Vandals attacked the monument to one of the mass graves in the Pivonija Forest outside Ukmergė (Vilkomir) following a commemoration there on September 6. Local police say the desecration happened on September 6. The mass grave site has suffered vandalism including from four-wheel off-road vehicles before. Police said they will investigate fully the latest incident.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, Israeli ambassador Shelly Hugler Livne and members of the Šiauliai Jewish Community, the Ukmergė (Vilkomir) Jewish Community and Kaunas Jewish Community attended a ceremony to commemorate Holocaust victims at the memorial and mass grave site in the Pivonija Forest on September 6. The United States embassy’s deputy ambassador Dan Hunt and diplomat Emma Locatelli attended, as did Lithuania’s deputy minister for culture Lina Baublienė and others.
After the ceremony participants were invited to attend an exhibit of Righteous Gentiles at the Ukmergė Tolerance Center. Ukmergė Jewish Community chairman Artūras Taicas took the opportunity to announce a new initiative to create an internet archive of historical Jewish passports and identity documents.
A ceremony to mark the 85th anniversary of the liquidation of the Ponevezh ghetto was held in the northern Lithuanian city September 8 with a number of speakers and music.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said they had gathered both to honor the dead and keep memory of the Holocaust alive for future generations.
Israel’s ambassador to Lithuania Shelly Hugler Livne said 85 years is long time in human life but only an instant in terms of historical memory.
Lithuanian MP Ramūnas Vyžintas reiterated the need to safeguard historical memory.
Sister Leonora Kasiūlytė from the Congregation of the Sisters of God’s Providence told the story Marija Rusteikaitė, the nun from the Panevėžys area who rescued 15 Jews including children.
A delegation of about 30 Litvaks living in Israel are visiting the northern Lithuanian city Panevėžys, or Ponevezh, and have met with the mayor of the city, Loreta Masiliūnienė. For many of the visitors the trip is very personal, an opportunity to visit where their parents, grandparents and forefathers lived and died.
Association of Lithuanian Jews in Israel Grisha Deitch sat with mayor Masiliūnienė at city hall in front of the rest of the Israeli delegation and they discussed the history of the Ponevezh community, securing its future and ties with Litvaks abroad.
A memorial ceremony will be held at the monument marking the gates of the Panevėžys ghetto will be held at 2:00 P.M. on Tuesday, September 8, followed by a walking tour of Jewish sites. Later the delegation and others will visit the mass murder site in Kurganava Forest where about 8,000 Jews were murdered, and the mass murder site in Žalioji Forest, where about 5,000 Jews were murdered.
Last week the Vilnius Jewish Public Library recognized Irina Guzenberg and Henrik Agranovski’s impressive and encyclopedic book Vilnius, the result of more than 30 years of research, published in English and Russian.
The book is both a short encyclopedia and a chronicle of Yerushalayim d’Lite, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilnius. Israeli ambassador Shelly Hugler Livne, Lithuanian deputy foreign minister Kristupas Vaitiekūnas, a large contingent from Beit Vilna, Lithuanian Jewish Community members and academics from Lithuania, Israel and the USA attended to book presentation.
The book was previously published as a much shorter version of Jewish sites in Vilnius for tourists and others. The larger volume goes into much greater depth about the sites and histories.
The Kaunas Jewish Community is celebrating this year’s theme for the European Day of Jewish Culture, love, with a free concert. A new installment in the Dance Me Back to the Future called Erev Shel Shoshanim, Evening of Roses, is a two-voice musical dialogue featuring Hebrew love songs and operatic arias.
Katya Kov is the organizer with support from Pasaka and the Create Culture Group in cooperation with Cvi Parkas. Supporters include the Goodwill Foundation and the city of Vilnius.
“The title Dance Me Back to the Future combines Leonard Cohen’s Dance Me to the End of Time and Robert Zemeckis’s film Back to the Future,” she explained. “Together, they open a path between the past and the present, following Lithuanian and Litvak history and stories, recollections and cultural ties which travel from generation to generation and find new voices today,” she said.
The concert is free and open to the public.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Tuesday, September 8
Place: Mikas and Kira Petrauskas House, K. Petrausko street no. 31, Kaunas
The Sabbath begins at 8:03 P.M. on Friday, September 4, and concludes at 8:57 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 7:45 P.M. and completed before sunset at 8:03 P.M. This Friday, September 4, is Labor Day in the United States. Wednesday, September 9, is Day of the Victims of the Holocaust and of Racial Violence in Slovakia. This holiday first established by the Slovak Parliament in 2000 commemorates the day in 1941 when the Slovak government issued a decree on the legal status of Jews in the country, known as the Jewish Codex, which led to the deportation of Jews from the country, resulting in the murder of approximately 70,000 Slovak Jews. The commemorative day was created to ensure this event remains fresh in the minds of all Slovaks so that this tragedy is never repeated.
Memorial for two victims attended by 800, including senior government figures; statement from King Charles read at ceremony: “Hatred can never prevail over our shared humanity”
Photo: Heaton Park Synagogue’s Rabbi Daniel Walker speaks at a memorial service for victims of the 2025 Yom Kippur terror attack, August 31, 2026. Courtesy Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region.
More than 800 people gathered Monday, August 31, at Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the deadly Yom Kippur terrorist attack.
Two people were killed on October 2, 2025, when British-Syrian citizen Jihad al-Shamie rammed his car into the gates of the synagogue during prayer services on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Al-Shamie stabbed Melvin Cravitz, 66, to death, then tried to storm the synagogue before police shot him dead. Adrian Daulby, 53, died from a single gunshot wound to the chest fired by a police officer responding to the situation.
The attack was one of the worst antisemitic incidents in Europe since the war in the Middle East began with the Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Eugene Smotkin, 72, currently lives in Puerto Rico and works in renewable energy. He and wife Linda recently visited Panevėžys whence his family comes, and visited the Panevėžys Jewish Community where they were warmly received by chairman Gennady Kofman. They visited the mass murder sites in the Žalioji Forest and Kurganava Forest together.
Eugene Smotkin said his father Morris was 16 when his uncle, Rabbi Meyer Kimmel, arrived in Ponevezh. He took Morris to New York where he entered yeshiva, then enlisted in the army. Morris knew five languages and during his service he interrogated captured SS officers, collecting intelligence on Nazi Germany.
“I never wanted to write a book about myself. My goal was to tell the story of post-war Jewish life, and the example I know well is our family,” Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky said Friday at a reading room in Palanga where she presented her book Dainos iš mėlynos užrašinės [Songs from the Blue Notebook].
She spoke about her family’s story, including stories about the post-war reality, and the childish fears and joys which sometimes last a lifetime.
“Don’t be surprised if I cry. My whole family got teary-eyed reading this book,” she cautioned.
Her book about her parents, grandparents and cousins, their experiences and fates, was more than an autobiography. It’s a portrait of three generations of Litvaks, the story of how they carried on after the Holocaust and learned to take joy in life again, while always carrying inside the unfathomable tragedy.
The European Day of Jewish Culture enters its 22nd year this Sunday, September 6, with this year’s theme love. In Judaism love is more than romantic emotions, it’s the connection between cultures and communities, linking the past with the present and people with generations.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to celebrate the European Day of Culture with us with a special program of events.
Program:
11:00 A.M. Ruth Reches will deliver an introductory Hebrew lesson at the LJC. Registration required before 5:00 P.M. Friday by clicking here.
The Sabbath begins at 8:21 P.M. on Friday, August 28, and concludes at 9:16 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 8:03 P.M. and completed before sunset at 8:21 P.M. Tuesday, September 1, is the first day of school and a national holiday in Lithuania.
Faina Kukliansky will present her book “Dainos iš mėlynos užrašinės” [Songs from the Blue Notebook] in Palanga Friday at the Palanga summer reading room and will sign copies. The book is a family history comprising three generations of Litvaks, from her grandparents who survived the Holocaust, to her father who spent his youth in a concentration camp to Faina’s sister Sulamita and Faina herself, chairwoman of the Lithuanian Jewish Community and accomplished attorney.
“People sometimes ask me why I spend so much energy on the issue of history and the place of the Jews in the world, and all the more so since most of my people are no longer with us. All I can say is my goal: to preserve their memory. We don’t have my parents’ candelabrum anymore, in which every Jewish family lights their Sabbath candles. All we have left is memory and respect,” Kukliansky said.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Friday, August 28
Place: Palanga summer reading room, Vytauto street no. 72, Palanga
The Jews murdered August 15 and 16, 1941, in Rokishok were commemorated on August 16, 2026, in this small northern Lithuanian town and former shtetl. The Rokiškis Regional History Museum invited the public to attend a “Road of Memory” procession from the ghetto next to the Rokiškis manor house (where the museum is now housed) to the Velniaduobė forest about 4 kilometers outside town where the Jewish population was slaughtered.
Rokiškis Regional History Museum staff spoke at the beginning, midway and end of the procession. Participants places inscribed with the names of victims at the memorial stele marking the mass murder site where around 3,200 Jews, 6 Lithuanians and 1 Pole were killed.
Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman was in attendance and said no Jewish family was untouched by the Holocaust. Rokiškis regional municipality council member Vytautas Saulis spoke about the Soviet trials of Lithuanians who murdered Jews held in 1965, and said the main question hadn’t been addressed: why?
According to Lithuania’s International Commission to Asses the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupations in Lithuania, which is behind the Road of Memory initiatives throughout Lithuania, around 75% of the town’s population was Jewish before they were murdered.
The Sabbath begins at 8:37 P.M. on Friday, August 21, and concludes at 9:35 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 8:19 P.M. and completed before sunset at 8:37 P.M.
by Grant Gochin
A Lithuanian state institution took an American administrative record, hardened it into an exoneration and published the result as a verdict of the United States. It has defended that claim since 2018. On August 19, 2026, ninety-nine days after Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry told US Congress the wording had been corrected, the claim was still online in Lithuanian.
Everything that matters is in documents Lithuania itself has supplied.
What America Actually Decided
In 1974 the Immigration and Naturalization Service examined allegations concerning Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis, acting head of Lithuania’s 1941 Provisional Government, and interior minister Jonas Šlepetys. Commissioner Leonard Chapman reported that no information of an evidentiary nature had been elicited from the sources contacted; the names were removed from the active list and the investigations deactivated. He also said new meaningful information would reactivate the investigation.
by Grant Gochin
A Lithuanian university published the contradictory wartime record in 2005. The Centre was told, and kept publishing.
Vilnius University Press published the wartime record in 2005. Thomas Remeikis assembled the American Legation dispatches from Stockholm and the Lithuanian material carried inside them; the Institute of International Relations and Political Science at Vilnius University appears on the imprint, and the introduction is signed Chicago-Vilnius, 2004. 1 Twenty-one years later the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania cannot describe the Lithuanian material in those documents as Soviet, inaccessible, or newly discovered in a foreign archive. That matters now, because the Centre is the state body expected to supply historical authority in the prosecution of Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Vilnius charged over a Facebook post. Its disclosure conduct in that case is set out in Show the File.
Publication establishes availability. It does not prove that a particular official at the Centre read this volume. The correspondence set out below establishes something different and harder: the Centre received direct documentary challenges to the historical claims it went on publishing, and answered them.
From September 13 to October 7 2026 the Lithuanian capital will host the third international Jewish music and culture festival, Vilnius Shalom Festival, one of the most significant events dedicated to Jewish music and culture in the Baltic region.
The festival’s nearly month-long programme will feature classical music, klezmer and jazz concerts, educational events, as well as the Shofar March – a unique symbolic procession of unity, peace and remembrance with no equivalent elsewhere in the region. Dedicated to the beginning of the Hebrew New Year, Rosh Hashanah, the Shofar March will bring together hundreds of participants from Lithuania and abroad for the third consecutive year.
by Grant Gochin
Eight days before Artur Fridman’s next hearing, Lithuania’s state history center should disclose the research behind any historical premise used against him.
The next hearing in the criminal case against Artur Fridman is scheduled for August 26. He is innocent, and the prosecution against him is illegitimate. Before the Vilnius City District Court hears more historical evidence, Lithuania should answer a simpler question: what research file, if any, supports the state history being carried into the case?
The prosecution began with a Facebook post. On May 9, 2024, Fridman stood at Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. He wrote about Soviet victory, Lithuanian partisans, and Lithuania’s heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Algirdas Ramanauskas filed a complaint with the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office on July 16, 2024. On January 8, 2025, authorities imposed a written undertaking restricting Fridman from leaving Lithuania. On October 30, 2025, prosecutor Kristina Minko signed charges in Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24 under Criminal Code Articles 170² §1 and 313 §2. The formal indictment runs twelve pages; the broader pre-trial file runs to roughly 220. The Vilnius City District Court opened the trial on March 5, 2026.
Emanuelis Moskovičius has died. He was born in 1947. He was an active member of the Lithuanian Jewish Community, a warm person and a good friend. Our deepest condolences to his family, friends and all who knew and loved him.