Monthly Archives: April 2023

Please Email Lithuania’s Prime Minister to Do Away with the Soviet Building Desecrating Vilnius’s Oldest Jewish Cemetery

Posted on 26 April 2023 by Defending History

OPINION  | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH ISSUES  |  CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES  |  OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT | OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER

◊

by Andrius Kulikauskas

◊

In 2020, Lithuania’s Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė struck funding and thereby ended plans to convert the Vilnius Sports and Concert Palace into a congress center. The Soviets had desecrated the heart of Vilnius’s oldest Jewish cemetery at Piramónt (Šnipiškės) by constructing and utilizing this building there. 53,000 people signed Ruta Bloshtein’s petition asking Lithuania’s leaders not to desecrate it further. Many people from around the world wrote letters which convinced the Prime Minister to strike funding.

Continue reading

Posted in 2023-2024 'Working Group' on the Future of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, Andrius Kulikauskas, Antisemitism & Bias, Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Christian-Jewish Issues, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Please Email Lithuania’s Prime Minister to Do Away with the Soviet Building Desecrating Vilnius’s Oldest Jewish Cemetery

But Who Will Now Tend to the Fate of the Vilnius Sports Palace?

Posted on 24 April 2023 by Defending History

 

OPINION  | HUMAN RIGHTS | CHRISTIAN-JEWISH ISSUES  |  CEMETERIES & MASS GRAVES  |  OLD VILNA JEWISH CEMETERY AT PIRAMÓNT  |  OPPOSITION TO CONVENTION CENTER

◊

by Andrius Kulikauskas

◊

What is there now and what could be restored: Clockwise from top left: The Soviet eyesore today; three details from paintings by Alfred Holler (1888–1954) at the current exhibit ‘Outsiders Look at Vilnius’ at the National Art Gallery in Vilnius. Photos: Andrius Kulikauskas.

◊

Continue reading

Posted in 2023-2024 'Working Group' on the Future of the Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery, Andrius Kulikauskas, Antisemitism & Bias, Bold Citizens Speak Out, Cemeteries and Mass Graves, Christian-Jewish Issues, Human Rights, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Old Vilna Jewish Cemetery at Piramónt (in Šnipiškės / Shnípishok), Opinion, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on But Who Will Now Tend to the Fate of the Vilnius Sports Palace?

Family of Master Vilna Yiddishist Zalmen Reyzen Welcomed to Vilnius

Posted on 23 April 2023 by Defending History

YIDDISH AFFAIRS | LITVAK AFFAIRS | EVENTS | MEMOIRS

◊

The following is a revised text of Dovid Katz’s post that appeared on his Facebook page today.

What a thrill to be able to welcome to my place in Vilna classics professor Ruth Reizin (Webb), granddaughter-in-law of the master Yiddishist scholar Zalmen Reyzen (1887-c.1941), and her daughter Rachel Reizin, the only direct descendant of Zalmen Reyzen. Alas, British journalist Paul Reizin (Ruth’s husband, Rachel’s dad), author of Happiness for Humans (2018) and Ask Me Anything (2020) passed away way before his time in 2021.
*
Growing up in a Yiddishist home in New York, of course Zalmen Reyzen, author of the classic four-volume encyclopedia of Yiddish literature and so much more, was a beloved name. My father Menke Katz had been a close friend of Zalmen’s brother, the great Yiddish author Avrom Reyzen, in New York over many decades.

Continue reading

Posted in Dovid Katz, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Yiddish Affairs | Comments Off on Family of Master Vilna Yiddishist Zalmen Reyzen Welcomed to Vilnius

Lithuanian Holocaust Remembered in Wollongong, Australia

Posted on 19 April 2023 by Defending History

EVENTS  |  LITHUANIA  |  HISTORY  |  MUSEUMS

◊

by Michael Samaras

◊

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA—More than 100 people attended the Wollongong Art Gallery to hear Professor Konrad Kwiet, resident historian at the Sydney Jewish Museum, deliver a public lecture on the Holocaust in Lithuania and the wartime role of Bronius ‘Bob’ Sredersas.

Wollongong Art Gallery audience listens to Professor Konrad Kwiet on the Lithuanian Holocaust. Photo: Michael Samaras.

Continue reading

Posted in Events, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, Michael Samaras, Museums, News & Views, Politics of Memory | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Lithuanian Holocaust Remembered in Wollongong, Australia

Garliava, Lithuania: On the Town’s Holocaust Mass Grave and its Old Jewish Cemetery

Posted on 16 April 2023 by Defending History

CEMETERIES AND MASS GRAVES  |  POLITICS OF MEMORY  |  LITVAK AFFAIRS

◊

by Julius Norwilla

◊

The Holocaust Mass Grave Site

The best way to reach the mass killing site in Garliava (Yiddish Gúdleve, Polish Godlewo), is to take a train from the central train station in Kaunas. It is just one stop. The railway runs south, through a picturesque valley of the languid river Jiesia. Garliava is a township historically in the Suwałki region. It is named after an ancient landlord and noble family Godlewski. It seems that twentieth century ethnic purity zealots renamed the township into Garliava to sever any obvious link to the personage commemorated by the town’s naming, thereby reducing the historical chronicle of the entire region to a narrow and assertively ethnonationalist narrative

When you step out of the old railway station in Garliava, the town itself is still one kilometer away. The train line and the station were built in 1862, and one can wonder, what  the point was, with the then cutting-edge train technology of the time, to make a long detour around the town and build the station somewhere in the middle of the fields, or as one might put it, right in the middle of nowhere?

Continue reading

Posted in Cemeteries and Mass Graves, History, Julius Norwilla, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Garliava, Lithuania: On the Town’s Holocaust Mass Grave and its Old Jewish Cemetery

For Vilnius’s 700 Year Celebrations, Antisemitic ‘Artists’ Launch Vicious New Holocaust-‘Justifying’ Souvenir

Posted on 9 April 2023 by Defending History

ANTISEMITISM  |  700 YEARS OF VILNIUS CELEBRATIONS  |  POLITICS OF MEMORY  |  DOUBLE GENOCIDE

◊

VILNIUS—This commemorative envelope was purchased this morning, on Easter Sunday, on Pilies gatve, Vilnius’s historic Castle Street that has become the city’s center for souvenir stalls and shops. It is an older antisemitic envelope design seen many times before, picturing the Jews of Kaunas allegedly welcoming the Soviet army into town during World War II (i.e. blaming the Jews for the 1940 Soviet occupation as excuse for the genocide — the Lithuanian Holocaust — that followed a year later, wiping out some 96.4% of Lithuanian Jewry, with thousands murdered in  late June 1941 before the Germans even took over).

 

The caption “explains”  (in Lithuanian) that “on June 15, 1940, numerous crowds of Kaunas Jews welcome the occupying Red Army (archive photo)”. No mention of the vastly larger numbers of Lithuanians, Poles and Russians who turned out. No mention that this canard continues to be used to “explain” the Lithuanian Holocaust. No mention of the failure of the nation’s army to defend the country or the president’s fleeing the country. But plenty of room to link (in English) the antisemitic canard to the current 700 year Vilnius anniversary festivities. Are Western tourists presumed to be idiots?

Continue reading

Posted in Antisemitism & Bias, Double Genocide, Lithuania, Litvak Affairs, News & Views, Vilnius | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on For Vilnius’s 700 Year Celebrations, Antisemitic ‘Artists’ Launch Vicious New Holocaust-‘Justifying’ Souvenir

Blaming Inna Hecker Grade for Bashevis Singer’s Greater Success in English

Posted on 5 April 2023 by Defending History

OPINION  |  YIDDISH AFFAIRS  |  LITVAK AFFAIRS  |  MEDIA WATCH

◊

NOTE: As someone fortunate enough to have had some NYT letters published over the decades, I fully anticipated the non-publication of this one (9 March), and hope none will take amiss my publication of it here in the interests of putting out there a (not yet offered?) second opinion on a woman against whom I feel there has been some unwarranted invective. —DK

◊

Re “In the Papers of Yiddish Novelist Chaim Grade, Clues to His Lesser Fame” by Joseph Berger (March 6)

To the Editor:

The magnificent Yiddish author Chaim Grade well equals Isaac Bashevis Singer in talent and output, but it is wrong to blame his wife (or their marriage) for the failure of his work to attain equal status in English translation.

Grade’s profound preservation of the intricacies of pre-Holocaust East European Jewish civilization (with vast religious minutiae delightful to folks in the tribe) is just not in the genre of Singer’s stark, universalist, compelling plots that are moreover enriched by untrammelled sexuality and bespoke kabbalah.

Continue reading

Posted in Arts, Litvak Affairs, Media Watch, News & Views, Opinion, Yiddish Affairs | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Blaming Inna Hecker Grade for Bashevis Singer’s Greater Success in English