews.

The UN General Assembly on Thursday adopted a resolution proposed by Israeli and German ambassadors rejecting and condemning any denial of the Holocaust.

The 193-member assembly agreed on the proposal without a vote with only Iran distancing itself from the text. The assembly also urged social media companies to “take active measures” to fight anti-Semitism online.

“The General Assembly is sending a strong and unambiguous message against the denial or the distortion of these historical facts,” German UN ambassador Antje Leendertse said. “Ignoring historical facts increases the risk that they will be repeated.”

Full story here.

Yad Vashem Budget Increased by 29 Million Shekels

Yad Vashem Budget Increased by 29 Million Shekels

As expected, the Israeli Government approved an increase to the budget of the Yad Vahsem Holocaust Commemoration and Research Institute on Sunday, January 23, increasing the institution’s budget by 29 million shekels for 2022 to combat anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. It was reported earlier the budget increase was needed because of flagging donations.

First-Ever Exhibit of Michael Brenner’s Works in Lithuania

First-Ever Exhibit of Michael Brenner’s Works in Lithuania

The Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund and the Aušra Museum in Šiauliai are pleased to invite the public the first-ever exhibition in Lithuania of works by famous Litvak designer and sculptor Michael Brenner. Brenner almost never exhibited his works during his lifetime and rarely invited anyone into his studios.

The exhibit called “Michael Brenner: Free Fall” will open at the Chaim Frenkel villa located at Vilniaus street no. 74 in Šiauliai at 5:30 P.M. on January 22. For more information, click on the links below.

Read more
Sergei Liser Exhibit

Sergei Liser Exhibit

The Lithuanian Jewish Community is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibit of paintings by Sergei Liser called “Surviving Vessels.” The opening will be held at 3:00 P.M. on January 30 at the Bagel Shop Café at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. The exhibit will run till February 28.

#WeRemember/#MesPrisimename 2022

#WeRemember/#MesPrisimename 2022

On January 27 International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust will be marked around the world, recalling the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to participate in the event and to remember the victims, eye-witnesses and rescuers who lived in Lithuania’s towns and cities.

Remembrance of the suffering Holocaust victims experienced compels us to accept shared responsibility to prevent crimes against humanity. We invite you to get involved by visiting the mass murder and mass grave sites where you live, or by sharing the hashtag #WeRemember or #MesPrisimename on your social media accounts.

Read more
The Forgotten Proto-Zionist: The Visionary Life of Warder Cresson

The Forgotten Proto-Zionist: The Visionary Life of Warder Cresson

by Michael Medved

Israel’s contemporary critics angrily insist that the special relationship between America and the Jewish state stems solely from the outsize electoral and economic clout of American Jews. But those who argue that this undue influence has always shaped our policies in the Middle East ignore the fact that the commitment to a rebuilt Jerusalem and a reborn Israel began at a time when the Republic’s Jewish community played an insignificant role in national life, with a minimal population amounting to far less than 1 percent of the federal total. In fact, the idea that the United States ought to link its fate to a Jewish state officially originated in 1844 with the very first diplomat America ever dispatched to Jerusalem, more than a century before Israel’s Declaration of Independence. His name was Warder Cresson, and he led an extraordinary and singular American life.

Cresson’s own Huguenot forebears first came to the New World from Holland in 1657, settling in Delaware and New York. After some adventures in the West Indies, his grandfather Solomon found his way to Philadelphia, where he became an ardent member of the Society of Friends and part of the new city’s Quaker establishment. As successful artisans and entrepreneurs, the Cressons owned prime real estate on Chestnut Street in the center of town as well as valuable agricultural properties in the surrounding countryside.

Born in 1798, Cresson began working the family farms in nearby Darby and Chester counties at age 17, impressing relatives and neighbors with his business and leadership abilities. Married at 23 to another devout Quaker, he proceeded to raise six children of his own and to follow the clan’s pattern of judicious investment and accumulation of wealth.

Full story here.

Jonas Noreika Was Holocaust Perp, Not Righteous Gentile, Granddaughter Says

Jonas Noreika Was Holocaust Perp, Not Righteous Gentile, Granddaughter Says

Jonas Noreika: Savior or slayer of Jews?
by Silvia Foti

My maternal grandfather was declared a Rescuer of the Jews by the Lithuanian Genocide Resistance and Research Centre. This division is funded by the Lithuanian government, dedicated to establishing and enforcing the legal and official historical narrative of the nation.

The context of the pronouncement was the impending launch of my memoir The Nazi’s Granddaughter: How I Discovered My Grandfather Was a War Criminal. Reluctantly, I had come to the horrific conclusion that my grandfather, Jonas Noreika, was involved in the murder of 8,000 – 15,000 Jews in Lithuania. The book launch in March 2021 coincided with multiple lawsuits against the government of Lithuania, accusing them of Holocaust fraud; these were filed by Grant Gochin, the descendant of some of my grandfather’s victims.

Father Borevičius

A single testimony, given by the Lithuanian priest, Father Jonas Borevičius, was the well from which this decree about my grandfather was drawn. His deposition was given 40 years after the Holocaust in a court in Chicago.

Read more
Who Turned Anne Frank In? New Book Takes Fresh Look

Who Turned Anne Frank In? New Book Takes Fresh Look

The story of Anne Frank has captivated millions of readers, but no one knows how the Franks hidden in an Amsterdam annex were discovered in 1944. A team of cold-case researchers has just published a new theory of who might have done it and why.

A cold case team that combed through evidence for five years in a bid to unravel one of World War II’s enduring mysteries has reached what it calls the “most likely scenario” of who betrayed Jewish teenage diarist Anne Frank and her family.

Their answer, outlined in a new book called “The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation” by Canadian academic and author Rosemary Sullivan, is that it could have been a prominent Jewish notary called Arnold van den Bergh, who disclosed the secret annex hiding place of the Frank family to German occupiers to save his own family from deportation and murder in Nazi concentration camps.

Read more

Silvia Foti Book on Grandfather to be Launched at Vilnius Book Fair

Lithuanian publisher Kitos Knygos has announced the impending launch of SIlvia Foti’s book about her grandfather Jonas Noreika in Lithuanian under the title “Vėtra Lietaus šalyje” [Storm in the Rain Country].

“Journalist Silvija Kučėnaitė-Foti (born 1961) grew up in Chicago’s Lithuanian community hearing about her grandfather’s achievements fighting for Lithuania’s freedom. He was initiator of the June Uprising, imprisoned at the Stutthof camp by the Nazis and killed by the KGB when he returned to Lithuania,” Kitos Knygos wrote on their facebook page.

“Before she died, her mother asked Silvia to complete her mission, to commemorate General Storm in a book. Silvia agreed. Later when she was travelling in Lithuania she discovered people who believed Noreika as head of the Šiauliai district during the Nazi occupation perpetrated Holocaust crimes. Silvia, who considered her grandfather an important hero of the Lithuanian nation, found this incredible: could her family really have hidden from her salient facts in Noreika’s biography?

“In this literary memoir the author presents her 20-year-long investigation of her grandfather’s actions in 1941. This is the story of the author’s own difficult road to learning the truth about her family. Foti relies upon Noreika’s correspondence, orders signed by him, documents issued by the Lithuanian Activists Front and KGB and other documents. The book includes compelling portraits and recollections from Noreika’s fellow travellers.

“This will be an authorized and checked edition. Martas Geležauskas translated from English, Darius Pocevičius translated Russian-language KGB documents and Asta Bučienė and Aira Naiuronytė edited the text. Kazimieras Dainovskis did design.”

Lithuanian publisher’s facebook page here.

YIVO Vilna Collection Online

YIVO Vilna Collection Online

Dear Faina,

Today, I am delighted to announce that The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (YIVO) completed the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project (EBYVOC), a historic 7-year, $7 million international initiative to process, conserve and digitize YIVO’s divided prewar library and archival collections.

These materials, divided by World War II and located in New York and Vilnius, Lithuania, have now been digitally reunited for the first time.

Comprising approximately 4.1 million pages of archival documents and books, the EBYVOC Project is an international partnership between YIVO, the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the Martynas Mavydas National Library of Lithuania, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences.

The completion of the EBYVOC Project is an epic milestone in the preservation of Eastern European Jewish history and culture. It was completed on schedule and within budget, providing a global audience access to these treasures through a dedicated web portal free-of-charge. We invite you to explore this remarkable collection at https://vilnacollections.yivo.org/.

Read more
Chaim Grade: Facts of a Life

Chaim Grade: Facts of a Life

Photo: Jung-Vilne literary group: Chaim Grade is stand­ing in the top row to the left, the poets Shmerke Kacz­er­gin­s­ki and Abra­ham Sutzkev­er are seat­ed in the mid­dle. YIVO archives

by Susanne Klingenstein and Yehudah DovBer Zirkind, In Geveb, December 15, 2021

INTRODUCTION

When on May 2, 2010, Inna Hecker Grade passed away at the age of eighty-five, a sigh of relief, unkind and hard-edged, coursed through some corners of the Yiddish literary world and a small circle of scholars and archivists tensed with expectation. For twenty-eight years, since the passing of her husband Chaim Grade on June 26, 1982, the literary legacy of one the most important Yiddish prose-stylists and documentary story­tellers to emerge from the ashes of Vil­na, had lain concealed in the couple’s Bronx apartment, guarded by his angry widow who deemed the world unworthy of her husband’s genius. After a brief foray into the publishing world, she had withdrawn into a tomb filled with her husband’s treasures.

The sepulchral metaphor was first used by Ralph Speken, the psychiatrist who had taken care of Inna Grade during the last months of her life. On the eve of breaking the seal, Speken pleaded: ​“They should take over that apartment as if they were taking over King Tut’s tomb.” Scholars and readers expected the discovery of manuscripts in drawers and closets that would speedily be published, perhaps in critical editions, and bring Grade back to literary life. No new work, no critical edition or biography has yet appeared.

Read more
Remembering Documentary Photographer, Author, Screenwriter Alter-Sholem Kacyzne

Remembering Documentary Photographer, Author, Screenwriter Alter-Sholem Kacyzne

Photo: Alter Kacyzne. “Green Fields” theater still. ca. 1921. Museum of the City of New York.

text by Yitskhok Niborski, translated from Yiddish by Yankl Salant

Kacyzne, Alter-Sholem (May 31, 1885-July 7, 1941)

(1885–1941), Yiddish writer and critic; photographer. Born in Vilna to a working-class family, Alter-Sholem Kacyzne (Yid., Katsizne) attended heder and also a Russian-language Jewish elementary school. At 14, after his father’s death, he stopped his formal studies. Kacyzne was an autodidact and remained an avid reader not only of literature in Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, but also of Polish, German and French works. For about 11 years he lived in Ekaterinoslav where he learned to be a photographer and was married.

In 1909, Kacyzne first published two Russian stories in the periodical Evreiski mir (Jewish World), edited by S. An-ski. In 1910, attracted by the work and reputation of Y. L. Peretz, Kacyzne settled in Warsaw, where he opened a photography studio. He grew very close to Peretz, who became a literary mentor, but did not begin publishing in Yiddish until after Peretz’s death in 1915. Kacyzne’s first Yiddish texts appeared in collections in Vilna and Kiev. In 1919 and 1920 his first two books were published in Warsaw, the dramatic poems Der gayst der meylekh (The Spirit, the King) and Prometeus (Prometheus). He was also a consistent contributor to (and sometimes co-founder and co-editor of) a series of literary periodicals, most of them short-lived, in Warsaw and Vilna, in which he published novellas and stories that in 1922 appeared in book form as Arabeskn (Arabesques).

Read more
News and Views from the Kaunas Jewish Community on the Levinas Center

News and Views from the Kaunas Jewish Community on the Levinas Center

Kaunas Jewish Community chairman Gercas Žakas shared his impressions on facebook after visiting the Emmanuel Levinas Center opening ceremony:

“It was endlessly pleasant to receive an invitation from professor Rimantas Benetis, rector of the Lithuanian Health Medicine University, to meet at the recently-opened Emmanuel Levinas Center. We had a nice and warm conversation in which we discussed the Center’s mission, planned activities and opportunities for cooperation. I thank Center directors Ingrida Krasauskienė and Julija Vasilenko who conducted a tour of the impressive space of the Center with its extraordinary aura and possessing materializing visions of the future. I hope that the Center will be more than just an institution researching and promoting the philosophical, intellectual and cultural inheritance of the famous philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) born in Kaunas, as its articles of incorporation state, but also that it will become a new venue in Kaunas for memorable and meaningful meetings and events. And I also hope ties of partnership and cooperation will join the Levinas Center and the Kaunas Jewish Community, inspiring us to carry out numerous projects.”