Lithuanian Jewish Community

February 16 Lithuanian Independence Day Nationalist March in Kaunas Fails

Following what appeared to be a series of diversionary actions, an annual march by Lithuanian nationalists, xenophobes and neo-Nazis through the center of Lithuania’s second largest city, Kaunas, appears to have failed this year.

In earlier years the number of marchers easily reached 1,000. This year barely 300 turned out, and the march began at least an hour and a half later than planned.

The reason for the small turnout seems to be a series of false reports in the mainstream and internet social media by the nationalists themselves, apparently designed to throw off the small but equally determined mix of local and foreign observers and protestors who come each year to document and oppose the hate event.

2015-02-18

Limmud Keshet 2015 February 20-22

>>Program of the event

2015-02-18

Run-Up to the 16 Feb. 2015 Neo-Nazi March in Central Kaunas

Baltic Nazi-Glorifying Marching Season Underway

COME JOIN US IN KAUNAS, MONDAY 16 FEB. at 1 PM (1300), AT RAMYBĖS PARK, TO MONITOR, SILENTLY PROTEST, & REMEMBER THE CITY’S MORE THAN 30,000 MURDERED JEWISH CITIZENS.

Some of the media coverage to date at:

AFTER THE EVENT: JTA; 15min.lt; Alfa.lt; Balsas.lt; Delfi.lt; FB; Info.smi; Interfax; Lrt.lt (+video); Lrytas.lt; Obzor; Simon Wiesenthal Center; Stormfront; RUN-UP TO THE EVENT: i24; Defending History (+correspondence with mayor’s office).

2015-02-17

Teleconference with Naftali Bennett (Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs)

It gives us great honour to invite you to a special teleconference discussion between Jewish leaders from Europe and Mr. Naftali Bennett, Israel’s Minister for Diaspora Affairs, to be held: Tuesday 17th February, 2015, at 18:00 Israel time.

This discussion follows the horrific terror attack on a Synagogue in Copenhagen and in light of the growing threats facing Jewish communities in Europe from rising anti-Semitism and Islamic terrorists.

2015-02-172019-12-10

Hundreds of tombs defaced in French Jewish cemetery Read more: Hundreds of tombs defaced in French Jewish cemetery

Interior minister decries ‘despicable act’; prime minister calls attack ‘anti-Semitic and ignoble’

PARIS — France’s interior minister said Sunday several hundred tombs had been defaced at a Jewish cemetery in the east of the country, in what he called “a despicable act.

2015-02-16

Invitation to the concert

2015-02-15

Correspondence with Kaunas Mayor’s Office to 11 February 2015 | Defending History

Below, (1) the text of DH’s letter to the mayor of Kaunas, (2) the response received today from his office, and (3) our further response, in connection with the annual neo-Nazi march planned for 16 February 2015 in central Kaunas. See also section on previous marches, and our 3 February 2014 correspondence with the Kaunas police. Note that a banner featuring a major Kaunas Holocaust collaborator, the Nazi puppet prime minister Juozas Ambrazevicius Brazaitis (reburied with full honors as a hero in Kaunas, in 2012), is depicted in a 2014 photograph used by the march’s organizers to advertise the 2015 event.

From: Dovid Katz
To: “meras@kaunas.lt”
Sent: Tuesday, February 3, 2015 12:28 PM
Subject: For the Honourable Mayor of Kaunas Andrius Kupčinskas
Dear Mayor Kupčinskas

I had the honor and pleasure of meeting with you at various memorial events in Kaunas in recent years.

Read all

2015-02-15

Finding History – and Myself – in Vilnius

The grandchild of Lithuanian Jews hidden during the Holocaust goes back

Maia Ipp writes in Tablet magazine: “In Lithuania, I felt connection – to my grandparents, to Jewish life and heritage, and to many individuals, Jews and non-Jews, who call Lithuania home.”

2015-02-13

Russian School in Vilnius Puts On Evening of Jewish Music

The Saulėtekis School in Vilnius devoted to education in the Russian language staged what school principal Reiza Zinkevičienė described as a “theatrical concert” at the Lelė Theater in the Vilnius Old Town on the evening of February 4.

The concert was also performed at the school two days earlier, and was conceived as part of on-going Holocaust education programs at the school. Principal Zinkevičienė, who is Jewish herself, said the event was organized together with Lithuania’s International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania, which has been working in cooperation with Israel’s commemorative authority Yad Vashem to train teachers from Lithuania on how best to organize and teach the Holocaust. She said several of her teachers had been to Yad Vashem for the two-week courses, and that for them, for her and for their school, this was a spiritual mission more than merely an educational matter.

2015-02-07

Israeli ambassador in Vilnius Amir Maimon on Jewish heritage, Israeli-Palestinian conflict and anti-Semitism in Europe

Israel’s first ambassador residing in Vilnius, Amir Maimon, says Lithuania should be more active in inviting tourists from his country and step up cooperation in the fields of defence and high technologies.
“Even it is very grey outside, you have a beautiful country. But I feel and sense that the average Israeli still didn’t discover Lithuania. And it will be for your side to take the necessary actions and promotion in order to attract more and more Israelis to come. Lithuania is not just Paneriai or the ghetto here in Vilnius. You have a lot to offer, but you need to ask yourself what can you do in order to be attractive to Israelis. The Israelis are well–known for their adventure characters. They like travelling, they like to discover new places,” the ambassador told BNS.

2015-02-07

The Bubnys Event at the 2015 Jewish Community Auschwitz Commemoration

by Julius Norwilla

This year much of the world commemorates the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945. The day of its liberation, January 27th, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. To mark the day this year, on the 26th of January, the Jewish Community of Lithuania organized three events, as reported in Defending History.

The final event of the day was the book launch for The Šiauliai Ghetto featuring as sole announced speaker its author, Dr. Arūnas Bubnys, director of the Genocide and Resistance Research Department of the Genocide and Resistance Research Center of Lithuania; for a critical view of the Genocide Center, as it is known for short, see Defending History’s page and news section on the institution.

There were about eighty people in the community’s elegant Yasha Heifetz Hall, mostly people from today’s Vilnius Jewish community. Among them were a number who have a very personal relationship towards the Šiauliai Ghetto: their family roots are in this city and its region, known in Yiddish and Jewish culture as Shavl. Many have lost most of their families in the Holocaust.

Read defendinghistory.com

2015-02-04

After the Ceremony to Commemorate International Holocaust Day at Auschwitz

Commentary by Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish Community

Auschwitz in the winter, during International Holocaust Day, was as moving as the Holocaust survivors who met here. My thoughts swirled around the people who are still alive. In Lithuania the only still living survivor is Meyshe Preis, who through some sort of miracle survived the Auschwitz, Stutthoff and Dachau concentration camps. His poor health didn’t allow him to attend the commemoration of Auschwitz victims on January 27. Kings, queens and heads of state did attend. I want the people of Lithuania, her politicians and high-ranking civil servants, and especially her decision makers, to understood that a trip to Auschwitz is not the same thing as travelling to Brussels for the usual meeting.

Seventy years ago the Jew were liberated, but they were persecuted en masse from 1939. Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė, foreign minister Linas Linkevičius and the chair of the Lithuanian Jewish Community travelled to the ceremony and were deeply affected by it. I believe their attitude is that of the state regarding Holocaust survivors, whose children and grandchildren now form the basis of our community. I will interject here that representing the community doesn’t mean that some high institutions choose a certain Jew for the post according to merit. That’s how it was for many years. If there’s a Jewish community which elects its chairperson democratically, then the chairperson must represent the community and Lithuania as well, if the community is loyal to the state and sees itself as a part of the country.

2015-02-02

Unique Jewish archive from interwar Vilnius to be reassembled in digital library

A unique Vilnius Jewish archive, which was scattered during the Holocaust, will be revived in a virtual library in a few years.
In January, the Lithuanian Central State Archive started preserving the documents collected by the Jewish scientific YIVO institute that operated in Vilnius between the two world wars to be able to later digitize them and upload on a special database on the Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

2015-01-31

STATEMENT BY THE JEWISH (LITVAK) COMMUNITY

It is not surprising that experienced journalists and politicians as well as leaders of well-known Jewish institutions, who are following Ms. Kukliansky‘s activities devoted to expose Nazi criminals as well as to fight Neo-Nazism, were left in a complete state of confusion after reading Mr. Zuroff ‘s so called protest .

Perhaps it is much easier to simply demonize some small country‘s even smaller institution, unjustly accuse chair of local Jewish community and exalt her deceased predecessor than to engage in any kind scientific research or a civilized discussion.

Mr. Zuroff, as it shows in his letters (here and here) of January 28 addressed to Ms. Kukliansky, was extremely quick to judge the cooperation between Jewish Community and Genocide Center. While the Jewish Community and Genocide Center certainly do not agree on some issues, the recent cooperation between the two institutions has brought some positive results:

2015-01-31

70th Anniversary Commemoration of the Liberation of Auschwitz

Dear Friends,

I have just arrived in Israel from Krakow where we commemorated the 70th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz.

As I am sure many of you will have seen this historic event was extremely symbolic and significant and it received unprecedented media coverage worldwide. The eyes of the world, this week, were on Auschwitz.

WJC, in partnership with the USC Shoah Foundation, brought 101 survivors of Auschwitz, from 21 countries, together with members of their families, to participate in this auspicious event. Their presence — surely the last time such a large number will be able to gather there — made this commemoration particularly meaningful.

2015-01-30

Aleksandras Bosas: Nine Poems

Editor’s note: These nine Lithuanian poems by Aleksandras Bosas (1951—2014) were chosen by Milan Chersonski, translated by Ieva Pukelytė-Mikutienė and edited by Stanley H. Barkan, director of Cross-Cultural Communications Press. Sincerest thanks to them all.

During his last days, Aleksandras Bosas, in addition to writing poems protesting the falsification of the Holocaust in his native land, participated in one demonstration in Ukmergė against a city-square monument that honors a local Holocaust perpetrator as “national hero” and another in Kaunas protesting the glorification of the 1941 “Lithuanian Activist Front” murderers of Jewish civilians across the land.

More at defendinghistory.com

2015-01-29

Litvak Victim Marks 70 Year Anniversary of Liberation of Auschwitz by Red Army and of Dachau by American Army

Meyshe Preis, prisoner of three concentration camps

Lithuanian Jewish Community member Meyshe Preis (or Moisiejus Preisas, as his Lithuanian passport calls him) was imprisoned at three concentration camps: sent from the Kovna ghetto to Stuffhof, then to Auschwitz, then to Dachau. He’s alive and living in Sventsyan (Švenčionys), Lithuania, and still speaks about the horrors he survived in the ghetto and at the concentration and death camps. His apartment, where he now lives alone since the death of his beloved wife, has a wall dedicated to memorabilia from hell, including photographs and a small bowl he took with him to all the camps until his liberation by American troops from a forced march of prisoners from Dachau into the neighboring mountains in May of 1945. His wall museum, collected over many years, includes newspaper articles and written memoirs as well as photos. Currently the LJC Social Center is helping Meyshe Preis out around the house and with the simple chores of life.

2015-01-29

A blueprint to combat anti-Semitism in Europe

On January 27th the world will come together to observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day, marking 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Yet 70 years since end of the most horrific chapter in Europe’s history, anti-Semitism has once again surged to levels unprecedented since the end of the Holocaust, with virtually no part of Europe free from this oldest and most enduring form of hatred.

Whether it is the kosher supermarket attack in Paris this January, the shooting in the Brussels Jewish Museum last year, or frequent assaults against Jews and vandalism of synagogues and Jewish stores, there is an increasingly palpable sense of fear and insecurity among many Jewish communities in Europe.

2015-01-28

Still fighting over Auschwitz, 70 years on

Vladimir Putin’s absence from events marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp shows how Europe is still bitterly divided over the legacy of the Holocaust.

The Kremlin has confirmed Mr Putin will not attend Tuesday’s ceremony at the camp in Poland on Tuesday, unlike many world leaders, including the presidents of France, Germany and Poland.

The official reason is that the Russian president did not receive a formal invitation.

The organisers of the ceremonies said no personal invitations were sent to any leader, but the Kremlin evidently feels snubbed, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov saying the letter was “not something that should be responded to”.

2015-01-28

The Lithuanian Jewish Community invites you to come and commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day

January 26, 2015 Program:

11:00 A.M. – 1:00 P.M. Reading of the names of Holocaust victims at the synagogue, Pylimo no. 39, Vilnius

4:00 P.M. Ceremony to honor Holocaust victims at the Lithuanian Jewish Community. Jascha Heifetz Hall, 3rd floor, Lithuanian Jewish Community, Pylimo no. 4, Vilnius

To include:

2015-01-26

Israeli President Isaac Herzog Visits Lithuania

On the War in Israel and the Situation in Lithuania