In 1988, Yehuda Evron received a memorable letter from Lech Walesa, the first post-communist president of Poland, on the eve of the country’s transition to democracy. “He wrote that within a few months we would get my wife’s property back,” recalled Evron, now 80. His wife was the only Holocaust survivor of a family that…
Lithuania’s outgoing chancellor agreed in principle to a lump sum transfer $47 million to the country’s Jewish community as compensation for lost Holocaust-era property. Chancellor Deividas Matulionis, chief of staff for Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, agreed to the transfer at a meeting last week with Gunther Saathoff, director of the German government’s EVZ Foundation for…
On the shiny glass table lay jewelry, coins and metal utensils – similar to those in a catalog of antiques. The years have left their mark on the items, but they are still in good shape. Some collector would probably pay a nice amount for them. But these items are not for sale. It is…
The monochromatic ocean of Haredim at the funeral of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv last month concealed a deeper undercurrent of dissent. Elyashiv, the acknowledged leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian community, had roped together two competing factions among a group usually seen as monolithic. There are the conservatives, led by Shmuel Auerbach of Jerusalem, as well…
With crucial help from Lithuania’s ambassador to Washington, a Maryland cemetery employee has managed to position himself as a key mediator between Jews and the Lithuanian government in a little more than one year. Harley Felstein launched his new organization, the Lithuanian Jewish Heritage Project, at a party hosted by Ambassador Zygimantas Pavilionis at the…
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust By Ellen Cassedy University of Nebraska Press, 288 pages, $19.95 This past May, the remains of the Nazi-quisling head of Lithuania?s wartime Provisional Government (PG), Juozas Brazaitis, were ceremoniously disinterred from Putnam, Conn., where he was buried in 1974, and reinterred a few days later in Kaunas,…
When Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, Israel’s most revered rabbi, died on July 18 at the age of 102, he left his community at a crossroads. Elyashiv, broadly accepted as the leader of the “Lithuanian” Haredi community — meaning all Ashkenazi Haredim who aren’t members of a Hasidic sect — took this important post from another consensus…
Wyman Brent may be about the most unlikely person you could find to establish a new Jewish library in the Baltic nation of Lithuania. Brent is neither a scholar nor an intellectual. He doesn’t speak Lithuanian and isn’t even Jewish. He is a wiry, soft-spoken, long-haired atheist from California; the type of man who signs…
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