This time the Israeli Embassy invites everyone to the bicycles ride in a beautiful Vilnius! Accompanied by the slogan “Have fun, safe ride” we will ride in the streets of Vilnius dressed in specially for this event designed T-shirts. In the end of the trip we will taste apples with honey: to meet the upcoming Jewish new year.
An Israeli soldier was wounded by an explosives attack along a tunnel road just outside of Jerusalem. The IDF is currently in pursuit of the terrorist.
According the Israel Defense Forces, an explosive was thrown by Palestinian terrorists onto a military lookout post. An Israeli soldier was wounded in the eye but remained conscious.
The terrorist who fled the scene is being pursued by a large military force that is searching the Jerusaelm-Bethlehem area.
Israeli’s opposition leader Isaac Herzog warned that “those who harm Israelis will suffer the consequences.” He added that “without drastic changes, we may find ourselves in a third intifada.”
The mayor and active citizens of the region of Kaišiadorys (Koshedar) are calling for more people to volunteer their time and labor to clean up the old Jewish cemetery in Žiežmariai (Zhezhmer) on Friday, August 21. Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky invites members of the community and especially youth to take part in the effort. Tools will be provided.
Work begins at 10 A.M. and those who want to go should contact the Lithuanian Jewish Community by 5 P.M. on Thursday, August 20.
for more information, see: Facebook Event
According to the Lithuanian newspaper and website Lietuvos žinios [News of Lithuania], the town of Žiežmariai is first mentioned in the historical sources in the 14th century and received charter rights as a city in 1792. Besides the Old Jewish Cemetery, the town has other attractions such as buildings surviving from the 16th century, a monumental neo-Gothic church and a unique wooden synagogue from the 19th century. The Old Jewish Cemetery contains hundreds of burials witnessing to the bustling Jewish life there until World War II, when almost all remaining Jews of Žiežmariai were murdered.
In 1925, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research was founded in Vilna (Wilno, Poland; now Vilnius, Lithuania), by key European intellectuals, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, to record the history and pioneer in the critical study of the language, literature and culture of the Jews of Eastern Europe. In 1940, YIVO moved its permanent headquarters to New York City, becoming the only pre-Holocaust institution to transfer its mission to the United States from Europe. In 1941, the Nazis destroyed YIVO in Vilna and ransacked the archives and library. A portion of YIVO’s archives was sent to Frankfurt to become the basis of the Institute for the Study of the Jewish Question; another part was hidden in Vilna; another part was destroyed. In 1946, the U.S. Army discovered the seized YIVO materials in the train depot in Offenbach, Germany and returned them to YIVO. The part that remained in Vilna was saved from the Soviets by a Lithuanian librarian, and remained hidden in the basement of a church until 1989. In 2014, YIVO along with its partners the Central State Archives of Lithuania and the National Library of Lithuania, launched the YIVO Vilna Collections, a seven-year project to preserve, digitize and virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar archives located in New York City and Vilnius, Lithuania. The project encompasses some 10,000 rare or unique publications and approximately 1.5 million documents to add to the existing 24 million documents and 385,000 books and periodicals the YIVO Archives and the YIVO Library currently hold. The conference in Vilnius will feature top YIVO officials, researchers and prominent members of Lithuanian, US and Israeli academia delivering presentations on a wide ranging variety of topics regarding the political, social and cultural context of the founding of YIVO, its current activities and future prospects.
Presented by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and the Jewish Community of Lithuania: The Klezmatics, the gold standard of the klezmer revival, are celebrating their 30th anniversary! Rather than rest on their laurels ground-breaking recordings, a Grammy award, collaborations with the likes of Chava Alberstein, Itzhak Perlman, Allen Ginsberg, Tony Kushner and Woody Guthrie the band continues to push boundaries. Letters To Afar is an ongoing artistic collaboration between the Klezmatics and the award-winning video artist Péter Forgács that brings to life the rich and vibrant life of Jews in inter-war Poland using historical film footage from the YIVO Institute. The original ground-breaking video art installation was commissioned by POLIN and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in 2013 and has been seen by over 100,000 people on two continents.
Yitzchak Rudashevski was born in Vilna in 1927 – his father, Eliyahu, worked in a publishing house, and his mother, Rosa, was a seamstress. In September 1941, when Yitzchak was not yet 14 years old, the Nazis forced the boy and his family into the Vilna Ghetto. At some point during the Nazi occupation, Yitzchak started writing a diary in Yiddish where he described the day to day horrors the Jewish population had to endure. In the main part of the diary, which encompasses the period from September 1942 to April 1943, the young man chronicled all aspects of the ghetto, using his literary talents to not only describe, but also to reflect with great clarity and insight for a 15 year-old upon what was happening within the walls of the houses and streets he had been confined to. As the author himself put it, “I consider that everything must be recorded and noted down, even the most gory, because everything will be taken into account”. In the fall of 1943, as the Vilna Ghetto was being liquidated, the Rudashevskis managed to hide away in a secret shelter, but after only two weeks the Nazis discovered their hiding place and executed everyone. Only Sarah Voloshin, Yitzchak’s cousin, managed to escape and flee to the forests surrounding Vilna. After the Soviets re-occupied the town in the summer of 1944, she returned to the shelter and found a small notebook, its more than 200 pages filled with handwriting, some in pen, and some in pencil. It was the diary of Yitzchak Rudashevski.
The 2015 Yiddish summer course at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute of Vilnius University concluded at the usual location, the courtyard of a restaurant adjacent to the university in the Old Town, with music, a theatrical presentation, the issuance of diplomas and plenty of food to go around. An addition this year was a sort of daycare center-corner for small children with toys and books.
Šarūnas Liekis, the head of the institute, served as MC and addressed the audience in Yiddish.
This summer’s crop of students included a Japanese individual, an American contingent, a Polish contingent, ethnic Lithuanians and people hailing from other parts of the world.
Arkady Vinokur presented a preview of the New Yiddish Theater project he is working on.
The audience included all the faculty and staff of the summer course, former students, Lithuanian Jewish Community chairwoman Faina Kukliansky and LJC deputy chairwoman Maša Grodnikienė, local Jewish and Jewish-friendly residents and what seemed like an unusal number of primary-school-age children who left before the event was over.
Pictures:
The Lithuanian Jewish Community would like to inform you that the Jewish organization Yachad is not connected with the Lithuanian Jewish Community, the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community of the Lithuanian Jewish Religious Association. On the organization’s webpage, they say they invited everyone who so desires, without regard to ethnicity, belief or place of residence, to become members and participate in Jewish religious life. The Lithuanian Jewish Community does not support this invitation and does not support the establishment of this organization because we believe it violates the principles of Judaism. This organization seeks to establish itself in the Choral Synagogue in Vilnius, although no permission has been given for this.
We would like to remind them the synagogue is the property of the Vilnius Religious Jewish Community.
Despite a Jerusalem Post story that would suggest otherwise (“Anger flares over Lithuanian Sports Palace” Sam Sokol, 8/11/2015) there is today a remarkable consensus in Vilnius that the site of the former Snipiskes Cemetery and the graves beneath must be protected. On this matter, the government of Lithuania, the Lithuanian Jewish Community which I chair, and the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe (CPJCE) which is Europe’s foremost halachic authority on cemeteries all agree.
Attention is now focused on the abandoned former Soviet Sports Palace, which partially sits on the cemetery grounds and in its current condition is mostly a gathering place for graffiti artists and alcoholics. The government rightly wants to renovate the building and turn it into a center for conferences and cultural events. Because the building itself has been designated an architectural heritage site, no significant structural changes are possible, but the interior will be renovated. The surrounding area will be maintained as a memorial park with inscriptions that describe some of the famous people who were buried here.
We would like to inform you that an extraordinary general meeting of the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community was held today, August 14, 2015. The Vilnius Jewish Religious Community resolved that since now the term of the contract with Chaim Burstein has passed, not to renew the contract and to appoint Shmuel Yatom to serve the function of rabbi in the interim while a new rabbi is found.
Shmuel Levin
Vilnius Jewish Religious Community
The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum and the Embassy of the United Kingdom to Lithuania
kindly invites you to the opening of the exhibition
„Scots Jews: Identity, Belonging and the Future“,
photographs by J u d a h P a s s o w.
The opening reception will take place on the 25th of August, 2015, at 5.30 p.m.,
at the Tolerance Center (Naugarduko Str.10/2, Vilnius).
A unique and contemporary photography exhibition on Scottish Jewish life from world-renowned documentary photographer Judah Passow, brought for the first time to Lithuania. The exhibition, from 2013, captures the complexity and diversity of Scottish Jews at the beginning of the 21st century. The Scottish Jewish community dates back to at least the 1700s and has produced scientists and doctors, judges and Members of Parliament, artists and writers, farmers and foresters, kilt makers and whisky distillers! The story of this community and how it maintains its traditions, while fully embracing Scottish culture is a fascinating one.
Come and see for yourself this fascinating and powerful exhibition at the Tolerance Centre in Vilnius from 25 August until the 5th of October, 2015.
Producer of the Exhibition Michael Mail.
Why is there so much anger and such a lack of truth emanating from an article by the well known and much respected Israeli newspaper Jerusalem Post regarding the former Jewish cemetery in the neighborhood of Šnipiškės (Shnipishyok, aka Piramont) in Vilnius, demolished by the Soviets in 1950 to make way for the Palace of Sports, which is now the subject of plans to renovate as a conference center? The Government of Lithuania is only planning to renovate existing buildings to serve as a conference center and for other cultural events while at the same time cleaning up and commemorating the territory of the former Jewish cemetery. This decision is being implemented in cooperation with members of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe who are to be included as supervisors over all work there. The Government’s actions regarding the project are being coordinated fully with the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe.
The first day of the LJC “en plein air” arts workshop opened at the Įlanka farm in the Molėtai region of Lithuania with 40 people gathering to spend 5 creative days together. Some said this was their first attempt at painting and ceramics, while more experienced artists called it an opportunity to share their skills as well as to do a few paintings in this corner of paradise on the shore of Lake Bebrusai. The first paintings and first pottery works have already emerged. Everyone assembled for the official opening of the Plein Air together with some of the community’s favorite violinists.
For the second year now the Lithuanian Jewish Community has been administering a program called “Support for Jewish Rescuers during World War II.” LJC chair Faina Kukliansky is the curator of the program and it is implemented by the LJC Social Center team: Social Center director Alan Levin and coordinators Ema Jakobienė and Mikhail Segal.
Jewish rescuers live throughout Lithuania and it hasn’t been an easy assignment for the Social Center to track them all down and inform them of the support program, get their consent and organizing record-keeping, logistics and other matters necessary for implementation. Many people have moved and many letters are returned to sender. In some cases we had to begin the search for a given person from scratch, follow up bad leads and then start over again. Meanwhile time has been ruthless: of the 110 rescuers who were sent a letter with information about the program, 96 turned out to be still alive…
Now we can announce with joy that support has reached 96 rescuers. The support to each rescuer totals 250 euros. The total sum of support is 24,000 euros.
The Israeli Embassy in Vilnius and the Šarūnas Marčiulionis Basketball Academy invite you to attend the International Youth Basketball Tournament taking place now in Vilnius. Teams participating are Tel Aviv Maccabi, the Šarūnas Marčiulionis Basketball Academy team from Vilnius, the team Perkūnas from Kaunas and Saulės from Šiauliai, Lithuania.
Schedule:
August 11:
4:00 P.M. first semifinal
6:00 P.M. second semifinal
August 12:
2:00 P.M. bronze
4:00 P.M. final match
Spectators are welcome and entry is free. Venue: the Šarūnas Marčiulionis Basketball Academy at Raitininkų street No. 4A in Vilnius. Romualdas Brazauskas will referee. See you there!
Augustinas Savickas, a Lithuanian painter, researcher in fine arts and professor, was born on 12 May 1919 in Copenhagen, Denmark. His father Jurgis Savickis was a Lithuanian writer and diplomat and his mother Ida Trakiner – a medical practitioner born in St Petersburg, in a Jewish family.
Two popular Israeli films are to be screened at the annual Kino pavasaris [Spring Film] festival from August 6-13: the comedy Zero Motivation (2014) directed by Talya Lavie and the drama Dancing Arabs, aka A Borrowed Identity (2014), directed by Eran Riklis.
Dangerous Paperclips
Zero Motivation director Talya Lavie has been watching war films were the main focus is on fighting since childhood. After she was graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in 2005, the idea occurred to her to make a film about the other side of war, the administrative apparatus, whose most dangerous weapon is the paperclip. What came forth is a comedy portraying mainly female officers at desks, but one that cuts deep to the heart of the country’s problems. Beyond the office jobs of the female conscripts in the Human Resources Office at a remote desert base there is a war going on in which people are dying, throwing in sharp contrast the rivalries and intrigues among the young girls which seem petty in comparison. By showing the consequences of the Israeli war machine against the background of a comedy, these consequences also seem all the more disturbing.
In total 2,340 athletes from 38 countries competed in 19 different sports. The twenty-six members of Lithuania’s Makabi team delegation competed in five sports in the young, adult and veterans groups. The young athletes did extremely well. Swimmer Jekaterina Gamper took three bronze medals for various strokes and distances and another two medals as well: a gold and a silver in one-on-one swim-offs with swimmers from other countries. Swimmer Artiomas Perepelica is taking home two bronze medals in singles competitions and another silver in a one-on-one swim-off. Young table-tennis player Vanessa Ražinskytė won two silvers, one individually and another together with an English table-tennis player. In total Lithuania’s young Mabaki team members take home 10 medals.
Among the adults the most successful was our swimmer Andrej Fadejev who earned 8 medals, 3 of them golden; badminton player Alanas Plavinas with 2 gold medals (1 individually, 1 as a pair with an Estonian player) and the swimmer Ela Pavinskienė who hauls home with her 3 bronzes.
The U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad has thanked the mayor of Šiauliai, Lithuania, for the city’s decision to shelve plans to exhume human remains discovered during highway construction.
Lesley Weiss, chairperson of the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad, noted in her letter to mayor Artūras Visockas that Jewish religious law bans exhumations of human remains. “Exhumation would have been a violation of human dignity. Thank you that you took timely and resolute action to ensure that did not happen. … We hold in high esteem your leadership and understanding of this important issue of human rights and values,” she continued.
The chairperson of this government commission, appointed by U.S. president Barack Obama in 2011, said the U.S. is concerned and involved with Jewish heritage protection abroad.
“We are a nation of immigrants, including Lithuanian Jewish émigrés and their offspring, so the US cares about the protection of sites located in foreign countries which are connected with the heritage of our citizens,” Weiss wrote.
