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.

http://www.lzb.lt/en/letter-to-mayor-of-shiauliai/

Recently there has appeared in the world press an article and information that a rabbi has been deported from Lithuania and that this event is connected with plans by the Government to construct new buildings in the old Jewish cemetery in Shnipishok (Piramont) in Vilnius. The Lithuania Jewish Community denies these rumors.

According to LJC chair Faina Kukliansky, no one has deported Rabbi Chaim Buršein from Lithuania.

“He lives in Israel, not Lithuania. After purchasing a ticket Chaim Buršein left Lithuania for Israel for his own reasons. We have no information that his departure was connected in any way with the Congress Center project which the Government plans to implement to both refurbish and commemorate the territory of the Jewish cemetery in Snipishnok. This project has the blessings of members of the Committee for the Preservation of Jewish Cemeteries in Europe and all of the Lithuanian Government’s actions concerning this project are coordinated with it. No construction at all is taking place and the project is still under consideration. Rabbi Chaim Buršein is not a citizen of Lithuania and it is possible he does not have permanent residence in Lithuania. His family lives in Israel and therefore it is natural that the head of a family of many children spends the majority of his time there, with the performance of the duties of Rabbi in Lithuania taking second place and being somewhat sporadic.

PRESS RELEASE

August 4, 2015

The Lithuanian Jewish Community for the first time in our country’s history is holding an “en plein air” outdoor painting and arts workshop called “Litvak Artists: The L’école de Paris Period” from August 10 to 14. The goal of the workshop is to remember the rich legacy of Litvak artists and their contributions to art history and to fortify and celebrate the memory of this unique cultural heritage in the consciousness of Lithuanian Jews and the broader Lithuanian society.

“The heritage of Litvak artists is a unique phenomenon in the context of Lithuanian as well as global art history. The Litvak artists include people such as Arbit Blat, Marc Chagall, Chaïm Soutine, Lasar Segall and Jacques Lipchitz. It is exactly the desire to share the rich history of the Litvak artistic legacy and to gather art-lovers and the like-minded together which have given stimulus to undertaking this educational project,” Junona Berznitski, the initiator and coordinator of this educational plein air event, said.

“It is very important to me to get out of Vilnius and see other parts of Lithuania, to get to known them and at the same time to represent Jewish culture,” Israeli ambassador to Lithaunia Amir Maimon is quoted as saying on the Šiauliai municipality’s website.

Maimon with Šiauliai Jewish Community chair Josif Burštein met mayor Artūras Visockas, deputy mayor Stasys Tumėnas, administration director Eduardas Bivainis and deputy administration directors Martynas Šiurkus and Giedrė Mendoza-Herrera at city hall. City leaders showed the ambassador around Šiauliai’s Free Economic Zone and the adjacent area where human remains from the Holocaust era were recently uncovered during construction work. Jewish and Lithuanian leaders quickly reached an understanding earlier that the remains would not be touched or exhumed since they are most like Jewish Holocaust victims and Jewish law forbids moving buried bodies.

Dr. Elena Keidošiūtė who successfully defended her doctoral thesis on Catholic missionary activities among Jews and trends in conversions by Jews in Lithuania has been awarded a Prins Foundation post-doctoral fellowship for 10 months at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. She will be a visiting scholar at New York University concurrently.

According to the Vilnius University webpage, Dr. Keidošiūtė said she felt the fellowship would serve not only to deepen by also assess anew as well as contextualize her research. “I will develop further the research begun during doctoral studies on conversions by Lithuanian Jews to Catholicism in the Russian Empire, interwar Lithuania and the Vilnius region, but more importantly I will have an opportunity to make use of the source materials conserved in the archive of the YIVO, the Jewish research institute. I hope to take part in the discussion with the center and university colleagues as well as researchers visiting these institutions,” she said.

In an open letter to the editor of the newspaper and website Lietuvos Žinios [Lithuanian News] published July 27, the Union of Freedom Fighters of Lithuania called upon Vilnius mayor Remigijus Šimašis and director of the Center for the Study of the Genocide and the Resistance of the Residents of Lithuania Teresė Birutė Burauskaitė to allow a memorial plaque commemorating Jonas Noreika, also known by his post-war partisan appellation as General Vėtra, to remain in place upon the wall of the library of the Academy of Sciences building in Vilnius. The call was made seemingly as a result of a recent editorial by Lithuanian veteran of journalism and opinion-maker Rimvydas Valatka in which he recounted Noreika’s Holocaust crimes and deconstructed his image as national hero on multiple fronts. Here is the text of the open letter by the Noreika supporters:

Ambassador of the State of Israel to Lithuania Amir Maimon visited the Lithuanian truckers association Linava and met with association president Erlandas Mikėnas and secretary general Vidmantas Adomaitis in the second half of July. They discusses possible avenues of cooperation between Lithuanian and Israeli transport companies and preparations for the World Lithuanian Economic Forum planned for this fall in Tel Aviv.

The Israeli ambassador wanted to talk about specific tasks of cooperation during the meeting, according to the Linava website. The website reported ambassador Maimon said: “There can be competition on price, quality, reputation and reliability. Israeli companies need to understand why it is beneficial to work with you.” The comments were reportedly in the context of how Lithuanian automobile carriers could form new partnerships with Israeli companies which have existing agreements with other European transporters.

The association website noted the association president also spoke about the extended economic sanctions against Russia and increasing competition among truckers in Western Europe leading to the search for new markets.

The Israeli ambassador reminded Linava officials Lithuanian prime minister Algirdas Butkevičius is planning an official visit to Israel this fall and the Lithuanian president is scheduled to attend the World Lithuanian Economic Forum being held in Tel Aviv on October 19 to 22. He told Linava representatives they should try to attend these events as a venue for making their aspirations known.

For the full story in Lithuanian