Lithuanian Jewish Community

Fayerlakh Performs at Public Library

The Jewish song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh performed at the Adomas Mickevičius Public Library in Vilnius on March 30. They were invited to perform there by the library’s Song Club who wanted to learn more about Jewish song and whose members had bilingual lyric sheets in Lithuanian and Yiddish. Borisas Kizneris began on violin, demonstrating popular Yiddish songs, and invited the audience to join in, which they did. After the music, Fayerlakh director Larisa Vyšiauskienė spoke about Passover. Matzo was distributed to all attendees.

Photos by Mindaugas Masaitis

2026-04-01

Passover Greetings

Passover begins tomorrow at sundown, April 1. As our forefathers escaped slavery and freedom from their enemies in the land of Egypt, so may the spirit of liberation warm our hearts and spirits during these dark days of upheaval and uncertainty, even as we pray for the liberation of our Persian brothers and sisters under the yoke of an evil and anti-human regime, and for the Lebanese peoples oppressed by that same evil. Am Israel chai.

2026-03-312026-03-31

Children’s Aktion Remembered

On March 27 tand 28, 1944, around 1,700 children, elderly and the infirm were rounded up in the Kaunas ghetto by Waffen-SS troops and murdered nearby. The almost-complete extermination of the children in the Kaunas ghetto on those days is called by its German name in the Holocaust literature, the Kinderaktion.

2026-03-312026-03-31

Bar and Bat Mitzvah Ceremony

Seventh-graders from the Sholem Aleichem ORT Gymnasium gathered to read the Torah in public for the first time, thus becoming adults under Jewish law, as their parents, siblings, teachers and friends looked on last week.

Rabbi Natan Alfred and LJC’s own prayer leader Viljamas Žitkauskas led the ceremony and aided the young adults in their first readings.

A celebration was held afterwards.

2026-03-31

Passover Drawing Contest

Children are invited to submit their drawings on any subject connected with the Passover story until April 7. Please write your name on your drawing or have your parents do it, and send a digital copy to info@lzb.lt. Participants will receive a box of special chocolate-covered matzo bread.

2026-03-31

Matzo Available

Matzo is available in 5 and 10 euro packages in the lobby of the Lithuanian Jewish Community in Vilnius, open from 10:00 A.M. till 6:00 P.M. weekdays, except for April 2 and 3.

2026-03-31

Sabbath Times

The Sabbath begins at 6:46 P.M. on Friday, March 27, and concludes at 7:42 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 6:28 P.M. and completed before sunset at 6:46 P.M. Saturday is Yom haAliyah. Sunday is Palm Sunday, marking the beginning of the paschal week. The eight days of Passover begin at sunset, 7:37 P.M., Wednesday, April 1, adjusted for Daylight Saving Time. Daylight Saving Time begins in begins at 2:00 A.M. on Sunday, March 29, in Lithuania. Set your time devices forward one hour, 2:00 A.M. jumping ahead to 3:00 A.M. on Sunday morning.

2026-03-262026-03-26

Musical Seder April 4

The Lithuanian Jewish Community is pleased to invite you to come celebrate Passover together with a seder led by ba’al tfillah (prayer leader) Viljamas Žitkauskas. The public seder will retell the Passover story in music performed by Fayerlakh and prayer. Registration is required by sending an email to zanas@sc.lzb.lt by noon Wednesday, April 1. The cost is 15 euros for LJC members, 45 euros for non-members and free entry for children 14 and under.

Time: April 4, Saturday
Place: Lithuanian Jewish Community, Vilnius

2026-03-262026-03-27

Boots on the Water

by Geoff Vasil

The US is sending two contingents of US Marines numbering about 5,000 soldiers and from 1,000 to 3,000 troops from the US Army’s elite 82nd Airborne Division to the Persian Gulf, to arrive sometime in the next week or so. The marines and the paratroopers are specially trained for taking and holding beachheads and islands, and higher ground positions in the case of the paratroopers.

There’s little or no doubt what their mission will be: open the Strait of Hormuz.

So far no one has challenged Iran at the Strait. Raising on a busted flush yet again, the Islamic Republic is trying to spin their image as global boogey-man into strategic control of the chokehold and over the world economy. Iran is seeking to put the blame on Donald Trump for their attacks on commercial shipping. While it’s true that the world’s leading exporter of terrorism could have been expected to act badly and attack neutral shipping, blaming Trump is a media PR ploy aimed at putting public pressure on Trump to end hostilities. Trump didn’t set fire to the 20 or so ships attacked so far.

2026-03-262026-03-26

Dear Jewish Scientific Institute! Book Launch

The Judaica Research Center of the Lithuanian National Library is launching the book “Dear Jewish Scientific Institute!” April 7. The book is a collection of YIVO correspondence presented in Lithuanian (and presumably English judging from the cover) providing readers a look at the textual legacy of the YIVO and their fruitful work in pre-Holocaust Vilnius.

Judaica Research Center director and editor of the book Lara Lempertienė, historian Juozapas Paškauskas, Yiddish translator Aistė Puidokaitė, English translator Dalia Cidzikaitė and book designer Deimantė Rybakovienė will speak on a panel moderated by Jolanta Budriūnienė.

Time: 6:00 P.M., April 7
Place: Lithuanian National Library, Vilnius

2026-03-262026-03-26

Musical Seder April 4

The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to come celebrate Passover together, with a musical seder scheduled for April 4. Stay tuned for more information.

2026-03-25

Fayerlakh Concert

The Song Club at the Adomas Mickevičius Public Library in Vilnius is hosting a concert by the Jewish song and dance ensemble Fayerlakh at the end of March. Club members will receive instruction in singing Yiddish folk songs in Yiddish, with synchronous texts in Lithuanian and Yiddish, under the tutelage of Fayerlakh veterans. The event is free and open to the general public.

Time: 6:00 P.M., Monday, March 30
Place: Adomas Mickevičius Public Library, Trakų street no. 10, Vilnius

2026-03-252026-03-25

Modestas Saukaitis: Between Gold Dust and Fluxus

The Jonas Mekas Visual Arts Center in Vilnius is hosting an exhibit of works by the late Modestas Saukaitis. Saukaitis was an artist, art and book restorer and interior designer. He curated the first Fluxus exhibition in Lithuania with Gintaras Sodeika. Fluxus was an art movement started by Lithuanian-American artist, writer and filmmaker Jonas Mekas and was loosely associated with Guy de Bord’s Situationist International movement. Saukaitis passed away in 2024. He was deeply interested in Litvak history and his works on exhibit include a tribute to Righteous Gentile Ona Šimaitė and various takes on Jewish Vilna, with inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek characters, displayed in mirror-reverse for whatever reason. This exhibit is based on a previous exhibit of works by Saukaitis at the Shofar Gallery under the Jewish Culture and Information Center in Vilnius was based on texts by Abraham Sutzkever, the Yiddish poet and Litvak partisan (see below).

According to the host gallery, the exhibition features “verre églomisé works, assemblages, archival Fluxus material and video documentation as well as an overview of the artist’s work in interior design and restoration.” The exhibit opened March 6 and runs till May 23. The gallery is located at Malūnų street no. 8 in the Užupis neighborhood of Vilnius.

2026-03-242026-03-27

Šiauliai Jewish Community Marks Rescuers Day with Butterfly Project

The Šiauliai Regional Jewish Community in concert with the Gegužės and Saulėtekis schools in Šiauliai are engaged in a project called “Road of Holocaust Memory: Lives Which Speak” to teach students about the Holocaust and human rights using first-person testimonies.

As part of that project, local students discovered and memorialized the biographies of 36 children who died in the Holocaust in Šiauliai. The older students from the Saulėtekis high school taught the younger students from the Gegužės junior high school about the lives of the Jewish children who were murdered.

2026-03-24

Rescuers Day in Pasvalys

The Pasvalys Regional History Museum held a conference called “They Saved a World…” to mark Lithuania’s Day of Rescuers of Jews. Speakers included Arūnas Bubnys, Aušra Jonušytė, Gražvydas Balčiūnaitis and others. Pasvalys mayor Gintautas Gegužinskas and museum director Vitutė Povilionienė welcomed the audience, which included high school students, Panevėžys Jewish Community chairman Gennady Kofman and local residents.

2026-03-24

Kupiškis Museum Celebrates Rescuers Day

The Kupiškis Museum in Kupiškis, Lithuania, celebrated Lithuania’s Day of Rescuers of Jews on March 16. Eighth-graders from Kupiškis area schools presented texts and drawings on Jews in hiding, rescuing Jews, the Holocaust experience and the inner hope and strength which were needed to survive. The texts and drawings are to become part of a virtual exhibit at the museum later to mark Lithuania’s Day of Remembrance of Jewish Victims of Genocide on September 23.

2026-03-24

Sabbath Times

The Sabbath begins at 6:32 P.M. on Friday, March 20, and concludes at 7:28 P.M. on Saturday in the Vilnius region. Sabbath candles should be lit at 6:14 P.M. and completed before sunset at 6:32 P.M. Depending on your location and local customs, the spring equinox will be marked on Friday, Saturday or Sunday. Nowruz, or Persian New Year, happens on the spring equinox and is now celebrated in multiple countries on multiple dates.

2026-03-19

The Impossibility of Ignorance

by Grant Gochin, March 19, 2026

In 2018, while already a member of NATO and the European Union, Lithuania’s Parliament (Seimas) formally recognized Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas as the head of the Lithuanian state for the period 1954 to 1957. Lithuania’s defense ministry then placed him in the Heads of State Pantheon and described him as a role model for the country’s officers and soldiers. That is not routine commemoration. It is state canonization inside alliances that define themselves by democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

Once a state does that, the first question is not ceremonial. It is governmental. What public record did Lithuania produce before this elevation showing how Ramanauskas-Vanagas responded to the destruction of Jews in his environment in 1941? Where is the record that he protected Jews, objected to anti-Jewish violence, forbade participation, or punished those who took part? Lithuania’s own official biographies place him in Druskininkai in June 1941 as leader of a self-defense unit and then in Alytus as a teacher from 1941 to 1944. Lithuania has produced no public record of protective action by him toward Jews in that period.

That silence matters because Ramanauskas-Vanagas cannot be sealed off from a documented persecution zone. The Simon Wiesenthal Center warned the Seimas against honoring him. Evaldas Balčiūnas, drawing on archival material cited from the Lithuanian Special Archives and on the work of Arūnas Bubnys, pointed to a July 18, 1941 police report stating that 28 people had already been shot and to evidence that a 38-man partisan unit assisted in establishing the Druskininkai ghetto beginning on July 16. Even on the narrowest reading, this is not an evidentiary void. It is a documented zone of confinement, shooting, and anti-Jewish coercion. Lithuania elevated him anyway.

2026-03-192026-03-20

Faina Kukliansky Elected to General Assembly of European Council of Jewish Communities

Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky attended the sixth Summit or European Jewish Leaders in Athens over the weekend, representing Lithuanian Jews, where she was elected to the General Assembly of European Council of Jewish Communities.

The European Council of Jewish Communities holds the event. This time over 250 participants from more than 30 countries attended. They included community leaders, heads of institutions, cultural professionals and members of Jewish communities from around Europe. Israeli president Isaac Herzog and EC president Ursula von der Leyen greeted the gathering. The meeting focused on continuing Jewish life in Europe and served as an opportunity for Jewish leaders to exchange ideas and experience.

2026-03-18

Israeli President Isaac Herzog Visits Lithuania

On the War in Israel and the Situation in Lithuania