(JTA) — In an unusual move, a Lithuanian court voided the local Jewish community’s April internal elections, declaring that communal bosses have no legal authority to continue their rule. The Dec. 21 ruling by Vilnius District Court, which is the first of its kind in years in Europe, is the latest development in the fight…
Rabbi Aharon Leib Shteinman, the leader of the non-Hasidic Lithuanian haredi-Orthodox community, has died at the age of 104. Shteinman died on Tuesday morning of cardiac arrest after being in and out of the hospital for much of the last year. Hundreds of thousands of mourners attended Shteinman’s funeral, which began in front of his…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Thanks to the hard work of his literary admirers, an English translation of Grigory Kanovich’s autobiographical novel “Shtetl Love Song” has finally appeared. The novel was released by a boutique British publishing house, Noir Press, that specializes in modern Lithuanian literature. It’s remarkable that one of the…
Some 75 years ago, a group of Jews under German occupation in Vilna was assigned to assist Nazi authorities in curating books and other cultural items destined for shipment to Germany. There, the selection of Judaica materials was to be conserved as a collection of artifacts from an extinct people. Some items were indeed shipped…
(JTA) — One of the oldest publishing houses in independent Lithuania withdrew the books of a best-selling author over her criticism of a nationalist who is accused of complicity in Holocaust-era crimes. The recall of Rūta Vanagaitė’s books came one day after she revealed that she is in a relationship with Efraim Zuroff, an Israeli…
(JTA) — Lithuanian soldiers pitched tents on the grounds of a former concentration camp for Jews in Kaunas, where they are training to fight Russian troops. A battalion of special forces troops camped Monday at Kaunas’ Seventh Fort, the first of dozens of concentration camps set up by Nazi Germany after its 1941 eastward invasion,…
(JTA) — The president of Lithuania dismissed concerns raised by 12 U.S. Congress members over the planned construction of a conference center atop what used to be a Jewish cemetery in Vilnius. Responding to a letter sent last month by the lawmakers about the Piramont cemetery, Dalia Grybauskaitė on Monday told the BNS news agency…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The extreme poverty that Jews once experienced in the cities and towns of Eastern Europe has been well documented, but what exactly was their diet like? According to the memoirs of Hirsh Abramovich, a Yiddish writer in pre-war Vilna, the Jews in Lithuania were probably the poorest…
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