Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the leader of the non-hasidic Lithuanian Ashkenazi community, was attacked at his home in Israel. Shteinman, 99, suffered a bruise on his chest but was unhurt otherwise during the attack in Bnei Brak early Wednesday morning, The Jerusalem Post reported. His attacker — a haredi Orthodox man in his 20s —…
The Lithuanian parliament passed a draft amendment aimed at preventing the outlawing of kosher slaughter. The amendment submitted by Vytautas Gapsys of the Labor party would benefit the “export of meat to Israel and Arab countries, which are new opportunities,” Gapsys told the news website obzor.lt on Tuesday. Fifty-one lawmakers in the 141-seat parliament voted…
The government of Lithuania asked Israeli President Shimon Peres to head the international advisory board for the restoration of the Vilnius Great Synagogue. “The [restoration] project is an important part of the effort to both preserve and restore Vilnius’ Jewish heritage, and I think that President Peres could bring valuable guidance and insight to our…
In the 1920s, when Esther Perkel was a young girl living in South Africa, she and her family traveled by tram and rickshaw to the Newtown Market in Johannesburg to buy bushels of fresh grapes grown in the vineyards around the Cape of Good Hope. Her family carted the grapes home shortly after Purim, where…
In 1988, Yehuda Evron received a memorable letter from Lech Walesa, the first post-communist president of Poland, on the eve of the country’s transition to democracy. “He wrote that within a few months we would get my wife’s property back,” recalled Evron, now 80. His wife was the only Holocaust survivor of a family that…
Lithuania’s outgoing chancellor agreed in principle to a lump sum transfer $47 million to the country’s Jewish community as compensation for lost Holocaust-era property. Chancellor Deividas Matulionis, chief of staff for Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius, agreed to the transfer at a meeting last week with Gunther Saathoff, director of the German government’s EVZ Foundation for…
On the shiny glass table lay jewelry, coins and metal utensils – similar to those in a catalog of antiques. The years have left their mark on the items, but they are still in good shape. Some collector would probably pay a nice amount for them. But these items are not for sale. It is…
The monochromatic ocean of Haredim at the funeral of Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv last month concealed a deeper undercurrent of dissent. Elyashiv, the acknowledged leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Lithuanian community, had roped together two competing factions among a group usually seen as monolithic. There are the conservatives, led by Shmuel Auerbach of Jerusalem, as well…
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