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 Years Ago An entire family of Italians is in Beth Israel Hospital for circumcisions after converting to Judaism. Joseph Petrigliano and his three sons, who live on Orchard Street in Corona, part of Long Island, N.Y., decided to convert to Judaism after Petrigliano’s Jewish wife, an immigrant from Galicia, told him of her recurring…
● The Clandestine History of the Kovno Jewish Ghetto Police Translated and edited by Samuel Schalkowsky Indiana University Press, 416 pages, $35 When we think of Lithuanian Jewry, we tend to think of Vilnius, “The Yerushalaim of Litte,” for its fame as a Jewish religious and intellectual center, its great scholars, and its contribution to…
Model of a Rabat Jewish bride in her finery / Jewish Museum in Casablanca I was fortunate enough to travel this month to both Morocco and Lithuania — the former for a class trip, the latter for an attempt to become acquainted with the land of my ancestors, including my ancestral hometown of Panevėžys (Ponevezh)….
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