(JTA) — Pope Francis prayed at the site of the former Vilnius Ghetto in Lithuania on the 75th anniversary of its liquidation. He offered the prayers on Sunday in the presence of survivors and Jewish community leaders at the site. He also led a mass for more than 100,000 in Kaunaus, the second largest city…
(JTA) — A Lithuanian museum housed in a camp where Nazis and collaborators murdered 50,000 Jews is hosting an event for families featuring battle re-enactments. The May 12 event, which the Kas Vyksta news website billed as a “feast,” is scheduled to take place at the Ninth Fort, a 19th century bunker complex that the…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. For hundreds of years, books played a powerful role in the lives of Vilna’s Jews. The city was home to the two most influential publishing houses of religious and secular books, Romm and B. Kletskin, as well as the great Strashun Library. Several synagogues, houses of study…
Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the former Japanese consulate in Lithuania on Sunday to commemorate a Japanese diplomat credited with saving an estimated 6,000 Jews from almost certain death in 1940. Chiune Suhigara was serving as Japanese consul in Kaunas, then capital of Lithuania, when he disobeyed his superiors and issued Japanese visas to…
(JTA) — In an unusual move, a Lithuanian court voided the local Jewish community’s April internal elections, declaring that communal bosses have no legal authority to continue their rule. The Dec. 21 ruling by Vilnius District Court, which is the first of its kind in years in Europe, is the latest development in the fight…
Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the leader of the non-Hasidic Lithuanian haredi-Orthodox community, has died at the age of 104. Shteinman died on Tuesday morning of cardiac arrest after being in and out of the hospital for much of the last year. Hundreds of thousands of mourners attended Shteinman’s funeral, which began in front of his…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thanks to the hard work of his literary admirers, an English translation of Grigory Kanovich’s autobiographical novel “Shtetl Love Song” has finally appeared. The novel was released by a boutique British publishing house, Noir Press, that specializes in modern Lithuanian literature. It’s remarkable that one of the…
Some 75 years ago, a group of Jews under German occupation in Vilna was assigned to assist Nazi authorities in curating books and other cultural items destined for shipment to Germany. There, the selection of Judaica materials was to be conserved as a collection of artifacts from an extinct people. Some items were indeed shipped…
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