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Let’s Not Name Streets after Nazi Collaborators

Let’s Not Name Streets after Nazi Collaborators

In Vilnius we have a street named after a Nazi collaborator, Kazys Škirpa, and as an elected city councillor I asked the municipality to change the name.

The street is in the absolute centre of town, between the Cathedral, the National Museum, the Castle and the Hill of the Three Crosses. Škirpa wrote the Lithuanian equivalent of Mein Kampf, and started an organisation to clear all the Jews out of Lithuania, men, women and children. He blamed them for Soviet atrocities just because they were Jewish.

I don’t think that’s the kind of person we should be celebrating on our walls. I asked the Names Commission to consider changing the name, to honour the Lithuanians who saved Jews from the Holocaust, instead of honouring a Nazi collaborator who wanted to create a racially pure Lithuania with Hitler’s help.

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Yiddish Summer Course

The Vilnius Yiddish Institute at Vilnius University proudly announces

The 2016 Summer Program in Yiddish Language and Literature17 July — 12 August 2016

offering four levels of intensive language instruction:

YIDDISH I: for beginners    YIDDISH II: intermediate
YIDDISH III: higher intermediate    YIDDISH IV: advanced

more information from Indre Joffyte, info@judaicvilnius.com
(Coordinator of Programs at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute)

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Kiev Renames Street after Nazi Collaborator

Authorities in Kiev decided July 7 to rename the city’s Moscow Prospect in honor of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera.

Allegedly pro-Western Ukrainian leaders and protestors have idolized Bandera, and the move to rename a street after the man could further trouble relations with neighboring Russia, Lithuania’s Baltic News Service reported on July 9.

As with Lithuania’s Nazi puppet government in the summer of 1941, Bandera declared Ukrainian independence as soon as the Nazis invaded the Ukrainian SSR.

Newsweek Magazine on the Last Nazi Hunter

by Stav Ziv

0715nazi04
Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Kagan visits the Chamber of the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Photo: GALI TIBBON/AFP/Getty

Efraim Zuroff has accomplished much in his long career, but there’s one thing he’s particularly proud of: He’s the most hated Jew in Lithuania.

His Lithuanian friend Ruta Vanagaite agrees: She called him a “mammoth,” a “boogeyman” and the “ruiner of reputations”—and that’s just in the introduction to a book they co-authored.

Last summer, in a journey that helped cement his notoriety, Zuroff set off across the Lithuanian countryside in a gray SUV with Vanagaite, an author best known for a book about women finding happiness after age 50. Their goal: to visit some of the nation’s more than 200 sites of mass murder during World War II. On the road, between destinations, they talked and talked, recording their conversations. The trip formed the basis of their 2016 book, Our People: Journey With an Enemy, an instant best-seller in Lithuania. It also ignited a rancorous debate among Lithuanians, who have long downplayed their country’s considerable role in the Holocaust.

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Farwell My Friend: Three Things I Learned from Elie Wiesel

Dear Friends,

Please find below Moshe Kantor’s opinion article published in the Newsweek following the sad loss of Prof. Elie Wiesel.

Kind regards,
The EJC team

European Jewish Congress (EJC)
Tel : +3225408159
Fax : +3225408169
Web : www.eurojewcong.org

FAREWELL MY FRIEND: THREE THINGS I LEARNED FROM ELIE WIESEL

The world has lost one of its premier moral voices, writes the president of the European Jewish Congress.

BY MOSHE KANTOR

The great French writer Victor Hugo once said that “adversity makes men.” There is no one in the history of humanity for whom this is more true than the late great Elie Wiesel. The world has lost one of its premier moral voices. His early life was fashioned in darkness, but he brought light to our world with his words of hope and peace. His courage to see good when he saw so much unspeakable evil should remain a legacy, not just for the Jewish people, but for mankind. Our view of life can be determined by interactions with extraordinary people. If you are lucky, each of us will meet one person who will change our world. For me, that was Elie Wiesel.

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Documentary Film: “An Open Door: Jewish Rescue in the Philippines”

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You are invited to attend a screening of An Open Door (2015) at the Lithuanian Jewish Community at 5:00 P.M. on July 13, 2016.

While Europe was under the thrall of the Nazis, Filipino president Manuel Quezon and US high commissioner to the Philippines Paul McNutt opened the door to 1,300 persecuted European Jews in the Philippines.

Jack Simke, assistant to the director and award-winning filmmaker Noel Izon, will introduce the film and lead a discussion afterwards. The event will take place in English.

For more information about the film, see here and here.

For more about the Jewish community in the Philippines, see here.

Concerning Statements Made by Daniel Lupshitz in the Name of the Lithuanian Jewish Community

July 5, 2016, No. 282

To: Remigijus Šimašius,
mayor, Vilnius

cc:
Government of the Republic of Lithuania

The honorable Amir Maimon,
ambassador of the State of Israel

Concerning Statements Made by Daniel Lupshitz in the Name of the Lithuanian Jewish Community

July 5, 2016
Vilnius

Recently many people have been inquiring of the Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC), by whose authority does Daniel Lupshitz speak for the LJC on different Lithuanian television programs?

Through this letter we wish to assure you that there is no such authority granted to Daniel Lupshitz, nor will there be in the near future. We would like to inform all media this person speaks only for himself, and does not represent the LJC or the regional Jewish communities.

If he has been given the authority to speak for the municipality of the city of Vilnius, that needs to be clearly stated.

[signed]
Faina Kukliansky,
chairwoman

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Judah Passow Thanks LJC Chairwoman Faina Kukliansky for Celebration for Return of Torah

Juda Passow dėkoja LŽB ir pirmininkei F.Kukliansky už Toros sugrįžimo šventę

“I just want to thank you once again for making possible such a moving and memorable day with the Lithuanian Jewish community,” Judah Passow said in the note.

“It was an honour and a privilege to be with all of you. I’m especially grateful to you for the time and effort you put into making what began as an idea a year ago into a reality,” he wrote.

Judah Passow’s father, professor David Passow at Philadelphia University, received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to commemorate Jewish life behind the iron curtain in 1960. When he went to Vilnius that same year, local Jewish leaders asked him to take away with him one of two Torah scrolls which were used in the Vilnius ghetto and survived the Holocaust intact, saying they were unsure what the future held for Jews in the Soviet Union. The Passows protected the Torah ever since then, for 56 years, and used it for three bar mitzvahs in the family. When he came to Vilnius last year for a showing of his photography work, Judah Passow met Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and the idea was fleshed out of returning the scroll to Vilnius. Just last week Passow returned the Torah dating from the time of Vilna Gaon, with a silver decoration his mother Aviva Passow made for the scroll.

Jewish Heritage Trip to Lithuania Visits Lithuanian Jewish Community

LŽB lankėsi „Jewish Heritage trip to Lithuania“ delegacija

A delegation from the Jewish Heritage Trip to Lithuania led by Peggy Mosinger Freedman visited the Lithuanian Jewish Community July 1. The organization supports the “Food to Homes” program for the elderly conducted by the LJC Social Center. Members of the group are not infrequent visitors to Lithuania, where they always take a keen interest in Jewish life. This time the delegation included Canadian Alex Bronsteter, who said he can make the trip to the land of his roots now that he retired. He wants to bring his children to Kaunas next year as well. His mother survived the Kaunas ghetto, but most of her relatives were murdered.

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Condolences

With sadness and our deepest condolences to those who survive him, we announce that Mema Epštein died on July 2. He was born May 16, 1938 and was a member of the LJC Social Club.

Global Media Carry Discovery of Escape Tunnel at Ponar

News of the discovery of the tunnel used by the burners’ brigade to escape from the mass murder site of Ponar near the Lithuanian capital has been picked up by media around the world. The Lithuanian Jewish Community received a report from the Lithuanian ambassador to India that Indian media are reprinting an article about it from the Washington Post.

A team of experts from Israel, Lithuania, the United States and Canada found the escape tunnel, new killing pits, overgrown paths taken by the victims to the execution site and the distribution of human ashes and crushed bone at the site.

The burners’ brigade was formed by the Nazis to exhume the corpses of Jews shot at Ponar, burn them in large piles and crush to dust whatever bones or teeth survived the fire. They knew they were condemned to death and over a period of time excavated a tunnel from their place of confinement.

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White Rose Exhibit to Open in Kaunas

Kaunas Balt.roze

The White Rose was the only organized youth resistance group at universities in Nazi Germany (the Edelweiss Pirates and the Swingjugend weren’t specifically university groups and weren’t as organized), established by students and a professor in Munich in June of 1942. Gradually the White Rose movement has come to symbolize all German resistance to Naziism, although it is still not widely known outside Germany.

In their final leaflet distributed in February of 1943, the White Rose society wrote:

“Der deutsche Name bleibt für immer geschändet, wenn nicht die deutsche Jugend endlich aufsteht, rächt und sühnt zugleich, ihre Peiniger zerschmettert und ein neues geistiges Europa aufrichtet. Studentinnen! Studenten! Auf uns sieht das deutsche Volk!”

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Remembering Lietūkis Garage

Lietūkio garažo žudynes prisimenant

Events to commemorate the victims of the Lietūkis garage massacre took place in Kaunas on the last, very hot weekend in June. Seventy-five years have passed since this atrocity. On June 24 we remembered and honored the victims of the mass murder before a monument set up at the site of pogrom by the Kaunas Jewish Community 10 years ago. A commemorative concert was held at the Kaunas State Philharmonic on June 26 with a special program by the male vocal artists Quorum. Members of the Kaunas Jewish Community were joined at the events by Kaunas residents and representatives of social organizations, the municipality and the Catholic Church. Raimundas Kaminskas and Julija Iskevičienė, representatives of the Kaunas section of Sąjūdis [Lithuanian independence movement] expressed sorrow, solidarity and the hope the brutality and the mass murders would never happen again. The priest Robertas Pukenis and deputy mayor of Kaunas Vasiliy Popov expressed the same sentiments. Scouts from the Kaunas area honored the victims with a Lithuanian folk song.

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Remembering Elie Wiesel: A Tribute from a Friend and Disciple

Dear Friends,

Together with the entire Jewish people and, indeed, the world, we are in mourning today for one of the greatest writers, teachers, and human rights activists of our age. Elie Wiesel not only survived the Shoah–he transcended its horrors and became the voice first of its survivors and then of the conscience of humankind.

Below are my recollections of, and tribute and farewell to, my friend and mentor for more than 55 years, published in Tablet Magazine. The link is:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/206702/remembering-elie-wiesel-a-tribute-from-a-friend-and-disciple

May his memory be a blessing and a source of strength to his beloved wife Marion, his son Elisha, daughter in law Lynn, his grandchildren, his stepdaughter Jennifer, the entire Jewish people and to us all.

Menachem Rosensaft

Father Murdered in Front of His Children in Har Hevron Shooting

Arab terrorists overtake family traveling in their car and open fire, killing Michael Marc of Otniel, wounding three other family members.

One person was killed and three others wounded in a shooting attack at the Adorayim Junction south of Hevron in Judea.

The fatality has been identified as 40-year-old Michael “Micki” Mark rom the nearby town of Otniel, who was traveling in his car with his family when it was targeted.

His wife Chavi was seriously wounded in the attack, and was evacuated to Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem hospital with multiple gunshot wounds to her upper body.

Full story here.

Call for Recipes

Dear members,

This year the Lithuanian Jewish Community will be actively involved in the European Jewish Culture Day program and is organizing different events to present the Jewish languages and Jewish cultural heritage to the public. European Jewish Culture Day will happen September 4, 2016.

The Bagel Shop Café will have on offer Jewish culinary heritage and is asking you to recall dishes made by your parents and grandparents, to find handwritten recipes (including in Yiddish) and to share them. We will prepare the best examples and offer them to the public during the event, and publish the recipes and descriptions.

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Picking Up the Pieces

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by Geoff Vasil

“Don’t get too close!” an attractive and sunburned young Lithuanian warned at the edge of a large pit just behind what was the Great Synagogue of Vilnius. He’s friendly and it quickly becomes clear he’s the lead archaeologist on the dig, but he’s just as quick to point out he’s formally the lead archaeologist, but Dr. Richard Freund of the University of Hartford in Connecticut is the real force behind the whole initiative.

Mantas Daubaras is doing his doctoral thesis at the Lithuanian Institute of History on a Neolithic site far to the west in Lithuania. He has no personal connection to Jewish Vilna and approaches it as he would any site, dispassionately.

“Yesterday we found what we think is the ritual bath,” he explains, pointing to a small hole in the top of what looks like a vaulted brick ceiling. They sent a camera in to take a look and found a large space terminated by rubble and fill. Does it connect to the Great Synagogue? He doesn’t know yet, but it looks as if it extends right up to the line where they think the back wall of the synagogue once stood.

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