With sadness we announce Yuri Alesin, a member of the LJC Social Center, passed away June 22. He was born on April 26, 1930.
The Lithuanian Jewish Community send our deepest condolences to his widow, Frida Alesin, his son Ernestas and his grandchildren and many friends and relatives.
VILNIUS, June 22, BNS–This week removal began of fragments of Jewish headstones used in the construction of an electric substation in Vilnius. The fragments will be removed to the Jewish cemetery on Olandų street to be used in a Jewish cemetery memorial to be erected there, the municipality informed BNS. “Currently work is underway to remove stones set in different walls,” Kęstutis Karosas, acting director of the city’s Heating and Water Department said. The plan is to remove all the stones by September 1.
The cost to the municipality is unknown so far. Karosas said payment will be made for work done. The electric substation on Olandų street was constructed during the Soviet period using headstones from the Jewish cemetery there. Jewish headstones, especially from the cemetery on Olandų street, were used all over Vilnius for construction during the Soviet era.
A team of archaeologists from the US, Canada, Israel and Lithuania have discovered the escape tunnel dug by the burners’ brigade at Ponar as well as new killing pits.
“New pits were discovered, overgrown paths were also found along which the victims were taken, and the ashes of burnt corpses distributed over the area. And also, the most important thing, the act of resistance, the escape tunnel, about which so much is said in the literature… Now without margins of error its length has been measured, about 30 meters, very exactly, Markas Zingeris, director of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum told Lithuanian Radio and Television Wednesday.
He said the findings at Ponar will lead to new information stands and exhibits. The tunnel might also become part of the new museum planned at Ponar.
VILNIUS, June 21, BNS—The Lithuanian parliament Tuesday began consideration of amendments to ensure Lithuanian Jews and their descendants who left Lithuania between the two world wars would enjoy the right to restore their Lithuanian citizenship. After initial presentation of the draft amendment, 92 MPs voted in favor of further consideration, none voted against and one abstained. The decision was adopted to put the proposed amendment up for fast-track consideration Thursday. Conservative MP Andrius Kubilius, leader of the opposition and one of the authors of the amendment, said the law needed amending because the year before last and last year Migration Department officials and courts began demanding Litvaks provide proof they or their ancestors were persecuted in interwar Lithuania.
VILNIUS, June 21, BNS–Legislative amendments paving the way for Litvaks, i.e. Jews of Lithuanian origin, and their descendants who left the country in the interwar period to restore their citizenship rights, should be submitted to the Lithuanian Seimas (parliament) Tuesday.
Amendments to the Law on Citizenship have been drafted by the European Affairs Committee.
According to the amendments, people who left Lithuania prior to March 11, 1990, except those who changed their place of residence within the territory of the former Soviet Union after June 15, 1940, should have their citizenship rights restored.
VILNIUS, June 21, BNS–A team of experts from the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel and Lithuania is starting to investigate the remains of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius and other buried buildings.
An international team of archaeologists using non-invasive geophysical techniques plans to investigate the remnants of a mikvah buried 2 meters below the surface under a school built by the Soviet regime after 1960.
“Our geophysical studies can map below the street without destroying any infrastructure and then to identify exactly where to dig, map and retrieve artifacts to understand the historical context,” one researcher said.
The Dubi Club invites kids to the summer day camp!
A day camp for children aged 3-and-a-half to 7 will be held at the naturally scenic recreation complex Viva Green Resort.
Camp program:
Educational activities with experienced teachers, excursions, nap-time for the younger kids, and three meals a day.
The day camp will be held from July 18 to 29, 2016.
Cost is 130 euros per child, or 110 per child for two children.
Registration is open until July 8.
Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky has paid a working visit to the United States. During her visit in Washington, D.C., Kukliansky attended the annual meeting of the American Jewish Committee and spoke at the meeting of the board of directors of the National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry. She also met with US State Department special envoy Nicholas Dean, gave an interview to the news service of Voice of America and met with the Lithuanian-American community.
The Romanian embassy in Vilnius and the Lithuanian Jewish Community invite you to a concert by the klezmer group Mazel Tov from Cluj, Romania, called
at 7:00 P.M. on Wednesday, June 29, at the Lithuanian Jewish Community, Pylimo street no. 4, Vilnius
The Vilnius Jewish Religious Community cordially invites you to celebrate this extraordinary event, the return of the Torah scroll, at the Vilnius Choral Synagogue.
This 350-year-old Torah scroll, which survived the destruction of the Vilnius ghetto during World War II and was taken out of the country to protect it, is finally coming home.
The ceremony of bringing in the Torah is to take place at 1:00 P.M. on Monday, June 27, at the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius.
The Vilnius Jewish Community is tremendously grateful to Judah Passow for his initiative in returning the Torah scroll. The family of London-based photojournalist Judah Passow safeguarded the Torah scroll for 56 years after it left Vilnius. The ceremony will feature a short presentation of the history of the Torah and what this most important book means.
Maftsir was born in Riga in 1947 and made aliyah to Israel in 1971, where he works at Yad Vashem as an independent film director. He has produced over 400 documentaries for film and television and is the director of at least 30 documentary films.
He’s currently working on a new film about Lithuanian Righteous Gentiles. When he was in Lithuania in 2008 he visited the Panevėžys Jewish Community to talk about best to commemorate those who heroically rescued Jews during the Holocaust. This time Maftsir met sister Leonora Kasiulytė of the Congregation of the Love of God at the Community concerning her book and collection of material about Marija Rusteikaitė, a woman who saved 15 Jews without regard for her own life during World War II. He also met Genutė Žilytė, a history teacher from the Rožynas Pre-Gymnasium who has been doing tolerance and Holocaust educational projects for 12 years now to give greater understanding to Lithuanian society on the scope and nature of the tragedy. She’s been directing the school’s Tolerance Education Center since 2004, participating with students in projects by the International Commission and civic initiatives, collecting Holocaust survivors’ testimonies and of those who were deported to Siberia and maintaining the mass murder sites at Kurganava and Žalioji forest. Every year creative work by students at the pre-gymnasium on the topics of the Holocaust and Soviet repression of Lithuanians is presented to the people of the city and region of Panevėžys.
The Kaunas Jewish Community invite you to come and remember the 75th anniversary of the Lietūkis garage massacre in Kaunas in the early days of the Holocaust. We will gather at the monument to the memory of the victims at Miško street no. 3 in Kaunas at 3:00 P.M. on June 24, 2016.
A concert to honor the victims will be held at the Kaunas State Philharmonic at 6:00 P.M., June 26, 2016 with the male quartet Quorum. The event is free and open to the public.
The Lithuanian Athletics Club Makabi’s Mini-Maccabee Games are dedicated to Lithuanian Jewish bicyclists I. Anolikas and T. Murnikas, participants in the Olympic games.
Location: Krėvės prospect no. 50, Kaunas
Date: June 19, 2016
Program:
An exhibition of works by students in Raimundas Savickas’s art classes held at the Lithuanian Jewish Community opened June 16 on the third floor. Friends and family congratulated the students with flower arrangements. Lithuanian Jewish Community deputy chairwoman Maša Grodnikienė opened the exhibit, saying: “Thanks to the accomplished teacher Raimundas Savickas, many new talents have blossomed. Thanks to him, the talent and desire to paint was discovered by elderly people, opening up a new outlook on life, and creativity is the key to longevity. All the new artists have become friends, connected by a newly discovered world, and life has become significantly more interesting, while your spiritual lives have been enriched.”
photo: J. Stacevičius/lrytas.lt
Despite strange weather carrying over from the day before when there were sudden gusts of wind, squalls and atomspheric microbursts mixed with heavy thunder and lightning, a record number of people turned out this year for the annual Gay Pride march in Vilnius. Many but certainly not most wore costumes just as flamboyant as the mercurial weather.
Amid gusting winds, at least 1,500-2,000 marchers and possibly more, according to the Lithuanian daily newspaper Lietuvos rytas, assembled at Lukiškės square and marched down the main boulevard, Gedimino prospect, past Cathedral Square to the city park area called Bernardinų sodas [Garden of the Bernardines] on the banks of the Vilnelė creek Saturday.
Some carried signs protesting the recent mass-shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, Florida. One marcher said she made up her mind to march this year because of that incident, and the assassination of a British MP the following day.
Leading the vanguard for equal rights was Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky along with Israeli ambassador to Lithuania Amir Maimon.
by Geoff Vasil
Sometimes you open a door and walk into a room expecting nothing, and the strangest things happen. I went to the Rositsan Elite Chess and Checkers Club chess tournament dedicated to the memory of chess enthusiast and interwar Lithuanian president Kazys Grinius at the Lithuanian Jewish Community on Sunday morning, June 19, and thought I saw the president himself, although he died many years ago in exile in America.
At the chess tournament held in his name, there were tables with timers and boards set up both inside the Jascha Heifetz hall and in the foyer and people of all age groups from pre-teen to people in their 80s waiting for the games to begin. I expected some sort of formal nod of the head to the former president, a cursory commemoration after which the players would get down to business. The organizers had a much different idea of what it means to honor someone. Multiple speakers took the podium, gifts were lavished, chess medallions were passed out and there was a sincere recollection of the man himself.
Borisas Gelpernas, former chess champion, spoke about how Kazys Grinius rescued his mother and father from the Kaunas ghetto. At first his father refused the offer of help, not wanting to put Grinius in danger, but the former Lithuanian president kept insisting, and after the actions–mass shootings of Jews–began, he and his wife did hide in Grinius’s own apartment for several months, along with Kristina, Kazys’s second wife.
By Raimonda Ramelienė
The Lithuanian parliament has heard complaints from Jews who left Lithuania between the wars and their descendants over their inability to restore Lithuanian citizenship and has begun amending Lithuania‘s law on citizenship.
Several parliamentary committees have been trying to determine since spring why the Migration Department has been rejecting requests by Litvaks and their descendants living in Israel and South Africa for restoration of Lithuanian citizenship.
Although members of parliament determined bureaucratic obstacles were hindering the process, they decided to put an end to conflicting legal opinions by amending the law. The initiator was oppoisition conservative leader Andrius Kubilius, aided by European Affairs
Participating: professor Richard Freund (Hartford University) and Dr. Jon Seligman (Israel Antiquities Authority, Jerusalem)
This team of renowned investigators began work on the Ponar mass murder site near Vilnius in early June. Using non-invasive archaeological methods, they examined a large portion of the site of the largest mass murder in Lithuania.
The archaeologists focused on the tunnel excavated by burners’ brigade and other items of high interest according the museum specialists. A film crew travelled with professor Freund to Lithuania and plan to release a documentary called Lost Vilnius.
The Israeli-American duo also looked at the site of the former Great Synagogue in Vilnius.
The Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum will host their presentation of their findings June 22. The public is invited to attend. The event will be held in Lithuanian and English. The Tolerance Center is located at Naugarduko street no. 10, Vilnius.
Vilnius, June 15, BNS–Lithuania’s Ethnic Minorities Department has established prizes to be awarded university students for best academic work on the topic of the ethnic minorities of Lithuania. The department said the prizes were intended to encourage interest by students in Lithuania’s minorities and to select topics involving the country’s minority communities for academic work in all disciplines.
All Lithuanian and foreign students of higher education whose final academic work (bachelor’s work, master’s thesis, doctoral dissertation) centered on Lithuanian minorities and which examine aspects of Lithuanian ethnic minorities in a broad manner.
Three prizes are planned: one for bachelor’s work, one for a master’s, and one for a doctoral dissertation.
At a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Soviet mass deportations of citizens of the Baltic states held in Los Angeles June 12, Latvian consul in California Dr. Juris Bunkis spoke out strongly for remembering the Jews in the Baltics who were murdered during the Holocaust.
“We are here to commemorate evil–evil like the mass shootings that took place earlier today in Orlando,” Dr. Bunkis said. “We gather today to commemorate a brutal event in our histories, the mass deportations of Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians from their illegally and forcefully occupied countries to Siberia by the Soviet Union that began on June 14, 1941. Unfortunately, this was just the first in a series of mass Soviet deportations of tens of thousands of victims from the Baltics, occupied Poland, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova,” he continued.
