An exhibition of photographs called “Pope Francis’s Visit to Israel in 2014” opened on Cathedral Square, the center of the city of Vilnius, on August 28. The photographs presented in the exhibit were selected to best show the historical nature of the visit and the most important meetings during the Pope’s trip. Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon and Vilnius archbishop metropolitan Gintaras Linas Grušas opened the open-air public exhibition.

In May, 2014, Pope Francis made his first visit to the Holy Land. It was the fourth pilgrimage by a Pope to Israel, and came on the 50th anniversary of the visit Pope Paul VI made to Israel.

Shimon Peres, president of Israel then, met Pope Francis at Ben-Gurion Airport. The Pope then travelled to Jerusalem where he met the patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. They prayed together inside the church. The Pope participated at a synod of bishops later that day.

On the sunny afternoon of August 26 a contingent of the ever-cheerful and bright Hesed Club activists gathered at the Kaunas Jewish Community to celebrate the 95th birthday of fellow Hesed Club and Kaunas Jewish Community member Ana Orlova. Ana Orlova was born in Byelorussia. When the war began she was evacuated to Kazan. After the war she contineud her medical studies in Minsk and came to Lithuania in 1948 along with her husband, a military doctor. Initially the young family with two small daughters lived in Marijampolė, then moved to Kaunas in 1956, where the young female doctor was appointed director of the internal diseases section at a Kaunas hospital, where she worked for many years. She retired after Lithuanian independence. Ana Orlova has raised three beautiful daughters and has five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Ana Orlova has always been the life of the party and is happy, inventive and creative. She recently has been reading some of her written work at Kaunas Jewish Community events. Community chairman Gercas Žakas greeted her on the occasion of her birthday and called upon everyone to try to follow her example of sharp wit, inexhaustible energy and great sense of humor. He said she would live to be at least 120!

Photo: Ana Orlova with daughters: Olia visiting from Israel and Nataša who lives in Kaunas.

This last of August, 2015, saw continued agitation over Lithuanian Government plans to restore an aging architectural monument built over a Jewish cemetery bulldozed by the Soviets in 1950. A delegation of Litvak ulta-Orthodox rabbis from Israel and America arrived in Vilnius to petition the government to halt any plans for the site and Israeli media continued to demonstrate a complete naïveté and immunity to the facts in the case in their reporting on the issue. The facts are:

There hasn’t been a cemetery operating at the site since the late 1800s, and the gravestones and monuments were bulldozed and removed in 1950. The Soviets, apparently out of a misplaced sense of cultural sensitivity, removed the human remains of the Vilna Gaon and reinterred them at the one working Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, in the Šeškinė neighborhood on the hill to the northwest of the historical neighborhood of Šnipiškės. Graves were certainly disturbed by Soviet construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the massive Palace of Sports was built. The site was grand Soviet architecture and almost all open ground was covered with flagstones at that point, as it still is. The remaining graves which were never disturbed by the building of the sports arena remain under the flagstones.

Group Meets Deputy Chancellor and the Vilnius Mayor to Relay Calls of World Jewry to Spare 500-year Old Snipiskes Cemetery from Further Desecration

Vilnius – A Rabbinic Delegation visited yesterday Vilnius and met the authorities to plea with them to cancel plans to construct a Congress Hall on Snipiskes Jewish cemetery.

The Snipiskes cemetery was established over five centuries ago, and it interred the most famous Jewish leaders of Vilnius. Sadly, the cemetery’s Gravestones were razed and the cemetery was desecrated by a series of regimes, including the Nazis and the Soviets. The latter built a now-abandoned Sports Palace on the cemetery land.  Desecration continued in recent years, under Lithuania’s democratic government. During the last ten years, two apartment buildings were constructed on cemetery grounds and human remains were disturbed, shattered and excavated, despite protests from Jewish communities worldwide.

A Rabbinic Delegation visited today Vilnius and met the authorities to plead with them to cancel plans to construct a Congress Hall on Snipiskes Jewish cemetery.

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The Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe

344 Fairholt Road, London N16 5HW Tel: 020 8802 6853 Fax: 020 8802 6905/8800 0279

23rd August 2015

 Press Release

We are pleased to inform that the CPJCE and its USA counterparts Admas Kodesh and their affiliated Organisations and Rabbinical Boards in the USA and Europe, haw engaged in intense negotiations with the Lithuanian Government in conjunction with the Lithuanian Jewish Community with regard to the Government proposals over the Sports Palace at the Snipiskes cemetery.

The CPJCE and Admas Kodesh have been heavily involved in achieving the initial successful agreement in 2009, which secured the the comprehensive preservation and protection of the remainder of the Snipiskes Jewish cemetery that resulted in scrapping the planned development on the cemetery grounds, the removal of the parking lot and ensuring that no digging or construction would take place within the boundaries of the cemetery.

Members of the Lithuanian Jewish Community took part in a call for volunteers to clean up the Jewish cemetery in Žasliai in the Kaišiadorys.
A large contingent of LJC members including chairperson Faina Kukliansky, Israeli ambassador Amir Maimon, Kaišiadorys mayor V. Tomkus and Žasliai alderman Mindaugas Nasevičius all took part in the clean-up effort.

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