The event was celebrated during a ceremony Thursday, the Baltic News Service reported, in the capital city of Vilnius, where one in four residents was Jewish before the Holocaust.

Lithuania used to have 250,000 Jews but the vast majority were killed by German Nazis and their local collaborators.

Israel’s first ambassador to the Baltic nation is Amir Maimon.

Lithuania opened its embassy in Israel shortly after the two countries established diplomatic relations, in 1992 — a year after Lithuania regained its independence from Russia following the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2012, Lithuania, which has been a member of the European Union since 2003, appointed a commercial attache to serve in Israel.

Israel, however, refrained from opening an embassy in Lithuania. The Jewish state was represented in Lithuania by Israel’s embassy in the capital of neighboring Riga.

The leaders of the eight political parties running in the March 17 Israeli Knesset election participated in their first televised debate on Feb. 26, moderated by anchor Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 2 network. Absent from the discussion, however, were current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his most formidable challenger, Zionist Union alliance chairman Isaac Herzog.

If Zionist Union wins the most seats in the Knesset (Israel’s legislature) and is able to form a governing coalition, Herzog—whose Labor party merged with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah party for the election—would rotate the role of prime minister with Livni.

When Israelis enter the “kalfi” (Hebrew for ballot box) next month, they will cast votes for entire parties—not for specific candidates. Each party, which presents a list of candidates for membership in the Knesset, must win at least 3.25 percent of the total vote to get the minimum representation of about four seats. The new Israeli government will be established based on how many seats each party wins, and the president will appoint the prime minister, who is usually the leader of the party that won the most Knesset seats.

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Dalius Simėnas

The Israeli-capital companies operating in Lithuania work in sectors well known to Jews: they control real estate, develop the IT business and, as an example, make cash registers. The heads of Israeli companies in Lithuania welcome the first Israeli ambassador to Vilnius but say that opening an embassy isn’t enough, hard work awaits for Israeli business to discover Lithuania as a country in which to invest and expand.

Direct Israeli investments in Lithuania, according to the Lithuanian Department of Statistics, are not especially great this year, comprising 12.71 million euros. The main sector, worth 10.5 million euros, is real estate, with the remainder going to refining and refinishing industry, IT and other spheres. This doesn’t compare to the much more significant investments made by EU partners in Sweden, Denmark and other Nordic countries, nor to US investments.

Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish-Litvak Community, has issued the following statement on the eve of the March 11th Lithuanian Independence Day holiday, following reports in the media that a march through the heart of the Lithuanian capital by ultranationalists would go forward as planned:
Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish-Litvak Community, says the March 11th holiday is to very important and dear to Lithuanian Jews, and therefore should not be an occasion for insulting citizens of other ethnicities through means unacceptable in a democratic society.

The Lithuanian Jewish Community strongly condemns the Nazi chants often heard on this day of great import to the Lithuanian state, and we are very encouraged by the words of Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevičius
uttered on the eve of the holiday at the Sholem Aleichem Jewish school in Vilnius that he will not allow the sowing of ethnic discord through various slogans and chants on the occasion of the birthday of the state.

He said that the head of the Government and other government officials want to stress that anti-Semitism and intolerance will not be tolerated in Lithuania.

by Editor, Feb 17, 2015, Jurgis Pabrėža Preparatory Gymnasium of Kretinga

 In February of this year the seniors of the Jurgis Pabrėža Preparatory Gymnasium of Kretinga had two open non-traditional integrated Lithuanian-language, history and English-language lessons about Jewish culture. During studies on the topic of Jewish literature, it was noted the students had little knowledge of this, so the decision was made to expand their horizons with supplementary material including facts from the religion, history and life of the Jewish people and a characterization of Jewish identity. Izaak Kutzi, a citizen of Israel who has lived in Lithuania for some time but speaks English, was invited to help with the lesson. The lesson was prepared beforehand: tasks were assigned students, the course of the lesson and the role of its leaders were discussed, a test was prepared to assess the acquisition of information, and Kutzi even made traditional Jewish food-dishes. Further participants in the lesson included teachers from the gymnasium and the local district, members of the Kretinga Jewish Community and students from Klaipėda University.

If you are not part of the closed world of ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, Jewry, or within the Orthodox rabbinic fraternity, you are more than likely completely oblivious to the release last week of an obscure newsreel from 1923, which for nearly a century has remained unseen, languishing on some dusty shelf in an obscure storage location in the United States. However, for the Orthodox community, the release of this footage is without exaggeration one of the most sensational media events to have occurred in the history of modern media, right up there with how secular audiences perceive movie footage of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon or of the Titanic’s discovery deep in the Atlantic Ocean.

This year’s Purim falls against a background of no little political drama, internationally and domestically.

The holiday, which celebrates the biblical story of Esther and the survival of the Jewish people during the Persian exile falls this year on Wednesday night and Thursday, except in Jerusalem where it takes place on Thursday night and Friday.

But while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is away in Washington battling Israel’s ancient Persian foe, various religious and political struggles back home continue apace.

Even after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Tuesday speech at the US Congress, rival Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union party would still be the largest Knesset faction following the March 17 elections, according to a Channel 2 poll published Wednesday, the first since the Israeli leader returned from Washington.

Based on the survey — conducted among 790 respondents with a 3.5% margin of error — the Zionist Union would receive 24 seats, while the Likud would gain 23.

The Joint (Arab) List places third with 13 seats, Yesh Atid and Jewish Home follow with 12 each, and Kulanu with 8. Yisrael Beytenu and Meretz, as well as ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, would all gain 6 seats, while Eli Yishai’s new Yachad party manages to just cross the electoral threshold with 4 Knesset seats.

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