(JTA) — One of the oldest publishing houses in independent Lithuania withdrew the books of a best-selling author over her criticism of a nationalist who is accused of complicity in Holocaust-era crimes. The recall of Rūta Vanagaitė’s books came one day after she revealed that she is in a relationship with Efraim Zuroff, an Israeli…
(JTA) — Lithuanian soldiers pitched tents on the grounds of a former concentration camp for Jews in Kaunas, where they are training to fight Russian troops. A battalion of special forces troops camped Monday at Kaunas’ Seventh Fort, the first of dozens of concentration camps set up by Nazi Germany after its 1941 eastward invasion,…
(JTA) — The president of Lithuania dismissed concerns raised by 12 U.S. Congress members over the planned construction of a conference center atop what used to be a Jewish cemetery in Vilnius. Responding to a letter sent last month by the lawmakers about the Piramont cemetery, Dalia Grybauskaitė on Monday told the BNS news agency…
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…
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