Hebrew music pulsated in the air and IDF soldiers joyfully waved Israeli flags on Monday, December 22nd at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport as 226 new olim (immigrants) from Ukraine alighted from the plane. The festive atmosphere upon their arrival marked the beginning of a new campaign to rescue Jews from the anarchy that marks the war torn country.

Working feverishly behind the scenes to get this project off the ground is Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (IFCJ).   “This will be the first flight of many flights from Ukraine; bringing our brothers and sisters back to Israel,” said Rabbi Eckstein with great resolve. With the help of those on the ground in Ukraine such as the American Joint Distribution Committee and the Chabad Lubavitch movement, the IFCJ has begun the imperative work of “ensuring that any Je who is in danger or who faces hardship from the violence and unrest in Ukraine will receive shelter and a home in Israel,” said Rabbi Eckstein.

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“A man is alive for as long as he remembers what he must never forget” (Grigory Kanovich “Shtetl Romance”)
New phone numbers fill my contact list one after another. However, our friend Saulius keeps dictating new ones and explaining why it is necessary to call this or that particular person. But my thoughts are already elsewhere. I cannot take my eyes off one phone number, which might mean a dream come true. Finally, Saulius makes a call and we hear the great news – writer Grigory Kanovich will be happy to meet with us, but we’ll still have to ring him up and arrange the details.

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Lithuanian foreign minister Linas Linkevičius congratulated Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kukliansky today on her receiving an award from the Jewish research institute YIVO for service to society.

On December 15 the YIVO institute in New York held a benefit dinner during which Kukliansky and others who contributed to a YIVO project were honored. The funds generated from the benefit dinner will be used for YIVO's Vilna project, which is aimed at digitizing and virutally conecting YIVO archives in Vilnius and New York over seven years.

Minister Linkevičius congratulated Kukliansky on her award and noted her many years of work with the Lithuanian Jewish community, strengthening ties between Lithuanians and Jews, celebrating the Jewish cultural legacy and deepening ties between the Jewish communities of Lithuania, Israel and the world.

The YIVO Yiddish – language archive is the largest and most comprehensive collection of pre-war documents in Yiddish in Eastern Europe. The archive was preserved by Jews, Lithuanians, Americans and others during and after World War II.

The Jewish research institute YIVO has awarded Lithuanian Jewish Community chair Faina Kuklianksy for her contributions in strengthening the Jewish community in Lithuania. Former US ambassador to Lithuania Anne Derse was also recognized for her leadership, and former Vilna ghetto inmate, partisan, historian and former head of Yad Vashem Yitzhak Arad, originally from Švenčionys, Lithuania, was also given an award for a lifetime of achievement.  YIVO bestows the awards annually upon people from  around the world for achievements in Jewish history and culture and contributions to the Jewish communities.

This year the awards ceremony was held in New York, where YIVO headquarters were relocated from Vilnius during World War II. Kukliansky has received a number of awards previously from the Lithuanian state, including the Order of the Knight's Cross "For Contributions to Lithuania." YIVO was founded in Vilnius in what was then Polish territory in 1925 as the first secular Jewish research institution in Eastern Europe. The institute moved its base of operations to New York in 1940. At the present time the YIVO archive and library conserve 24 million documents and more than 385,000 books, including the largest collection of Yiddish-language materials in the world.

P O E T R Y

Editor’s note:  Defending History is proud to launch its new poetry section with Ken Slade’s My Dream of When the Witch is Found (© KR Slade 2010-2014). KR Slade is an author/journalist, educator, and English-language text editor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He repatriated to his family’s native Lithuania in 2004. Graphics, from the public domain, are added, intending to illustrate the message, and do not reflect on such original artist’s context or intentions.

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In ushering out 2014, we remember the Lithuanian Jewish Community was established 25 years ago, and we remember how many contributions and how much effort people sacrificed to make this community what it is today. Our financial situation improved in 2014 and we become more independent. The community became more creative and freer, and many more plans, projects and hopes have surfaced. Improved finances have allowed us to bring more ideas to fruition. I would like to emphasize that the restitution monies received, which the Lithuanian state has begun to pay out, are not there for us to spend them all in one day, to splurge and waste these resources. No one has paid us all 128 million litas in a lump sum.

By Philip Pullella

ROME, Dec 9 (Reuters) – As the liberation of Auschwitz approaches its 70th anniversary next year, descendants of Holocaust survivors face a dilemma that will deepen as time passes – how to transmit "received memory" to future generations.

In a book named "God, Faith and Identity from the Ashes: Reflections of Children and Grandchildren of Holocaust Survivors," 88 of them tell how they inherited the memory and how they hope to pass it on.

"Many if not most children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors live with ghosts," Menachem Rosensaft, a son of survivors, writes in the introduction of the book he edited.

"We are haunted much in the way a cemetery is haunted. We bear within us the shadows and echoes of an anguished dying we never experienced or witnessed.".

Essayists are from 16 countries and aged between 27 to 72. A few were born in Displaced Persons camps in Europe at the end of World War Two but many are grandchildren in their 20s and 30s. None had any actual memory of the Holocaust, in which the Nazis murdered some six million Jews.

Written by Živilė Juonytė Bagel Shop Tolerance Campaign volunteer, translated by Geoff Vasil.     ,

December 4, 2014

 Meet Dr.Lara Lempertienė, historian of Jewish culture and bibliographer. Although she denied during the interview being a qualified Jewish book specialist and added that there were none such in Lithuania, she has worked for two decades now at the Lithuanian National Martynas Mažvydas Library in the retrospective bibliography section. She seemed able to go on for hours about her field, the Jewish book and book culture, providing many interesting facts and unexpected discoveries.

Both Student and Teacher

Editor’s note: Our colleague Prof. Pinchos Fridberg drew our attention to a page on Radio Svoboda’s website, by Elena Fanailova, featuring both the audio and transcript of a recent interview conducted by Donata Subbotko for the Polish weekly Gazeta Wyborcza with the famed Lithuanian humanist, poet, essayist and professor Tomas Venclova. Text of the Polish version appears in Gazeta Wyborcza. The Russian text also appeared, at Prof. Fridberg’s initiative, in Obzor.

The following brief excerpt, concerning Banderism in Ukraine and analogous tendencies in Lithuania and elsewhere, has been translated into English (from the Russian) by Ludmila Makedonskaya. See also Defending History’s section dedicated to Tomas Venclova. Our page on bold Lithuanian truth tellers includes some of Prof. Venclova’s writings from the 1970s onward. His famous essay from the period, Jews and Lithuanians, is available in his collection of essaysForms of Hope.

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