Dear Friends,
You are kindly and cordially invited to meet film director from Australia
Rod Freedman
Who will be presenting his documentary “Uncle Chatzkel”
In Vilnius Jewish Public Library, Gedimino pr. 24,
on March 30, at 3 PM
(Please mind that screening of the same documentary with Lithuanian sound and communication providing interpretation services with Rod Freedman will be held on the same day at 6 PM)

Film director from Australia Rod Freedman presents his documentary “Uncle Chatzkel” in Vilnius Jewish Public Library.
On Monday, March 30, 2015, at 3 PM guests of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library will have a rare opportunity to meet a famous film director and producer from Australia Rod Freedman – an independent director, producer and executive producer whose documentaries have won many Australian and international awards and screened in dozens of film festivals. Rod is particularly interested in stories about people and their life’s journeys. Rod’s most recent film as producer is ONCE MY MOTHER, showing in the 2015 Vilnius International Film Festival in the ‘Lithuanians Abroad’ program. Rod’s grandparents were Jewish Lithuanian.

The deputy CEO of the World Jewish Congress, Maram Stern, was in Turkey this week to take part in the re-opening ceremony of the Great Synagogue of Edirne, which was restored for $2.5 million and is the first synagogue to open in Turkey in two generations. Guest of honor at the ceremony was Turkey’s Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç.

Turkey’s Jewish community head, İshak İbrahimzadeh, attended the morning service conducted by Davud Azuz, who had led the last service at the synagogue 46 years ago. An estimated 250 people attended the service in the temple, which has a capacity of 1,200. “I would like to thank those who contributed,” Azuz said, referring to the community effort to re-open the Great Synagogue.

In testimony before a key US Congressional committee on Tuesday, World Jewish Congress President Ronald S. Lauder warned that radical Islam was fueling the flames of a new anti-Semitism engulfing Europe, and criticized the United States for failing to lead the fight to extinguish the threat.

Appearing on behalf of WJC – representing more than 100 Jewish communities worldwide – before the US House of Representatives Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations, Lauder said: “In order to defeat this new flame of radical Islamic terror and survive, the United States must lead. The United States can and must speak loudly and clearly to condemn this evil for what it is – the radical Islamic hatred of Jews.”

The Grand Edirne Synagogue in Turkey that went through renovation from 2010 until the beginning of 2015 with funding from General Directorate for Foundations will open its doors again on March 26th after a special ceremony. Jewish community head, İshak İbrahimzadeh, who visited the synagogue before the opening ceremony, said the opening of the restored synagogue was a milestone that made him very happy.

Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç and Turkey’s chief rabbi, İshak Haleva, will attend the opening, along with many other Jewish community members from both Turkey and abroad. Faina Kukliansky Lithuanian Jewish (Litvaks) Community chairperson was invited byDeputy Prime Minister  of Turkey H.E. Bülent Arınç to take part in the ceremony marking the reopening of the historic Grand Synagogue of Edirne, a town known as Adrianople in ancient times; became the second capital of the Ottoman Empire in  the 14th century A.D. before Istanbul, and it preserved its importance as the most prominent imperial city in the Balkan domains for centuries to come. Jews lived for at least twenty centuries in Edirne, a city that once was the center of Jewish life in the Balkans Region. However, today there aren’t any Jews living in the city.

The Grand Synagogue in Edirne was built during the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II by the architectural model of the famous Leopoldstädter Tempel in Vienna in Moorish style and opened to worship in 1907. It was known as the second largest synagogue in Europe at that time. However, it fell into disrepair in the following decades and finally abandoned in 1983.

by Dovid Katz

We have this week made available two more videos from late 1990s expeditions to record the language, memories and world view of the last Yiddish-speaking Litvaks in Belarus. These videos are of return trips in 1998 to friends made in previous years, this time accompanied by the famed Lithuanian documentary film maker and Holocaust educator Saulius Beržinis, founder of the Independent Holocaust Archive of Lithuania.

One video is of the famous Litvak Yiddish author, Hirsh Reles (1913—2004), a native of Tsháshnik (Časniki, northeastern Belarus). Speaking in his apartment in Minsk, he talks about his father, Leybe, of Kovno (Kaunas) who himself dreamt of becoming a writer and moved to Vilna for that purpose. When things didn’t work out, he relocated northeastward to Tsháshnik, where he worked as a teacher, and was the one and only misnáged (non-hosed, Litvak in the popular religious sense) in town. He was trusted to read the Torah in the synagogue (it’s the same for both) but not to lead in prayers, because there are differences between the Litvak and Hasidic rites (even today here in Vilnius…).

Almost certainly, what happened yesterday in the White House briefing room is provoking joy among Palestinians, concern if not fear in Israel, and urgent “taking of views,” as the British put it, in foreign ministries worldwide.

For the first time in decades, Washington is not reflexively and unconditionally standing with Israel.

As a matter of fact, the Obama administration is explicitly doing the opposite.

Repeatedly, President Obama’s aptly-named spokesman, Josh Earnest, told reporters Thursday the U.S. is “rethinking” and “re-evaluating,” and “reconsidering” its decades-long, unwavering support of a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The days of Washington automatically supporting Israel at the UN, striving to protect it from international isolation may be over: “That foundation has been eroded,” said Earnest. “It means that our policy decisions need to be reconsidered.”

And the president’s spokesman was happy to provide everyone with the reason for America’s change of heart: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pre-election declaration earlier this week that shattered, finally, the idea of “the peace process.”

I use those quotation marks deliberately. The peace process has been a fiction for many years, if it was ever real at all.

But it was a fiction nearly everyone had an interest in perpetuating: negotiations leading to “two states, living side by side in peace and security.”

Pollsters try to explain why they got the election result wrong, say many voters refused to participate

Having heard the results of the exit polls for Tuesday’s elections, Israelis went to bed thinking that the Likud and Zionist Union were neck and neck. Two TV exit polls (on Channels 1 and 10) showed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union, the country’s two largest parties, tied at 27 Knesset seats each. The third (on Channel 2) showed the Likud leading the Zionist Union by one seat, 28-27

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by Geoff Vasil

Usually when you hear a new Holocaust exhibit or book is being presented at the Tolerance Center of the Vilna Gaon Museum in Vilnius, you can expect a whole gaggle of diplomats and a certain number of people from that new Lithuanian elite which does understand Holocaust issues to some extent to be in heavy attendance.

Perhaps it was because it was held in the early afternoon on a Tuesday in early March, more likely it was a conscious decision to forego the pageantry and fanfare made by the director of the museum, but for whatever reason the opening ceremony for Danutė Selčinskaja’s new mobile exhibit was subdued, even somber to some extent, befitting the subject matter. There was no Californian wine awaiting toasts after the ceremony, no cheese snacks or fruit on the table in the foyer. Instead, there were about twenty apparently photocopied and hand-folded brochures laid out carefully for guests to take before or after the event.

All Waffen SS members swore an oath to Adolf Hitler, some were recycled Holocaust killers;  Lithuania’s far-right leaders J. Panka and R. Čekutis, fresh from neo-Nazi march in Vilnius, were on hand as honored guests; for the second year in a row, the prime minister forbade his ministers from attending.

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