This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The extreme poverty that Jews once experienced in the cities and towns of Eastern Europe has been well documented, but what exactly was their diet like? According to the memoirs of Hirsh Abramovich, a Yiddish writer in pre-war Vilna, the Jews in Lithuania were probably the poorest…
(JTA) — Dan Sofer and his wife considered it a great honor when they became the first couple since the Holocaust to be wed in Lithuania by a chief rabbi of that country. Sofer, a Ukraine-born businessman from Israel, said his wedding in 2004 was a chance to play a small part in the revival of…
(JTA) — In an escalation of the internal feud dividing Lithuanian Jews, the Chabad movement’s senior emissary to the country was banned from the capital city’s main synagogue. Rabbi Sholem Ber Krinsky, who has lived in Vilnius for 22 years, was informed in an email Monday from the chairman of the Vilnius Jewish Religious Community…
(JTA) — Lithuania’s government is reconsidering plans to build a convention center atop what used to be a Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, rabbis said after meeting with the country’s ambassador to the United States. The seven-member delegation of American haredi Orthodox rabbis and activists met Rolandas Kriščiūnas last week to discuss the controversial plan to build…
Holocaust restitution money is supposed to heal wounds. But the Lithuanian government’s payment of $40 million to the country’s small Jewish community has reopened a decades-long dispute between Lithuania’s Jewish leadership and a Chabad rabbi from Boston. Arguments over the money have swelled into a debate about who better represents Lithuanian Jewry — a Hasidic…
(JTA) – A Lithuanian game show in which a contestant performed a Nazi salute and shouted “Jew” to describe a Jewish composer was taken off the air. Actress Asta Baukute, a former lawmaker, made the gesture on the “Guess the Melody” episode that aired Friday, Delfi reported. In the charades-style game, contestants act out songs and other…
The 103-year-old Rabbi Aaron Yehuda Leib Shteinman, considered the leading sage in the non-Hasidic (Lithuanian) Haredi community, was hospitalized in Bnei Brak on Sunday after he had felt unwell for several days. Doctors suspect he has pneumonia. Ma’ayanei Hayeshua Medical Center director Prof. Moti Ravid told Haaretz that Shteinman was conscious and had been admitted as…
(JTA) — Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaitė called the Holocaust a tragedy of all of Lithuanua during a commemoration ceremony at the site of 1941 massacre of Jewish residents in the town of Molėtai in eastern Lithuania. “Their memory is an uncompromising obligation for all Lithuanian people to fight against hatred, violence, discrimination, and indifference, and…
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