With crucial help from Lithuania’s ambassador to Washington, a Maryland cemetery employee has managed to position himself as a key mediator between Jews and the Lithuanian government in a little more than one year. Harley Felstein launched his new organization, the Lithuanian Jewish Heritage Project, at a party hosted by Ambassador Zygimantas Pavilionis at the…
We Are Here: Memories of the Lithuanian Holocaust By Ellen Cassedy University of Nebraska Press, 288 pages, $19.95 This past May, the remains of the Nazi-quisling head of Lithuania?s wartime Provisional Government (PG), Juozas Brazaitis, were ceremoniously disinterred from Putnam, Conn., where he was buried in 1974, and reinterred a few days later in Kaunas,…
When Yosef Shalom Elyashiv, Israel’s most revered rabbi, died on July 18 at the age of 102, he left his community at a crossroads. Elyashiv, broadly accepted as the leader of the “Lithuanian” Haredi community — meaning all Ashkenazi Haredim who aren’t members of a Hasidic sect — took this important post from another consensus…
Wyman Brent may be about the most unlikely person you could find to establish a new Jewish library in the Baltic nation of Lithuania. Brent is neither a scholar nor an intellectual. He doesn’t speak Lithuanian and isn’t even Jewish. He is a wiry, soft-spoken, long-haired atheist from California; the type of man who signs…
Negotiations between Lithuania and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research may be close to re-establishing YIVO’s presence in Vilna 70 years after the Nazis looted and largely destroyed its holdings. But just where those negotiations stand appears unclear following an announcement in the group’s newsletter and a follow-up statement from YIVO’s executive director and CEO,…
Stung by accusations about Lithuania’s complicity in the Holocaust, the Baltic nation’s foreign minister announced a series of measures aimed at bolstering its Jewish heritage during a concert at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. The measures did little to allay the concerns of critics who had opposed YIVO’s decision to invite the minister to…
With only a day to go before the event, uncertainty surrounds the planned appearance of Lithuania’s foreign minister at a concert in New York City celebrating the music of the Vilna Ghetto. It is an appearance that has come to be seen as a flashpoint for a complex stew of issues roiling relations between Lithuania…
It was supposed to be an evening of celebration and remembrance of the Jews of the Vilna Ghetto. But by hosting the Lithuanian foreign minister as “guest of honor” at a concert of Yiddish songs, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has instead angered some Holocaust survivors and their advocates. Audronius Ažubalis, the foreign minister,…
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