On August 7, 2015, members of the Panevėžys City Jewish Community visited the Riga ghetto. The Riga ghetto was established in October of 1941 by order of Nazi politician Hugo Wittrock. They placed the ghetto in the most Jewish neighborhood of Riga called the Moscow Suburb by locals. All Riga Jews living outside the territory were ordered to leave their homes immediately and move into the ghetto, 9,000 square meters surrounded by fences.

About 30,000 Jews in total were forced to live under atrocious conditions in the Riga ghetto. Approximately 12 people had to share a room with five beds.

A ghetto prisoner gave the group from Panevėžys a short tour of the ghetto during which he recounted how they murdered Riga ghetto Jews continuously from November of 1941 till June of 1944. On November 28, 1941, the Nazis ordered the men separated from the women, including children.

Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon visited Panevėžys on August 6. The purpose of his visit was to expand cooperation and encourage the growth of trade between Israel and Lithuania, to meet with Panevėžys businesspeople and to meet with the Jewish community. The ambassador visited city hall where he met with the mayor Rytis Račkauskas.

“We live in the middle of Lithuania, in a favorable geographic location, halfway between the capitals of Lithuania and Latvia. We are a compact city favorable for business growth. We have large enterprises such as AB Amilna, the Panevėžys Construction Conglomerate and Panevėžio keliai, we have received foreign investment and we are pleased by the Norwegian companies which have been established here.

“We can be proud of the free economic zone operating here, this year the enterprise Devold should be established here, and two other potential investors are considering doing business here. We strive to make Panevėžys attractive for investors, so we have invited representatives of Israel. I would like to note that ten years ago a protocol was signed with the city of Ramla [in Israel], but sadly this process has come to a halt. One wishes one of the Israeli cities was among the ranks of our partners,” mayor Račkauskas said.

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.