Following the publication in Lithuania of a groundbreaking book on local complicity during the Holocaust, a state museum on genocide said it would publish a list of 1,000 suspected perpetrators. Terese Birute Burauskaite, who heads the Vilnius-based Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, said her institution would “this year try to publish a book”…
Lithuania’s second-largest city named a park for Emmanuel Levinas, a late Jewish philosopher who was born there before moving to France. Levinas, whose writings greatly influenced Bernard-Henri Levy, another French Jewish thinker, was honored by the city council of Kaunas on Monday, the news site Jewish.ru reported. Born to a Jewish family in 1905, Levinas…
Lithuania’s largest Jewish museum opened a center dedicated to combating anti-Semitism and preserving Litvak Jewish identity domestically and abroad. The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum opened its Centre of Litvak Culture and Art last week, the Baltic News Service reported. Funded by the Lithuanian state and set up based on the experience of Polish experts…
The body of a Lithuanian Jewish woman who died in Germany 78 years ago was exhumed for reburial next to her husband in Chicago. Wednesday’s exhumation of the woman, whose family asked not to be named by the media, was a rare exception to Jewish religious laws that forbid disturbing graves under all but very…
Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Simasius unveiled the sign of the first street in Lithuania named for a non-Jew who risked her life to save Jews from the Holocaust. The Sept. 22 ceremony was at Simaites Street, where a heavily Jewish crowd of several dozen people convened to honor Ona Šimaitė, a Vilnius University librarian whose actions…
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his blessing to controversial construction planned atop a former Jewish cemetery in Lithuania, that country’s leader said. Lithuanian Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius spoke of Netanyahu’s consent for the planned renovation at the Concert and Sports Palace in central Vilnius in an interview Wednesday with the Baltic News Service. “He…
It’s one of the most intriguing sites in all of Vilnius: a massive Soviet-style sports complex built in 1971 that since its closure in 2004 has become a run-down haven for vagrants. Now the Lithuanian government has some grand plans to renovate the rotting behemoth and turn it into a gleaming $25 million conference center….
A radar survey has found that significant pieces of Lithuania’s largest synagogue complex, which was damaged by the Nazis and destroyed by the Soviets, still remain but are buried underground. The ground penetrating radar survey conducted in June in Vilnius (previously called Vilna) by a joint team of academics from Israel and the United States…
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