The surviving family members of the late Leyzer Ran, led by his wife Basheva Ran, today released a statement concerning Yivo’s decision to honor the Lithuanian foreign minister in New York in the absence of apologies for the accusations against Jewish partisan heroes, and in the absence of progress on widespread antisemitism including legalized swatikas and Holocaust distortionism. Details and a PDF of the letter are available here.
Leyzer Ran Section
Leyzer Ran Family Writes Collective Open Letter on Yivo Debacle
Posted in "Jewish" Events as Cover?, A 21st Century Campaign Against Lithuanian Holocaust Survivors?, Basheva Ran & Family, Double Genocide: The New Form of Holocaust Revisionism & Denial, In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Leyzer Ran Section, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, United States
Tagged Dr. Jonathan Brent, Leyzer Ran, Prof. Faye Ran
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Full Statement of the Leyzer Ran Family on Yivo’s Positions on the Lithuanian Holocaust and Current Machinations
NEW YORK—The Leyzer Ran family released this statement, dated 16 September 2011, which appears here in the original PDF format received. To turn pages please use the arrows in the upper left hand corner. Alternatively, the document may be accessed as PDF.
Posted in In the Era of Yivo's 100th, Leyzer Ran Section, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion
Tagged Leyzer Ran, Yivo, Yivo and Lithuania
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Yiddish Loses Last Global Position as Symbolic “First Jewish Language” in Vilnius
OPINION | COMMEMORATION OF DESTROYED COMMUNITIES | YIDDISH AFFAIRS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | IDENTITY-THEFT LITVAK INDUSTRY
by Dovid Katz
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VILNIUS—For close to three decades, Vilnius has been the only city in the world with municipally sponsored public plaques and signs that regularly include Yiddish. Symbologically for a small, weak, stateless, threatened and “threat-to-nobody” language in this part of the world, it was an equally important statement of respect for the language, literature and culture of the murdered Jewish people of the city that Yiddish sometimes came first, “on top,” and always so when it was a question between Yiddish and modern Israeli Hebrew.
For the first time in thirty years, Yiddish has been denied primacy of place among the Jewish languages of the city. The new sign starts with an Israeli Hebrew version used by nobody in pre-Holocaust Vilna.
Posted in Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Dovid Katz, Events, Identity Theft of Litvak Heritage, Israel, Leyzer Ran Section, Lithuania, Lithuania's Jewish Community Issues, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Opinion, Politics of Memory, Symbology, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Amir Maimon, Emanuelis Zingeris, Faina Kukliansky, Hebrew-Yiddish conflict, Holocaust in Lithuania, Holocaust remembrance in Vilnius, Jewish Community of Lithuania, Vilnius Jewish street names, Vilnius Yiddish street signs, Yiddish in Lithuania, Yiddish in Vilnius, Yiddish street names, Yidishe gas in Vilnius, Zydu gatve in Vilnius
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Harvard Publishes “Catalog of the Leyzer Ran Collection in Harvard College Library”
BOOKS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | VILNIUS JEWISH LIFE
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VILNIUS—As the first small shipment of Harvard Library’s new book, Catalog of the Leyzer Ran Collection in the Harvard College Library arrived this week in the Lithuanian capital, there was widespread satisfaction that at least a tabulation of the contents of Leyzer Ran’s extensive archive of Jewish Vilna is finally available. The collection was bequeathed to Harvard University where the Library maintains it as a distinct entity with its own name, space, and now, a handsome catalogue brought out by Harvard University. Leyzer Ran (1912-1995) is widely considered to be the primary postwar chronicler of the centuries-old unique Jewish civilization of the city known in Yiddish as Vílne, Yerusholáyim d’Líte — Vilna, Jerusalem of Lithuania. The newly appeared catalogue was compiled and edited by Dr. Charles Berlin, who is Head of Judaica at Harvard Library and Harvard University’s Lee M. Friedman Bibliographer in Judaica.
Posted in Books, Leyzer Ran Section, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Yiddish Affairs
Tagged Charles Berlin (Harvard), Davina Ran, Dovid Katz, Faye Ran, Jerusalem of Lihtuania, Justin Cammy, Leyzer Ran, Mordechai Zalkin, Ruth Wisse, Vilna, Vilna Jewish Studies, Vilnius Jewish history
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Is Yiddish ‘Lingua non grata’ at National Library’s Exhibition on Prewar Lithuanian Jewish Life?
OPINION | MUSEUMS & EXHIBITIONS | THE ARTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | YIDDISH AFFAIRS
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by Dovid Katz
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Lead banner for National Library’s exhibition on prewar Lithuanian Jewish culture
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For many centuries, the Jews of Vilna (Yiddish Vílne, formal Ashkenazic Hebrew Vílno, modern Hebrew Vílna), and indeed, those from a huge radius of towns and villages in all four directions that looked to the then “Jerusalem of Lithuania” as their spiritual capital, the streets of the oldest Jewish settlement in the town were lovingly known as Di yidishe gas. The narrow dictionary definition is indeed “the Jewish street” but in the Yiddish of Vilna, as in other cities with highly developed Yiddish culture, the phrase came to signify the entire neighborhood in the sense that could perhaps best be captured by something like “our Jewish part of town.” When in 1920, the then Polish authorities offered the Jewish community the opportunity to name a few streets in town, Yídishe gas (Polish Żydowska) became one of them, for the neighborhood’s primary street. When the democratic Lithuanian independence movement of the late 1980s reached the stage of ridding the city of hated Soviet-imposed names, the old name was rapidly and boldly, restored, in its translative Lithuanian form, Žydų gatvė.
Posted in Arts, Commemorations for Destroyed Communities, Dovid Katz, Events, Leyzer Ran Section, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion
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First Impressions of Vilnius’s New ‘Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews’
OPINION | MUSEUMS | ARTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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by Dovid Katz
The creators of Vilnius’s new Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews (MCILJ or for short — “Litvak Culture Museum”), which opened its doors last January, have rapidly earned their place of honor in the 700 or so years of Lithuanian Jewish history. They have achieved a notable advance in encapsulating — in broad outline — the scope, the breadth, and many of the contours of internal diversity of one of the world’s more intriguing and complex stateless cultures, right in the city that had for centuries been its symbolic capital. That heritage is part of the larger Ashkenazic heritage that is itself often undercredited and understudied internationally, particularly among modern Jews themselves, for whom the twin pillars of modern Israel and of modern forms of religion occasionally leave no room for the civilization of their own forebears. That it was largely annihilated in its homelands during the Holocaust makes such a task more daunting still.
Posted in Arts, Dovid Katz, Leyzer Ran Section, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Museums, News & Views, Opinion, Vilnius
Tagged Dovid Katz, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Holocaust in Lithuania, Jenny Biber, Jewish museum (Vilnius), Joseph Levinson, LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), Leyzer Ran, Litvak Culture Museum, Litvak Identity Museum, Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews, Polin Museum (name), Rachel Kostanian, Rachel Margolis, Yiddish in Lithuania
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