Notes

Notes on Locations (Lithuania)

See also: List of locations; Map (cf. Litvak civilization map); Reading list.

 

The provisional List of Locations is an incomplete tabulation of the annihilated Jewish communities on the territory of the Republic of Lithuania. It is a list of current Lithuanian place names (minus diacritics which often misproduce on various screens), followed by traditional Yiddish names. A prime source for Yiddish place names from the interwar Lithuanian republic is still Berl Kagan’s Jewish Cities, Towns and Villages in Lithuania (NY 1991; in Yiddish: Berl Kahan’s Yidishe shtet, shtetlekh un dorfishe yishuvim in Lite). In the preface to his supplement on Jewish-inhabited hamlets in the interwar republic, Kagan (p. 641) notes that his own assembled list of 369 such hamlets (pp 642-701) is far from complete, estimating another hundred to hundred and fifty. None of these  hamlets is consciously included in the following list. That remains a future project.

One of the major resources is Yad Vashem’s Pinkas Hakehillot. Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities from their Foundation till after the Holocaust: Lithuania (edited by Dov Levin, asistant ed. Josef Rosin, Jerusalem 1996; in Hebrew).

Among the sources for Yiddish forms of place names from interwar Poland: the Yekopo’s Pinkes (ed. Moyshe Shalit, Vilna 1930), and the Svintsyan (Svencionys) area yizkor book edited by Shimon Kantz (Tel Aviv 1965).

Certain Yiddish forms cited derive from the maps in Dovid Katz’s Lithuanian Jewish Culture (Vilnius 2004, 2010), or are based on ongoing interviews with survivors in the context of Litvish: An Atlas of Northeastern Yiddish.

Live links are provided where possible to Holocaust-related websites and resources, as a point of departure. Each site conjured is self-identifying, including, most prominently, JewishGen and the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Studies. The longer-term project is for both detailed memoirs and scholarly studies to be available online (in English and in local languages) for a maximum number of locations. Hopefully one of the major Holocaust education institutions or museums will pursue this goal, enabling the free and rapid access of information for Holocaust studies. Moreover, it is particularly important that open-minded young people who grow up on the territory of the Holocaust, and who take an interest in their country’s history, should rapidly be able to look up their hometown’s Holocaust-era history.

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