The Embassy of Israel to Lithuania organized a fun event, inviting everyone who wanted to ride bicycles together through the beautiful city of Vilnius.

Riding under the motto “Have fun, ride safe,” around 200 participants rode through the streets of  Vilnius wearing t-shirts made especially for the event. At the end riders were treated to apples with honey, in anticipation of the upcoming Jewish New Year.

Pictures

Operating now since winter, the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in the Vilnius neighborhood of Žvėrynas has now opened its doors officially. The gymnasium acquired the school premises on Kraševskio street in mid-2013 and spent two years renovating the dilapidated classrooms, corridors and assembly halls. September 1, the traditional start of the school year, became a real holiday for the first graders whose faces lit up as they received First Grade passports and the principal gave them a gift: a trip to McDonalds.

“Is it my fault that summer is over?” gymnasium principal Miša Jakobas quoted a line of poetry as he began his welcome speech. The experienced teacher paused after the line, and the audience erupted into laughter and applause.

August 30, 2015  lrytas.lt

Until only recently, Kraševskio street in the Lithuanian capital was a dilapidated and abandoned section of the Žvėrynas neighborhood. Today this location has received new life. Although surrounding buildings appear just as dilapidated as before, the sidewalks are still uneven and tree branches still litter the ground, there is a shiny newly-renovated building standing right in the middle.

So this year the traditional start of the school year, September 1, will also feature the opening of the impressive new school building, the Sholem Aleichem Gymnasium. The Lithuanian and Israeli flags fly atop tall flagpoles in the yard. This is a secular school in whose cafeteria pork products are not to be found, and the cafeteria workers ask whether it’s alright to add sour cream to the beet and meat soup. The majority of children attending the school are Jewish.

School principal Miša Jakobas, 66, is bright, polite and calm, but also speaks emotionally. A true teacher by calling. He describes himself as a Lithuanian patriot and is happy that almost all of his graduates pursue successful careers in their own country, and almost none seek their fortunes abroad.

For full interview in Lithuanian, see Lrytas.lt

An exhibition of photographs called “Pope Francis’s Visit to Israel in 2014” opened on Cathedral Square, the center of the city of Vilnius, on August 28. The photographs presented in the exhibit were selected to best show the historical nature of the visit and the most important meetings during the Pope’s trip. Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon and Vilnius archbishop metropolitan Gintaras Linas Grušas opened the open-air public exhibition.

In May, 2014, Pope Francis made his first visit to the Holy Land. It was the fourth pilgrimage by a Pope to Israel, and came on the 50th anniversary of the visit Pope Paul VI made to Israel.

Shimon Peres, president of Israel then, met Pope Francis at Ben-Gurion Airport. The Pope then travelled to Jerusalem where he met the patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. They prayed together inside the church. The Pope participated at a synod of bishops later that day.

On the sunny afternoon of August 26 a contingent of the ever-cheerful and bright Hesed Club activists gathered at the Kaunas Jewish Community to celebrate the 95th birthday of fellow Hesed Club and Kaunas Jewish Community member Ana Orlova. Ana Orlova was born in Byelorussia. When the war began she was evacuated to Kazan. After the war she contineud her medical studies in Minsk and came to Lithuania in 1948 along with her husband, a military doctor. Initially the young family with two small daughters lived in Marijampolė, then moved to Kaunas in 1956, where the young female doctor was appointed director of the internal diseases section at a Kaunas hospital, where she worked for many years. She retired after Lithuanian independence. Ana Orlova has raised three beautiful daughters and has five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Ana Orlova has always been the life of the party and is happy, inventive and creative. She recently has been reading some of her written work at Kaunas Jewish Community events. Community chairman Gercas Žakas greeted her on the occasion of her birthday and called upon everyone to try to follow her example of sharp wit, inexhaustible energy and great sense of humor. He said she would live to be at least 120!

Photo: Ana Orlova with daughters: Olia visiting from Israel and Nataša who lives in Kaunas.

This last of August, 2015, saw continued agitation over Lithuanian Government plans to restore an aging architectural monument built over a Jewish cemetery bulldozed by the Soviets in 1950. A delegation of Litvak ulta-Orthodox rabbis from Israel and America arrived in Vilnius to petition the government to halt any plans for the site and Israeli media continued to demonstrate a complete naïveté and immunity to the facts in the case in their reporting on the issue. The facts are:

There hasn’t been a cemetery operating at the site since the late 1800s, and the gravestones and monuments were bulldozed and removed in 1950. The Soviets, apparently out of a misplaced sense of cultural sensitivity, removed the human remains of the Vilna Gaon and reinterred them at the one working Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, in the Šeškinė neighborhood on the hill to the northwest of the historical neighborhood of Šnipiškės. Graves were certainly disturbed by Soviet construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the massive Palace of Sports was built. The site was grand Soviet architecture and almost all open ground was covered with flagstones at that point, as it still is. The remaining graves which were never disturbed by the building of the sports arena remain under the flagstones.

Group Meets Deputy Chancellor and the Vilnius Mayor to Relay Calls of World Jewry to Spare 500-year Old Snipiskes Cemetery from Further Desecration

Vilnius – A Rabbinic Delegation visited yesterday Vilnius and met the authorities to plea with them to cancel plans to construct a Congress Hall on Snipiskes Jewish cemetery.

The Snipiskes cemetery was established over five centuries ago, and it interred the most famous Jewish leaders of Vilnius. Sadly, the cemetery’s Gravestones were razed and the cemetery was desecrated by a series of regimes, including the Nazis and the Soviets. The latter built a now-abandoned Sports Palace on the cemetery land.  Desecration continued in recent years, under Lithuania’s democratic government. During the last ten years, two apartment buildings were constructed on cemetery grounds and human remains were disturbed, shattered and excavated, despite protests from Jewish communities worldwide.

A Rabbinic Delegation visited today Vilnius and met the authorities to plead with them to cancel plans to construct a Congress Hall on Snipiskes Jewish cemetery.

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