Yiddish

Rugelakh Now Available at Bagel Shop Café

Rugelakh Now Available at Bagel Shop Café

As the Lithuanian Jewish Community counts down the days to the New Year 5784, the Bagel Shop Café has come up with some new menu items. One of them is rugelakh, the amazing pastry traditionally served during Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah. The name comes from the Yiddish root “rugel” meaning little twist or tie.

Roots: Save Our Trees Protest at Romain Gary Square in Vilnius

Roots: Save Our Trees Protest at Romain Gary Square in Vilnius

The small square–actually more of a triangle–on Basanavičiaus street in Vilnius with a sculpture of Litvak writer in French and diplomat Romain Gary as a boy was the sight of a fairly large protest Wednesday last week.

Several hundred people came to protest plans by the adjacent cafė to cut down some larger trees around the sculpture.

The cafė owner claimed the trees weren’t rooted in soil and had simply grown over pavement, and posed an obstacle to renovating the terrace there.

Protestors called for tree specialists to make a determination about root-depth. Last Friday the Vilnius city municipality rescinded permission to remove the nine trees until experts have had a chance to look at the situation.

New Installations in Anykščiai Mark Jewish Heritage Sites

New Installations in Anykščiai Mark Jewish Heritage Sites

BNS, July 23, 2023

Two new artistic installations now grace the Old Town in Anykščiai, Lithuania, north of Vilnius intended to commemorate the former Jewish population.

The Anykščiai municipality reports a sculptural relief by professor Romualdas Inčirauskas and Zita Inčirauskienė called “Memorial Marker for the Former Synagogues” was installed at the site of the former synagogue at Šaltupio street. It reportedly includes portion of a map of the town from 1925 with the sites of six former synagogues marked.

The same artists installed a bench in front of the building located at Baranauskas Square no. 7. There are seven human figure sculptures on top of the bench back to symbolize the days of the week with the Sabbath represented as a rabbi.

Congratulations to Lara Lempertienė

Congratulations to Lara Lempertienė

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda presented the Lithuanian medal “For Merit” to Lara Lempertienė, director of the Judaica Research Center of the Lithuanian National Library, on July 6, Lithuania’s State Day, Coronation of Mindaugas Day. She received the award in recognition of her work at the Center going beyond textual research and including exhibits, publications, presentations at international conferences and presenting the Litvak cultural legacy in Lithuania and abroad. The Lithuanian Jewish Community congratulates Lara on yet another Lithuanian state award and wish her continued success.

Library Named after Litvak Novelist in Home Town

Library Named after Litvak Novelist in Home Town

The public library in Jonava, Lithuania, has been renamed the Grigoriy Kanovitch library. The late Litvak writer came from Jonava originally.

At the naming ceremony the writer’s son, Sergejus Kanovičius, also a writer, quoted from an interview made with his father several years ago:

Q.: If you could be anywhere in an instant, which location do you hold most dear?
A.: I’d go back to my childhood. To Jonava, on the banks of the Vilija [Neris River].

Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein and Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky both attended the ceremony at the town hall as well. Both women thanked the city council and the library for the name-change. The library awards a Gigoriiy Kanovitch literary prize annually.

“A few days ago my father would have celebrated his 94th birthday and tomorrow would be exactly 82 years since he and his family were forced to leave Jonava, as he believed, for life. I am extraordinarily grateful that after so many years you have brought his memory back to Jonava, to his childhood on the banks of the Vilija,” his son said.

Against Anti-Semitism in Name Only

Against Anti-Semitism in Name Only

by Geoff Vasil

Lithuanian president Gitanas Nausėda has joined the chorus, the other two heads of state, the prime minister and the speaker of parliament, in declaring Lithuania has zero tolerance for anti-Semitism. At the same time, the state and the nation continue to glorify, lionize and commemorate, often enthusiastically, Lithuanian Nazis who were complicit in Holocaust crimes and responsible for the death of nearly every Lithuanian Jew.

The state-funded Lithuanian Academy of Sciences has removed the Jonas Noreika plaque on its walls “for repairs” even though permission was never granted by any state or municipal body to place the plaque there. Its latest incarnation was the work of enthusiastic Lithuanian neo-Nazis. Streets, schools and squares retain the names of known Holocaust perpetrators with commemorative plaques and statues to them scattered across Lithuania.

At the same time, the ruling coalition, aka the Lithuanian Government, has engaged in rank censorship for two and a half years now, along with a complicit media and law enforcement bodies. This has created a virtual atmosphere of full-fledged fascism and conformity in the country, with straight-up propaganda de rigueur on a range of topics.

Nechama Lifshitz Young Jewish Vocalists Contest

Nechama Lifshitz Young Jewish Vocalists Contest

Vocalists aged 10 to 35 are invited to register for the Nechama Lifshitz Vocalist Contest to be held in Vilnius in September. The goal of the competition is to inspire creativity and talent in the younger generation, to popularize vocal Jewish music and to discover talented young Jewish performers and song writers. The contest is named after renowned singer Nechama Lifshitz who was born in Kaunas and was sometimes called the Jewish nightingale. She became famous throughout the Soviet Union and the world.

Register here: https://www.competition.lt/registracija/

Litvak Literature Conference “Litvak Literature: A Remarkable Direction in the Lithuanian Cultural Inheritance”

Litvak Literature Conference “Litvak Literature: A Remarkable Direction in the Lithuanian Cultural Inheritance”

The International Publishers Association and the Lithuanian Jewish Community invite you to an academic and practical conference on the significance of Litvak literature on the Lithuanian cultural heritage. Besides presentation by individual scholars and thinkers there will also be readings of texts and some more personal commentaries. The conference will be conducted in Russian and is free and open to the public.

Happy Birthday to Fania Brancovskaja

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!

Pages from Music History: Anna Varshavski

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)
What Do You Know about Litvak Writers?

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.

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

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.

Markas Zingeris in Memoriam

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

Mini Klez-Fest at Tolerance Center, National Library

Mini Klez-Fest at Tolerance Center, National Library

The Judaica Research Center at the Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library, the Vilna Gaon Jewish History Museum and Roma Social Center present their “mini klez-fest” which includes live music and a lecture on klezmer music.

The event will take place at the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon Museum at 6:00 P.M. on Sunday, April 30. The performers decided to call their hour-long concert “From Vizhnitz to Vilne: Klezmer Music from the Carpathians and Beyond.” The program is composed of songs selected by Jewish music researcher, ethnographer and artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University Yale Strom, recorded during ethnographic field work and which were once performed from the Carpathian Mountains to Jonava in Lithuania and locations inside Belarus. Yale Strom currently teaches music at San Diego State.

The lecture component by Strom will take part on at 6:00 P.M. on Wednesday, May 3, at the National Library in Vilnius. It is called “Relationship between Romani and Jewish Musicians before World War II: How and Why?”

Malines

Malines

An excerpt from the great Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever’s memoir of the Vilna Ghetto

“Malines were built everywhere: underneath ruined buildings, in cellars, underneath garbage dumps, in caves, and everywhere else imaginable.”

The poet Abraham Sutzkever (1913-2010) moved into the Vilna Ghetto not long after the Nazis created it in September of 1941 and with his wife Freydke escaped to the forest in September, 1943. During his two years in the ghetto he worked with the theater and youth groups and was part of the legendary Paper Brigade, a group of ghetto inmates and their allies who rescued priceless Jewish books and manuscripts from Nazi destruction.

Full article and translation here.

Remembering Rivka Basman Ben-Haim

Remembering Rivka Basman Ben-Haim

by Zelda Kahan Newman
Last updated June 23, 2021

In Brief

Born February 20, 1925. Rivka Basman’s mother died when she was five. Her younger brother was ripped from her hands and murdered by the Nazis, and she escaped from the Nazi death march. After the war, she helped the illegal immigration movement to what was then Palestine. During that time, she met and married the painter Shmuel Ben-Haim, who designed every one of her books. The couple lived on Kibbutz Ha-Ma’apil for sixteen years, where she taught schoolchildren. During the 1960s, she studied comparative literature at Columbia University for one year, and later went to Russia, where her husband was Israel’s cultural attaché. In Russia, she furthered clandestine contacts between Soviet Yiddish writers and the outside world. After her husband died, she added Ben-Haim to her name.

Family and Education

Rivka Basman Ben-Haim was born in Wilkomir (Ukmerge), Lithuania to Yekhezkel and Tsipora (née Heyman) on February 20, 1925. Her mother died in 1930, and her father remarried; he and his second wife had a son, Aharon (Arele).

As a child, Rivka attended a Yiddish-speaking folk-shul, and she and her classmates read and delighted in the poems and stories of the Yiddish woman writer Kadya Molodowsky. Even then, she wrote poems in Yiddish. She continued studying in a Lithuanian gymnasium (academic high school), but in 1941, before she could graduate, her family moved into what later became the Vilna ghetto. She spent two years in the ghetto, where she met the poet Abraham Sutzkever and read him her poems in Lithuanian and Yiddish. He encouraged her to write only in Yiddish and was her mentor and friend till his death.

Great Synagogue Listed as Protected Heritage Site

Great Synagogue Listed as Protected Heritage Site

The site of the former Great Synagogue in Vilnius with associated mikvot has been listed as a state-protected cultural heritage site, according to Baltic News Service.

The Lithuanian Culture Ministry issued a press release Thursday naming this site and the site of the first Lithuanian gymnasium in Vilnius was established on Basanavičiaus street. The YIVO occupied part of the latter space at its inception in 1925 before moving headquarters to Vivulskio street in Vilnius. The ministry reports state protection means more opportunities for funding protection and restoration of these sites.

The exact date the synagogue was built isn’t known. The Great Synagogue with adjacent ritual purification baths was part of a larger complex of synagogues, libraries and schools located around the Great Synagogue and the home of the Vilna Gaon.

Ownership of the ruins of the Great Synagogue and mikvot were passed to the Goodwill Foundation in 2020. Various plans for commemorating the site have been proposed, but so far the most likely is a humble protected excavation exhibit showcasing the subterranean main hall with bimah and floor.

Photo: Tunnel dug by archaeologists leading to central bimah, by Valdas Kopūstas, courtesy BNS.