The Gesher Club and the Kaveret Club for young families at the Lithuanian Jewish Community invite you to attend a warm and cozy Sabbath celebration at 7:00 P.M. on November 11 on the third floor of the LJC at Pylimo street no. 4 in Vilnius. For more information please contact Žana Skudovičienė at telephone number +370 678 815 14.
Yaffa Eliach, who as a 4-year-old survived the Nazi massacres of Jews in her Lithuanian town, and went on to document their daily life in a kaleidoscopic book and a haunting, three-story canyon of photographs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, died on Tuesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 79.
Her death, after a long illness, was confirmed by Thea Wieseltier, a family friend.
After a childhood that might have throttled a person of lesser spine, Professor Eliach (pronounced EL-ee-akh) dedicated herself to the study and memorialization of the Holocaust and its victims.
Starting in 1969, she did so as a professor of history and literature in the department of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College, and by founding the pioneering Center for Holocaust Studies at the Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn. Though modest in scale, its collection of taped interviews, diaries, letters, photographs and artifacts became a model for dozens of such centers.
Her mission, she said many times, was to document the victims’ lives, not just their deaths, to give them back their grace and humanity. She determined to do so as a member of President Jimmy Carter’s Commission on the Holocaust during a visit to the death camps, where she realized that the victims were portrayed only as bulging-eyed skeletons in ragged striped uniforms, not as the vital people they once were.
Professor Eliach decided to recreate the shtetl she had known in Lithuania — Eisiskes, known in Yiddish as Eishyshok — where 3,500 Jews, almost the entire Jewish population, were killed, by collecting photographs of its inhabitants.
Full necrology here.
Photos: J. Stacevičius, lrytas.lt
Vilnius archbishop metropolitan Gintaras Grušas said a prayer of invocation at the prayer breakfast and Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius, Kaunas archbishop metropolitan Lionginas Virbalas, Russian Orthodox priest Vitalijus Mockus of the Saint Paraskeva the Martyr Church in Vilnius and deputy Lithuanian Sunni Islam mufti Romualdas Krinickis spoke at the breakfast.
Lithuanian Jewish Community member Tobijas Jafetas spoke about his personal experience as a Holocaust survivor at the prayer breakfast as well. The theme of the annual prayer breakfasts is “Conquering Apathy” this year, and young people, politicians, public figures and businesspeople spoke about how separate religions and creeds have shared values, and how by standing in solidarity these different faiths can contribute to the making of a more peaceful and safer world.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Press release, November 9, 2016
For the third year in a row Jewish communities around the world will host challa baking events and Sabbath celebrations. More than 1,006 cities around the world are participating in this enchanting event, and this year Vilnius is one of them. The Lithuanian Jewish Community officially joins the Shabbat Project Thursday, November 10, when we will host an evening of baking that special Jewish bread called challa with Community members and friends.
Challa is a special bread baked for Sabbath and holidays among Jewish families. The process of making and breaking challa is deeply rooted in tradition and religion. The word’s primary meaning is that of loaf or bun, as recorded in the Book of Numbers or Bamidbar in the Old Testament or Tanakh, and was one of the first commandments given the Israelites as they were preparing to leave the wilderness for the Promised Land: “Ye shall offer up a cake of the first of your dough for an heave offering: as ye do the heave offering of the threshing floor, so shall ye heave it.” (Numbers 15:20)
The event will feature a brief history of the Sabbath, music and hymns, kneading the dough together and baking traditional Sabbath challa. Ester Izakson, the wife of the rabbi of Vilnius, will lead the event. She will present the ceremony of separating a portion of the dough for the cohen, the haFrashat khalva, one of the three commandments incumbent of women in Judaism.
We’ll begin activating the yeast at 6:00 P.M. on November 10 at the Bagel Shop Café, Pylimo street no. 4, Vilnius. The Lithuanian Cultural Council is supporting the event.
The event will be attended by Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky with family members, foreign ambassadors and guests.
For more information, contact Dovilė Rūkaitė, director of projects for the Lithuanian Jewish community, at projects@lzb.lt
Is it a newsletter? A magazine? Something else? You decide. And feel free to contact the editor with ideas for stories, features, questions for LJC staff and for the rabbinate! Click the link at bottom to download.
Vilnius, November 9, BNS–Following republican Donald Trump’s victory in US presidential elections, American ambassador to Lithuania Anne Hall said the US will honor its obligations to partners including the Baltic states and will maintain standing foreign policy. She said she understood Lithuanians are trying to understand what effect the Trump presidency will have on their country, but said friendship between the two nations developed over decades will continue to flourish.
Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė also commented, saying Lithuanians respect the decision of the American electorate. “We trust the United States, they are our strongest and closest ally,” she said in an audio statement released by the Presidential Press Service. “We will work closely with the new US administration both at the bilateral level, based on the US-Baltic Charter, and in NATO and other international organizations. Strong trans-Atlantic relations between America and Europe are the best solution to geopolitical challenges,” the Lithuanian president said.
France24 and Jerusalem Post reported the Israeli right-wing ruling Likkud party hailed Trump’s victory, saying the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was now over and all prospects for an independent Palestinian state were off the table.
Israeli reaction here.
The international Shabbat Project involves more than a million Jews in 84 countries
Tel Aviv is epicenter of global Shabbat initiative in Israel.
Shabbat Project participants baking challah together in Johannesburg, South Africa.
The number of cities expected to join in this week’s annual global Shabbat is approaching 1,000, and organizers expect it to surpass that number.
This is the third year of the Shabbat Project since it launched in 2014, and the number of participants has grown exponentially from year to year, with an estimated one million having taken part last year in 919 cities and 84 countries across the globe.
This year, 57 new cities have committed to take part, from Lodz in Poland, to Hoorn in the Netherlands, Alphaville in Brazil and Hollywood, USA.
The tag line of this year’s Shabbat Project is “Shabbat can do that.”
“In 2014 and again in 2015, through the transformative power of Shabbat, we’ve seen individuals and communities accomplish great things; things that before were not thought possible,” explains the brains behind the initiative, South Africa’s Chief Rabbi Warren Goldstein. “We’ve seen walls torn down, families rejuvenated, deep feelings awakened, deep friendships formed. This is what Shabbat can do,” he adds.
Full story here.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to participate in the international Shabbos project!
We’re inviting all Community members to come bake challa and celebrate the Sabbath together on November 10 in Vilnius!
Jewish communities around the world will be baking traditional challa bread on November 10. This fun project has been going on for three years and includes Jewish communities in 65 countries. This is the first time the Lithuanian Jewish Community is participating. We’re inviting all regional communities, families, mothers and daughters to gather together and bake challa together in their own communities. Grandmothers, mothers, granddaughters, we’re hoping you will all come knead challa together at one table!
Registration is required because space is limited. goo.gl/fEmzp4
Program:
6:00 P.M. We activate the yeast and knead the dough
6:30 P.M. The story of the Sabbath
7:00 P.M. We braid the challa
7:30 P.M. We bake the challa
More information available here.
photos: Saulius Žiūra
Information from the Vilnius municipality
Fewer and fewer examples of the barbarousness of the Soviet government remain in Vilnius. Locations where fragments of Jewish headstones are found are being put in order. Recently one such site was found in Antakalnis, where pieces of Jewish grave monuments were discovered in the stairs to the main entrance of the Vilnius Clinical Hospital. This week the Jewish headstones used as steps are being removed and taken to a location dedicated to honoring them, the old Jewish cemetery on Olandų street.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Dear parents, please register now for your children to attend the annual A Mehaye winter camp, organized every winter by the Lithuanian Jewish Community with the financial support of the Joint Distribution Committee. Children and youngsters aged 7 to 17 are invited to come, have fun, make new friends, see old ones and learn while they’re at it! The camp is scheduled for December 24 to 30.
To register, or for more information, please contact:
soniakaplan@mail.ru
telephone +37067257540
by Jūratė Juškaitė
manoteises.lt
The figure of the Jew remained even after the Holocaust in Lithuania, at Užgavėnės [Shrovetide carnival figure] and in libels concerning the blood of Christian children and matzo bread. These sorts of stories not only remind us how much daily anti-Semitism exists and is even enjoyed among us, but also forces us to think about an uncomfortable matter: who are these people whom we cannot forget, and where are they?
One of them is Amit Belaitė, the director of the Union of Lithuanian Jewish Students. It seems if not for the Holocaust our conversation might have been very simple, without long pauses and deep feelings of guilt. But after decades of silence, questions such as what happened to ‘your’ people, how did they survive, how did the Holocaust inform your experience, seem to erupt from within like a torrent.
Full interview in Lithuanian here.
German-Israeli pianist Dina Yoffe and German-Israeli violinist Michael Vaiman will perform a concert called Romantic Fantasies at 7:00 P.M., November 8, at the Vaidila Theater, Jakšto street no. 9, Vilnius. The concert will include works by Brahms, Liszt, Ravel and others.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community extend our deepest condolences to Rachilė Kostanian in this hour of shared grief as we mourn the loss of her beloved husband, Henrik Kostanian.
Following the 9:00 A.M. news Tuesday, November 8, Lithuanian National Radio and Television continued their series about Lithuanian shtetls with a trip to Šeduva, which had a thriving and colorful multicultural, multi-linguistic life before the Holocaust, which wiped the town clean of its Jews and left very few material monuments to their former existence there.
How should we commemorate the Jews of Šeduva today? What were their lives like? How did they contribute to the foundation of an independent Lithuanian state? Vita Ličytė attempts to answer these and other questions in the fourth episode in the on-going series.
An event to open an exhibition of Klaidas Navickas’s paper cutout works will be held at the LJC on the third floor at 6:00 P.M. on November 17.
Klaidas Navickas was born in Raseiniai, Lithuania, on November 30, 1962. He currently lives in Grigiškės and is an attorney and public servant. He began cutting paper into art in 1988. He has been a member of the Union of Lithuanian Folk Artists since 1991. In 2005 he was recognized as a working artist and in 2009 as a master of traditional arts and crafts. He has held personal exhibits of his paper cutouts at Expo 2005 in Japan; Linz, Austria; Expo 2010 in China; Gdansk and Warsaw; Philadelphia; Mogilev Podolsky, Ukraine; Moscow and St. Petersburg and Minsk. He has done over ten exhibitions of his work in Lithuania. A permanent exhibit has been on display in his workshop in Vilnius since 2003. He has published two catalogs of his cutouts.
Kauno.diena.lt
A new Holocaust memorial was unveiled a the Seventh Fort in Kaunas. About 3,000 people were murdered at the Seventh Fort in July, 1941. Human remains were discovered at the largely abandoned site several years ago. The remains were turned over to the Kaunas municipality but have now been reburied at the mass grave site.
The Star of David stone monument appears to be springing up from the earth. It was made by Alfonsas Vaura. The sculpture is accompanied by three lights which come on at night. The project was financed by the Kaunas municipality.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Long-awaited renovation work has finally begun at the museum set up at the house and office of Japanese diplomat Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania. So far renovation is going on inside the house. The façade also requires repair, but there are reports there are problems in financing all the repairs needed at this point in time.
The second floor of Sugihara House is currently being refurbished and all exhibits have been placed on the ground floor temporarily. The ground floor houses the diplomat’s office. When the second floor is finished, there will be more exhibit space drawing even more visitors from Japan, Lithuania and around the world fascinated by this man who rescued so many Jews from the Holocaust.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
“Empty, boarded up, gone, pulled up the roots,” these are the words opera soloist Rafailas Karpis used to describe extant Jewish synagogues in Lithuania following a trip he made through northern Lithuania with Beata Nicholson, a noted Lithuanian journalist and television personality who produces a cooking show called “Keliauk ir ragauk. Lietuva” [Travel and Taste: Lithuania]. Karpis said the wooden synagogues of Lithuania used as store houses or sports gyms during the Soviet era are still being used as such in many locations. But not at the synagogue complex in Joniškis, rebuilt at the initiative of the local communities, where Beata and Rafailas will spend most of their time during the upcoming episode.
Full article in Lithuanian here.
The accusation the Klaipėda resident known only by the initials V. L. engaged in incitement to hatred based on ethnicity, sexual preference, group affiliation and personal convictions or beliefs on his facebook page will be the subject of a trial. The Klaipėda District Prosecutor’s Office has completed an investigation into the local man’s alleged posting of a translation from a Russian text intended to promote Jewish stereotypes and has passed the case on to the court. He allegedly posted two comments to his own post in which he insulted Jews, homosexuals and Lithuanian politicians.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
Currently the roof and internal support skeleton of the synagogue located at Kauno street no. 9 in Alytus are being repaired. When repairs are complete a lightning rod is to be installed as well.
“We’re so glad to have the opportunity to renovate this brick-and-mortar synagogue still standing from the end of the 19th century, testifying to the high cultural and economic achievement of the Alytus community. Let’s not forget the synagogue after it was rebuilt in the early 20th century following a fire became one of the dominant features on the Alytus skyline. Its rich interior decoration also survives, including authentic multicolor decorations in the main prayer hall. The most important task now is to stabilize the building, to fix up the roof which had holes. After emergency repairs are made, water will no longer erode the bricks and mortar and the synagogue will be safe, and later more work will be done,” Cultural Heritage Department director Diana Varnaitė said.
Full story in Lithuanian here.
