I, your faithful correspondent from the Colonial Motherland, just spent six days in the other motherland – Lithuania, the place from which most of my ancestors came. Other than a return in the 1990’s by my Holocaust-survivor maternal grandmother, and a similarly timed visit by my paternal grandparents, none of my “nearby” extended family had been to Lithuania in about seventy years.

What drew me back? In part there is a certain enjoyment I have – despite my complaints about Ashkenormativity – in being a Litvak. Lita brings to my mind a certain sort of rootedness, as well as the rye bread, pickled herring, and peppery gefilte fish (certainly not sweet) my grandparents fed me as a child. There was also a sense of “this is where things started”: before one brave great-grandparent set out 120 years ago to South Africa, my ancestors had been in Lithuania for centuries. Part of me wanted to honor the relatives – including my mother’s half-sister – who had been decimated by the Shoah. Finally, I’ve been entangled in an increasingly drawn-out attempt to gain Lithuanian citizenship by descent, given a new law granting the descendants of Holocaust survivors citizenship of the country. (Obviously, I would keep my other passports.)

Criticism Leveled at Lithuanian Government and Society at Vilnius Holocaust Conference VILNIUS, April 20, 2015 A conference on Holocaust education was held at the Vilnius city hall on April 17, 2015. This conference was the final event in the “Being a Jew” project’s series of events this year marking Holocaust Remembrance Day.

The day before the “Star of Remembrance” event to commemorate Holocaust victims with 700 students participating from 15 Vilnius schools took place outside the Town Hall in Vilnius and at Ponar mass massacre site outside Vilnius. The conference included participants from the United States, Poland, Romania and Israel, including recognized and esteemed Holocaust historians and Holocaust education specialists, among them Tomas Venclova, Saulius Sužiedėlis, Dovid Katz, Šarūnas Liekis and a prerecorded address given by Efraim Zuroff. Director of the European Commission’s European Remembrance program Pavel Tychtl, Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky, Vilnius mayor Artūras Zuokas and Holocaust education experts from Poland and Lithuania spoke as well.

Hundreds of students marked Holocaust Day last Thursday by forming a giant Star of David on the square outside the Lithuanian capital’s historic Old Town Hall building Thursday before boarding trains for Ponar, where over 70,000 Jews were murdered during World War II. The same day the Lithuanian
Government and Prime Minister’s Office honored Lithuanian families who rescued Jews during the war.

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Baltic News Service reported April 14, 2015, that members of the delegation from a European Jewish cemeteries committee said they have no complaints over Lithuanian Government plans to refurbish the former Palace of Sports building complex located upon an old Jewish cemetery.

After the meeting Rabbi Hershel Gluck said: “This is an important day for the Lithuanian Jewish Community and for relations with Lithuanian state representatives and the Lithuanian people.”

He told reporters further that “this shows we can work together in a way beneficial to all sides. This is a new chapter in cooperation between the Jewish community and the Lithuanian Government. I want to express gratitude for these very positive steps.” 

Two female rabbis, Rachel Logan and Hilly Haburn, decided to extend their study-tour in Lithuania this year in order to attend several different Passover seders here.

As usual, Vilnius had multiple public seders this year, including the usual Lithuanian Jewish Community seder, the Chabad Lubavitch Center’s seder conducted by Rabbi Krinsky, and the independent seder sponsored and organized annually by Rabbi Feffer. This year, however, Amit Belaitė, the president of the Lithuanian Union of Jewish Students, took things to a new level, literally. Her seder was held high above Vilnius, in the restaurant midway up the Vilnius Television Tower in the Karoliniškės neighborhood of Vilnius.

Belaitė’s luftseder was conducted by the two female rabbis who had been invited to stay on in Vilnius for this purpose, at 6:00 P.M on Sunday, April 5, 2015. On the first night of Passover they had attended the LJC seder, the Rabbi Samuel Jacob Feffer seder and the Chabad Lubavich seder of Rabbi Sholom Krinsky.

The Lithuanian news and variety magazine Veidas in their February 20, 2015 issue published a long article about the dangers of anti-Semitism in Europe and the prospects for an attack on Jews in Lithuania. The author interviewed several Lithuanian Jews, including Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky and head of the Sholem Aleichem Jewish school Miša Jakobas.

“The situation in Europe today is not very promising, it’s not looking good, and I am afraid it might get worse than it is now. I am a child of the post-war era. There are many people who say this generation whose parents experienced and survived the terrors of the war has many problems because we are always afraid. And I am personally afraid of the times past returning. Current events remind me of Nazi Germany, where everything also began from simple things: one person insults another, store windows are broken, and slowly things head towards what happened,” Jakobas commented for the Lithuanian magazine.