Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Simasius unveiled the sign of the first street in Lithuania named for a non-Jew who risked her life to save Jews from the Holocaust. The Sept. 22 ceremony was at Simaites Street, where a heavily Jewish crowd of several dozen people convened to honor Ona Šimaitė, a Vilnius University librarian whose actions…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his blessing to controversial construction planned atop a former Jewish cemetery in Lithuania, that country’s leader said. Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius spoke of Netanyahu’s consent for the planned renovation at the Concert and Sports Palace in central Vilnius in an interview Wednesday with the Baltic News Service. “He…
It’s one of the most intriguing sites in all of Vilnius: a massive Soviet-style sports complex built in 1971 that since its closure in 2004 has become a run-down haven for vagrants. Now the Lithuanian government has some grand plans to renovate the rotting behemoth and turn it into a gleaming $25 million conference center….
A radar survey has found that significant pieces of Lithuania’s largest synagogue complex, which was damaged by the Nazis and destroyed by the Soviets, still remain but are buried underground. The ground penetrating radar survey conducted in June in Vilnius (previously called Vilna) by a joint team of academics from Israel and the United States…
With horror, I read recently about the Lithuanian state’s attempt to hide its history of Nazi collaboration — by accusing Jewish partisans who fought against the Germans (and their Lithuanian collaborators) of ill-defined, ill-documented “war crimes.”](http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/07/lithuania_and_nazis_the_country_wants_to_forget_its_collaborationist_past.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top “”) It’s not the first time such an effort has been made, but it’s still maddening to read the…
Lithuanian writer Sigitas Parulskis first confronted the enormity of the Holocaust during a visit to London when he stumbled across a museum plaque showing collaborators from his small town who took part in the mass murder of Jews. Decades after the end of World War Two, in which six million Jews across Europe were annihilated…
The excavation of a mass grave of Holocaust victims in Lithuania was halted following an appeal by the Jewish community and the country’s chief rabbi. On Wednesday, Martynas Siurkus, a municipal official in Siauliai, announced that the work would be halted “until the appropriate respect is guaranteed for the human remains of the people murdered…
The chief rabbi of Lithuania appealed to authorities to prevent the excavation of a mass grave of Holocaust victims in the country’s north. Rabbi Chaim Burshtein issued the statement Tuesday about the mass grave discovered this week during road construction work in Siauliai, a city located 120 miles northwest of Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. “Please halt…
100% of profits support our journalism
