News

Criticism leveled at Lithuanian government and society at Vilnius Holocaust conference

Criticism leveled at Lithuanian government and society at Vilnius Holocaust conference

A conference on Holocaust education was held at Vilnius city hall on 17 April. The conference was the final event in the “Being a Jew” project’s series of events this year marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The conference included participants from the United States, Poland, Romania and Israel, including recognized and esteemed Holocaust historians and Holocaust education specialists, among them Tomas Venclova, Saulius Sužiedėlis, Dovid Katz, Šarūnas Liekis and a prerecorded address given by Efraim Zuroff. Representative of the European Commission’s European Remembrance program Pavel Tychtl, Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky, Vilnius mayor Artūras Zuokas and Holocaust education experts from Poland and Lithuania spoke as well. No official representatives of the Lithuanian Parliament or Government attended.

Read more Read more
Jewish Vilna’s Best Kept Secret: 100th Exhibit Features Gaon, and Still Counting

Jewish Vilna’s Best Kept Secret: 100th Exhibit Features Gaon, and Still Counting

The Lithuanian Jewish community has always been different from the Jewish communities in other countries. Back in the Lithuanian Grand Duchy (roughly from AD 1200 to just before 1800) the Jewish communities enjoyed the special favor of the grand dukes and the Vilna Jewish community especially but Litvaks in general as well gained world renown for scholarship and religious knowledge, and many celebrated rabbis, cantors and Talmudic scholars issued forth from Lithuania. Litvaks have long had a reputation for being more conservative and for being more immune to innovation than other communities. The special worldview of the Litvaks, distinct for its synthesis of rational thought, logic, reason and religious imperatives, evolved under the influence of great local religious authorities and social conditions within the cultural zone of the Grand Duchy. The Litvak attitude, point of view and worldview is a distinct form of Jewish mentality for which the Litvaks became known as a distinct group within Judaism and Jewish culture over the centuries. The greatest religious authority, largely responsible for the religio-cultural identity of the Lithuanian Jewish community, was the wise Vilna Gaon of the 18th century.

Read more
Imagining an Alternate History in Lithuania: A Jew in the Motherland

Imagining an Alternate History in Lithuania: A Jew in the Motherland

I, your faithful correspondent from the Colonial Motherland, just spent six days in the other motherland – Lithuania, the place from which most of my ancestors came. Other than a return in the 1990’s by my Holocaust-survivor maternal grandmother, and a similarly timed visit by my paternal grandparents, none of my “nearby” extended family had been to Lithuania in about seventy years.

What drew me back? In part there is a certain enjoyment I have – despite my complaints about Ashkenormativity – in being a Litvak. Lita brings to my mind a certain sort of rootedness, as well as the rye bread, pickled herring, and peppery gefilte fish (certainly not sweet) my grandparents fed me as a child. There was also a sense of “this is where things started”: before one brave great-grandparent set out 120 years ago to South Africa, my ancestors had been in Lithuania for centuries. Part of me wanted to honor the relatives – including my mother’s half-sister – who had been decimated by the Shoah. Finally, I’ve been entangled in an increasingly drawn-out attempt to gain Lithuanian citizenship by descent, given a new law granting the descendants of Holocaust survivors citizenship of the country. (Obviously, I would keep my other passports.)

Read more

Memories of America: Three Students Tell of Their Experiences

The Joint Distribution Committee, or JDC, more commonly known simply as the Joint, is a participant in Lithuanian Jewish Community activities and youth programs, and selected three students for a trip to the United States.

Edvinas Puslys is a member of the LJC’s Ilan Club and native of Vilnius whose mother is Jewish. He is 16 and is in the 10th grade at the Sholem Aleichem Jewish Gymnasium. He was grateful for the opportunity the Joint provided him to travel in Poland last summer and visit Jewish locations in Warsaw and Cracow, and Auschwitz. In January he travelled to America to take part in the second part of the program, and saw firsthand there how Jewish families and others live in America. He said Jewish life and making friends were much easier there, and that American Jews are much more open, communicative and friendly.

Read more

Invitation to the lecture “The history of Jewish resistance against the Nazi genocide in the occupied USSR

muz

Dear friends,

You are kindly invited to a lecture on a very involving and still awaiting for further research topic – The history of Jewish resistance against the Nazi genocide in the occupied USSR.

The lecturer Anika Walke, Ph.D., is assistant professor of history at Washington University in St. Louis and her book is to be published at Oxford University Press.

Place and time: Vilnius Jewish Public Library, Gedimino 24, Vilnius, April 30, 2015, 5 pm

RSVP: info@vilnius-jewish-public-library.com or (8-5) 219 77 48

Press release

Press release

Criticism Leveled at Lithuanian Government and Society at Vilnius Holocaust Conference VILNIUS, April 20, 2015 A conference on Holocaust education was held at the Vilnius city hall on April 17, 2015. This conference was the final event in the “Being a Jew” project’s series of events this year marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The day before the “Star of Remembrance” event to commemorate Holocaust victims with 700 students participating from 15 Vilnius schools took place outside the Town Hall in Vilnius and at Ponar mass massacre site outside Vilnius. The conference included participants from the United States, Poland, Romania and Israel, including recognized and esteemed Holocaust historians and Holocaust education specialists, among them Tomas Venclova, Saulius Sužiedėlis, Dovid Katz, Šarūnas Liekis and a prerecorded address given by Efraim Zuroff. Director of the European Commission’s European Remembrance program Pavel Tychtl, Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky, Vilnius mayor Artūras Zuokas and Holocaust education experts from Poland and Lithuania spoke as well.

Read more

Jerusalem of the North is Already Lithuania’s “Brand,” Tomas Venclova Says

A day-long conference April 17 capped efforts in Lithuania’s capital city this year to mark Yom haShoah, Holocaust Day, appropriately, and featured speakers as diverse as Vilnius’s mayor, esteemed writer and thinker Tomas Venclova and Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem and now director for Eastern Europe as well, who is often referred to as “the last Nazi hunter.”

The Lithuanian Jewish Community was also amply represented there, with a keynote speech by LJC chair Faina Kukliansky and outgoing LJC executive director Simonas Gurevičius acting as moderator.

Other speakers included Pavel Tychtl from the European Commission, Dovid Katz of DefendingHistory.com, Piotr Kowalik of the Polish Jewish Museum in Warsaw, the historian and writer Saulius Sužiedelis and others. 

Read more
Hundreds of Youth Form Human Star of David outside Vilnius’s Old Town Hall

Hundreds of Youth Form Human Star of David outside Vilnius’s Old Town Hall

Hundreds of students marked Holocaust Day last Thursday by forming a giant Star of David on the square outside the Lithuanian capital’s historic Old Town Hall building Thursday before boarding trains for Ponar, where over 70,000 Jews were murdered during World War II. The same day the Lithuanian
Government and Prime Minister’s Office honored Lithuanian families who rescued Jews during the war.

More pictures

LJC Chair Faina Kukliansky addresses March of the Living at Ponar

The annual March of the Living procession assembled in Ponar (Paneriai) outside Vilnius last Thursday to walk the final mile many Jews walked from the railroad station to the killing pits from 1941 to 1944. Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky spoke to those who gathered at the main memorial there. Her speech is available here, in Lithuanian with synchronous translation to English:

fk

Calling all community members!

Calling all community members!

VOLUNTEERS WANTED!

You are invited to a volunteer clean-up campaign at 1:00 P.M. on April 26, 2015. We need people at the Jewish cemetery in the Šeškinė neighborhood of Vilnius (Sudervės kelias).

You’ll need to wear appropriate clothing and bring work gloves. Those who possess such things are asked to bring rakes.

If you can help, place call 8-652 09205 by April 22, or send an email to info@lzb.lt telling us, so we can pass it on to the organizers. If the weather is unexpectedly bad the clean-up at the cemetery will be rescheduled for another day and those who have registered will be informed.

March of the Living honours Holocaust victims in Paneriai, Lithuania

Hundreds of people attended the traditional March of the Living on the Holocaust Memorial Day from a railway station to the memorial where 70,000 Jews were massacred during World War Two.

Under flying Lithuanian and Israeli flags, the rally included Jews living in Lithuania, people from Israel and a few hundred young people who formed a human David’s Star in front of the Vilnius Town Hall before the march.

“If we’re talking about Paneriai, it is a factory of death. The only word I can think of is horrible. I am here at this rally because I owe my family – I need to preserve their memory,” Fania Brancovskaja, 93-year-old survivor of the Holocaust in Vilnius, told BNS.

The article

The March of the Living

April 16, 2015, is Yom haShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the traditional March of the Living will take place in Lithuania, marking the route to Ponar where 70,000 Lithuanian Jews were murdered. This year 600 young people from Vilnius will take part along with the Jewish community. The march will have a unique start this year, with the 600 young people forming a human Star of David at 11:00 A.M. on the square outside the Old Town Hall in Vilnius on April 16.

Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky said Holocaust Remembrance Day marked by the March of the Living is an extraordinary event summoning many people to the Ponar memorial where they may travel the same path those condemned to death followed when they were brought in by train and forced to march their final march to the pits.

Read more
Delegation from a European Jewish cemeteries committee in Vilnius

Delegation from a European Jewish cemeteries committee in Vilnius

Baltic News Service reported April 14, 2015, that members of the delegation from a European Jewish cemeteries committee said they have no complaints over Lithuanian Government plans to refurbish the former Palace of Sports building complex located upon an old Jewish cemetery.

After the meeting Rabbi Hershel Gluck said: “This is an important day for the Lithuanian Jewish Community and for relations with Lithuanian state representatives and the Lithuanian people.”

He told reporters further that “this shows we can work together in a way beneficial to all sides. This is a new chapter in cooperation between the Jewish community and the Lithuanian Government. I want to express gratitude for these very positive steps.” 

Read more

Origins of the Holocaust in Lithuania

Discussion published by Andrius Kulikauskas on Monday, April 13, 2015 0 Replies
Greetings from Lithuania!

I share an article which I published at Dovid Katz’s website DefendingHistory.com, “How Did Lithuanians Wrong Litvaks?”
http://defendinghistory.com/how-did-lithuanians-wrong-litvaks-by-andrius…

It’s my English translation of an extended version of a talk that I gave in Lithuanian at the conference “Litvak Culture in Lithuania and Beyond” on December 11, 2014 at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius.

I investigate the extent of Lithuanian responsibility for the Holocaust, but especially, the indiscriminate murder of roughly 80,000 Jews in Kaunas and the shtetls of Lithuania in 1941 as documented by the Jaeger report. The murder of women, children and the elderly was well under way even before September 1941, when Hitler made his decision to annihilate the Jews in his dominion, according to Christopher Browning.

Read more

Opinion: If you doubt benefits of conscription, look at Israel

Darius Degutis, former ambassador of Lithuania to Israel
The decision of the Lithuanian Seimas to re-introduce conscriptionwas welcome. It was a crucial step not only because of the growing geopolitical threat but more importantly because it builds a healthy, solid and Western society and a state that has confidence in itself.
The debate on calling up young people to the army is currently underway. What’s shocking is that there are suggestions that serving your country and the security of Lithuania is a duty first and foremost of unemployed, homeless young men and even criminals. One gets the impression that the authors of this “idea” still see Lithuania’s armed forces today through the prism of the Soviet army where brute physical aggression and crass , absurd obedience dominated, eliminating any kind of thinking. It was no accident that during the Soviet times we threatened with the maxim “if you fail school, you go to the army”.

Read more

A Death in the Family April 9, 2015

Levinson-2013

With profound sadness the Lithuanian Jewish Community mourns the loss on Thursday of one its founding members, Josep Levinson (1917-2015). Levinson was a pioneer in Holocaust research after World War II and located Jewish mass murder sites. He also led efforts to mark and commemorate such sites. His memory lives on in the his books “The Shoah: The Holocaust in Lithuania” and “The Book of Sorrow” he compiled and edited, monuments to the lost Lithuanian Jewish Community. The book contains information about and photographs of almost every Jewish mass murder site in Lithuania.

 Josif Levinson grew up in the shtetl Vishéy (Lithuanian Veisiejai) in the Dzūkija ethnographic region of Lithuania. He was graduated from Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas with a degree in engineering. In 1941 his father and relatives were murdered in the village of Katkiškė near Lazdéy (Lithuanian Lazdijai). He fought the Nazis as a serviceman of the 16th Lithuanian Division during World War II and was seriously injured.  He was a founding figure of Vilnius’s Green House–the Holocaust exhibit of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum–and was one of the primary historians in the field of Lithuanian Holocaust studies.

We mourn our great loss and offer our condolences to the immediate family of the esteemed scholar and tireless advocate of memory and justice.

Joseph Levinson, 98, Dies in Vilnius

JOSEPH LEVINSON (1917-2015)

Native of Vishéy (Veisiejai), Lithuania. Decorated hero of the Red Army’s war against Nazi Germany. Specialist engineer over half a century.

Fearless Litvak truthteller about the Holocaust in Lithuania who assembled the documents that outline the accurate history (as well as the intellectual history of “Double Genocide” revisionism).