A contingent of members of the Kaunas Jewish Community travelled to Brussels to attend a celebration of 100 years since the founding of the YIVO held at a Lithuanian government representative office there in late September. Member of the European Parliament Liudas Mažylis extended the invitation for the Kaunas legation o attend the event.
The Judaica Research Center at the Lithuanian National Library presents a lecture by Center director Lara Lempertienė at 6:00 P.M. Tuesday, October 28, on Yiddish poet and novelist Moyshe Kulbak called “I Am This City: Moyshe Kulnak’s Vilnius” in :Lithuanian.
Lempertienė for many years has worked with Jewish texts from Lithuania and Europe and has research manuscripts in the National Library’s Judaica collection. She was graduated from Vilnius University as a philologist, studied at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a visiting scholar at Oxford University’s Hebrew and Judaica Studies Center. She earned a doctorate for her thesis “Rabbinical Exegesis in the Context of Traditional Jewish Education in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”
The lecture will take place at the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum in Vilnius where an accompanying exhibit of art by Tania Mourad is on display touching on the Holocaust experience and Litvak poetry, with street graffiti transcribed into the Yiddish alphabet. For more information, call +370 5 261 6764 or send an emial to the museum at kasiulio.muziejus@lndm.lt.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Tuesday, October 28
Place: Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum, Goštauto street no. 1, Vilnius
The Science and Encyclopedia Publishing Center of the Martynas Mažvydas National Library and the Judaica Research Center there are pleased to announce the publication of a Lithuanian translation of Cecile Esther Kuznitz’s acclaimed monograph “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture: Scholarship for the Yiddish Nation.”.
The book presentation will take place at 6:00 P.M on October 21 in the Conference Hall (5th floor) of the National Library. The event will feature the author Cecile Esther Kuznitz, professor of history and director of Jewish Studies at Bard College; Laimonas Briedis, cultural geographer and Vilnius researcher; and Jolanta Mickutė, scholar of Eastern European Jewish history. The discussion will be moderated by Lara Lempertienė, director of the Judaica Research Center.
Originally published in English in 2014, “YIVO and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture” is the first comprehensive history of the YIVO founded in Vilnius in 1925. As the only in-depth study of the institute’s activities in Vilnius before World War II, the publication of a Lithuanian translation is a long-awaited and significant cultural event.
The Lithuanian National Library will host a discussion called “Young Voices: YIVO Autobiography Competitions and Their Multilingual Participants” with Polish researchers Kamil Kijek and Małgorzata Litwinowicz in the library’s conference hall on the fifth floor at 6:00 P,M, on Tuesday, September 16. Kijek will discuss biographies by young people written in Yiddish and submitted to writing contests sponsored by YIVO. Litwinowicz will present youth biographies written in Polish and submitted. Judaica Research Center director Lara Lempertienė will moderate. The event will be in English.
More information in Lithuanian available here.
From September 21 to October 21, 2025, the Lithuanian capital will host the Vilnius Shalom Festival. The month-long Jewish music and culture festival will bring together the unique Shofar March (unprecedented in the region), educational activities and high-level classical jazz, and klezmer music concerts. The festival will feature the Be’er Sheva Municipal Concert Band, the State Choir Vilnius, the St. Christopher Chamber Orchestra and renowned performers from Lithuania, Israel, Germany, Ukraine and the USA.
We believe these events will gather lovers of Jewish culture and music from across Lithuania and abroad in Vilnius, often called the Jerusalem of the North.
Thanks to our sponsors and partners, all festival events are free of charge. Advance registration required here: www.shalom.lt
Program:
Marking 100 years since the YIVO was founded in Vilnius, the Martynas Mažxydas National Library in Vilnius will open an exhibit at 5:00 P.M. on Thursday, September 4, and running till the end of the year entitled “YIVO Centennial: Origins, Journey, Legacy.”
The opening ceremony with keynote speech and a musical performance takes place on the third floor at 5:00 P.M. The action then moves to the 5th floor with a presentation and tasting of Litvak cuisine, culminating in a guided tour by National Library Judaica Center director and exhibit curator Lara Lempertienę.
The event is free and open to everyone.
The Vilnius Jewish Public Library in concert with the 15min.lt news website will hold a quiz on Jewish Vilna history and culture at the Lithuanian National Library at 3:00 P.M. on Sunday, August 7. The event is intended to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of YIVO in Vilnius and the European Days of Jewish Culture which falls on the first Sunday in September annually..
Master of ceremonies will be Ugnius Antanavičius, an editor at 15min.lt.
Contestants will compete in teams of from 2 to 6 people of their own making. Prizes await the winners. The quiz is expected to last about 2 hours.
The quiz is open to the public and there is no fee for competing. To register send an email to uantanavicius@gmail.com, indicating your team’s name and the expected number of players..
The Lithuanian National Martynas Mažvydas Library continues celebrations the 10tth anniversary of teh founding of the YIVO Jewish research institute in Vilnius with a lecture by Silvia Hansman titled “Reflections of Vilnius in Buenos Aires: The YIVO Institute in Argentina” next week,
Silvia Hansman is director of the lesser-known YIVO chapter in Buenos Aires. She’s an historian, translator of Yiddish manuscrupts and archivist with 30 years experience leading archival research projects in the USA and Argentina.
The YIVO chapter was founded in Buenos Aires at the same time the headquarters in Vilnius and chapters in Berlin and New York were founded, back in 1925.
The lecture is free and open to the public, and will be in English. For more information in Lithuanian, click here.
Time: 6:00 P.M., Thursday, August 7
Place: Second floor, National Library, Gedimino prospect no. 51 Vilnius
An international seminar for Lithuanian teachers dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the YIVO Institute (Jewish Research Institute) in Vilnius was held at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, and a virtual museum was presented with a prepared methodological manual entitled “Beba’s Story,” based on the story of Beba Epstein, a girl who lived in Vilnius.
The opening of the seminar was attended by library director Aušrinė Žilinskienė, Israeli ambassador Hadas Wittenberg Silverstein, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky, MP Emanuelis Zingeris, diplomats from the USA and Germany and deputy Vilnius mayor Vytautas Mitalas.
The seminar was attended by 40 teachers from different locations in Lithuania who are interested in the history of Lithuanian Jews and the possibilities of using various historical sources in their curricula.
Speakers included Egidijus Aleksandravičius of Vytautas Magnus University, YIVO sirector Jonathan Brent, director of the National Library’s Judaica Center Lara Lempertienė and historian Saulius Sužedelis.
The seminar was organized by the YIVO Institute (USA) in cooperation with the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library, the city of Vilnius, the Goodwill Foundation and the Lithuanian Jewish Community.
The Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium in Vilnius will host two weeks of Yiddish course at beginner, intermediate and advanced levels under the tutelage of Dov-Ber Kerler and Anna Vershik–both teachers at the former Vilnius Yiddish Institute’s summer courses–and Yuri Vedenyapin from Poland August 3-15. The cost is €350 per student and registration is open now by clicking the following link:
https://forms.gle/DR4nzbXrDS84TVQ37
Beginners need no knowledge of the language at all but the instructors say knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet would be a big help. For more information, write to: yiddishcourse@ort.lt
The Chwoles Gallery within the Litvak Identity Museum will host a YIVO exhibit called “Stories of Vilnius” to mark the YIVO’s 100th anniversary. The opening is on May 21 and will run till December 28.
Time: 6:00 P.M., May 21
Place:Litvak Identity Museum, Pylimo street no. 4a, Vilnius
The Vilnius Picture Gallery and the Lithuanian Museum of National Art will host a lecture by Dainius Junevičius called “Early Lithuanian Photography: Jews on Both Sides of the Lens” at the picture gallery at 5:30 P.M., Tuesday, May 20. The event is free and open to the public.
Junevičius is an expert on the history of photography. He will speak on the role Jewish photographers played in early Lithuanian photography from the Jewish owners and photographers of first photo studios in Vilnius to the work of talented photographer Miron Butkovski (1865-1938) who earned the Vatican’s gratitude fir his photos of Vilnius’s churches in the late 19th century, and will also speak about the evolution of photography in Lithuania and in general and the pioneers in other locations in Lithuania.
.
His lecture will include demonstrations of the earliest photographs of Jews starting with those from a Russian ethnographic exhibit in 1867 and extending through the Jewish ethnographic field surveys led by An-sky from 1912 ro 1914.
The lecture and slideshow is part of the exhibit “You Shall Not Make an Images” the Vilnius Picture Gallery and YIVO opened March 5 and which will run till September 14. Registration is not required for the lecture and there is no fee for admission..
Time: 5:30 P.M., Tuesday, May 20
Place: Vilnius Picture Gallery, Didžioji street no. 4, Vilnius
Photo: Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters was originally serialized in the 1960s and ’70s in New York-based Yiddish newspapers (from YIVO and Alfred. A. Knopf via JTA).
The editors discuss how a previously-lost decades-old manuscript was found and pieced together. It’s being called “probably the last great Yiddish novel”
by Andrew Silow-Carroll, April 7, 2025
JTA–Sixty years after he first began serializing it in the Yiddish press and 42 years after publisher Alfred A. Knopf acquired the book, Sons and Daughters–the last novel by the late, great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade–lands in bookstores this week. To call it long-awaited is an understatement.
How the novel came to be published in English translation is a story of family intrigue, literary detective work and dogged creativity on the part of its translator and editors.
The result, a sprawling 600-plus-page book about a rabbi in 1930s Lithuania and the different paths taken by his children, is “quite probably the last great Yiddish novel,” the critic Adam Kirsch writes in the introduction. Dwight Garner in a New York Times review calls it “a melancholy book that also happens to be hopelessly, miraculously, unremittingly funny.”
Full story here.
The Martynas Mažvydas Lithuanian National Library conserves a YIVO document collection of very significant volume and content. The YIVO was established exactly a century ago in Vilnius in 1925. It is the only Vilnius Jewish institution which did not stop operating during the Holocaust and which continues to operate today. After World War II YIVO made its main headquarters at its branch in New York City. This branch took over the institute’s functions as a center for the preservation of Jewish heritage and research.
Many traces of the institute’s work survived in Vilnius: fragments of its documentation, correspondence, library collection and archives, scattered among several commemorative institutions. The National Library is conducting a study of the institute’s archives which is revealing YIVO’s origins in Vilnius and its especially fruitful period of activity in Vilnius before WWII.
The 100-year anniversary of the founding of the YIVO was noted back in 2023 in a resolution by the Lithuanian parliament as being of special significance to world culture and the National Library. Lithuanian National Library director Aušrinė Žilinskienė spoke about this at the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, D.C., on December 9, 2024. That event to mark the anniversary was organized with YIVO headquarters in New York.
The National Library is holding an event in cooperation with a large number of Lithuanian and foreign partners with a spectacular program, including the publication of books on the history of the YIVO, an international academic forum and an exhibit of textual heritage.
Ambassadors from Germany, the USA and Israel and the Lithuanian Jewish Community marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day by attending a play about the life of Abraham Sutzkever at the Vilnius Puppet Theater, a venue which was the Vilnius ghetto theater during the Holocaust.
Abraham Sutzkever was a Yiddish poet before, during and after the Holocaust and was imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto. He joined the underground and fought as a Jewish partisan against the German and Lithuanian Nazis. In February of 1946 he was called up as a witness at the Nuremberg trials, testifying against Franz Murer, the murderer of his mother and newborn son.
The play, “Witness,” was written by Sutzkever’s granddaughter Hadas Kalderon. Israeli actor and stand-up comic Michael Hanegbi performed the role of Sutzkever.
Lithuanian foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys introduced the play. After the play Kalderon and Hanegbi shared reminiscences of Sutzkever and their thoughts and feelings about the play itself.
The Šiauliai District Jewish Community marked the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust proclaimed by UNESCO in 2005 Monday with members and friends attending the remembrance ceremony.
Actors Juozas Bindokas and Monika Šaltytė read translations of texts and poems by Abraham Sutzkever accompanied by Motiejus Dudnikas on accordeon. The composition was called “Prayer Just to Myself” detailing Sutzkever’s life before the Holocaust, being imprisoned in the Vilnius ghetto, liberation and the testimony he gave against Nazi war criminals at the Nuremberg trials.
Monday marks the 90th anniversary of Tsemakh Shabad, the renowned doctor from Vilnius. Besides being a medical doctor, Shabad was a philanthropist and served on the Vilnius city council and in the Polish Senate. He was a founding member of the YIVO. Legendary during his own lifetime, Shabad was immortalized in literature as Dr. Aybolit in the work of the same name by the extremely popular Russian-language children’s author Korney Chukovsky. Dr. Aybolit was the main character in three Soviet films and spawned a Soviet cartoon series as well. Janina Valančiūtė from the Lithuanian Library of Medicine wrote a study of the man in Lithuanian several years ago, available below.
Lithuanian Jewish Community members are invited to a special tour next Saturday in Vilnius called Labyrinths of the Old Town led by accomplished guide Markas Psonikas. The tour will invoke the mediaeval aura of the courtyards of the Old Town and continue on to the secrets and discoveries of the present day.
The cost is 7 euros per person. Registration is required by sending an email to zanas@sc.lzb.lt before 12:00 noon on November 28.
Time: 11:00 A.M., Saturday, November 30
Place: starting point to be announced following registration
Duration: ~2 hours
The Israel Antiquities Authority, Kultūros paveldo Išsaugojimo pajėgos, the Good Will Foundation, and the Jewish Community of Lithuania are pleased to announce the results of the fifth season of excavation at the Great Synagogue of Vilna (Vilnius) & the Shulhoyf.
At 7:00 P.M. on June 4 the Shalom Culture and Music Festival presents a concert at the Church of St. Kotryna (aka St. Catherine) in Vilnius, with performances by opera soloist Rafailas Karpis, violinist Boris Kirzner and the Vilnius State Choir conducted by Artūras Dambrauskas. This will be the first performance in Lithuania of “Wagon of Shoes” by Lee Kesselman. The concert program is to include works by Jewish composers for solo and choir.
“Wagon of Shoes” is a work for choir, soloist, piano and violin by Lee Kesselman based on the poem by Abraham Sutzkever, Yiddish poet, Jewish partisan and survivor of the Vilnius ghetto. The Jewish composer lives in the USA and wrote the piece for the 700th anniversary of Vilnius under commission by the Lithuanian Consulate in Chicago and the Dainava Choir of the Lithuanian Community in Chicago. The premiere took place in June of 2022 in Chicago.
The Shalom Culture and Music Festival is being held in eleven Lithuanian cities and towns from May to October of 2024. The half-year tour will feature classical and contemporary music, klezmer, improvisational jazz, exhibitions and artistic activities. Musicians and singers from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Ukraine, Germany and Israel will participate in the festival. This year’s festival program includes over 20 concerts in concert halls in Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai and Palanga, the Old Zapyškis Church, synagogues in Alytus, Joniškis, Kėdainiai, Pakruojis and Žiežmariai and at the former Telšiai yeshiva.