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Vilnius is celebrating its 700th anniversary. Lithuanian Jews are commemorating a darker one.
(JTA) — Legend has it that in the early 14th century, the grand duke of Lithuania set out on a hunting trip. One night, he dreamt of an enormous iron wolf, which a priest would later tell him was a sign that he should establish a city on the site where he had slept.
Whether or not the origin story is true, it’s uncontested that the present-day Lithuanian capital Vilnius was first referred to by its former name, Vilna, in documents and letters in 1323 — making this year, in the government’s eyes, the city’s 700th anniversary.
The city is marking the anniversary year throughout 2023 with various festivals, visual art exhibitions, lectures and more. The organizers of Vilnius 700 stress that they are including Jewish people and themes in the celebrations through a range of programming.
That’s because for a portion of the city’s existence, starting in the early 19th century, Vilnius was also one of the most important Jewish centers in the world, known as the Jerusalem of the North. Roughly half of the city was Jewish, and it was a Jewish cultural powerhouse, a deep well of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In 1910, the city had over 100 synagogues, along with Jewish schools, publications, and charitable and political organizations.
“The Jewish community is an integral part of Vilnius’ past and present, playing an important role in the city’s day-to-day life,” Tomas Gulbinas, Vilnius’ deputy mayor, wrote in an email.
Yet this weekend also marks a darker anniversary: 80 years since the final liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto that saw almost all of its over 50,000 Jews die at the hands of the Nazis.
On Saturday, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte joined others in a march from the city’s former Jewish ghetto to Paneriai, the forest site formerly known as Ponary where the Nazis and their local collaborators murdered 70,000 Jews, mostly Lithuanian, over three years during the Holocaust.
The twin anniversaries have brought into stark relief tensions over historical memory in Lithuania, where, as in neighboring Poland and Latvia, officials have downplayed the role of local collaborators in carrying out the Nazis’ murderous plans. Memorials to Lithuanians who fought with the Nazis against the Soviet Union are plentiful in the city, making that history loom both literally and figuratively over the 700th birthday party.
Soldiers hold the Vilnius flag during an anniversary event, Jan. 25, 2023. (Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
“There is an unresolvable tension between desire to celebrate and this history that is not much to celebrate,” said Laimonis Breidis, a Vilnius native whose book “Vilnius: City of Strangers” explores the city’s history through the insights of travelers. The biggest challenge, he said, is that “everything told about the city is compartmentalized.”
Almost all of the few thousand Jews living in Vilnius today have familial ties to people who died during the Holocaust, said Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Community. She said in an interview earlier this year that the community was more determined to commemorate the ghetto anniversary than the city one.
“I promise you, we, the Lithuanian Jewish community, will not forget this date,” she said.
How Lithuania’s Holocaust history is remembered became an issue of high drama in 2019, after a Chicago schoolteacher named Sylvia Foti published a book recounting how her grandfather — Jonas Noreika, a general and formerly a national hero — had agreed with the Nazis about the extermination of Jews.
The book caused an uproar. Lithuania’s parliament then voted to remove the head of a national genocide research center, Adas Jakubauskas, after he insisted Noreika had tried to save Jews; 17 historians wrote to the center complaining that Jakubauskas was compromising the quality of their research. For his part, Jakubauskas charged that he was being pressured by Israel and Russia to indict Lithuanian participants without evidence.
Yet the country continues to memorialize the Holocaust without calling attention to the role that Lithuanians played in carrying it out. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, said this week in a special session of the Lithuanian Parliament that the country “must consistently acknowledge that many of the Lithuanian Jews massacred in the Holocaust died at the hands of their Lithuanian co-nationals and that Lithuanians also took part in the extermination of Jews in neighboring countries.”
Members of an international team of archaeologists work to unearth the bimah, the central prayer platform, at the archaeological site of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, July 25, 2018. (Petras Malukas/AFP via Getty Images)
Such an acknowledgement is not a centerpiece of the Vilnius 700 programming, in part because its emphasis on celebration is focusing attention to happier moments in local Jewish history.
Gulbinas listed the Jewish-themed projects the city has undertaken in conjunction with its 700th anniversary: city tours, put on by Undiscovered Vilnius, that highlight the city’s Jewish history; the city’s involvement in the reconstruction of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius, which was mostly destroyed by the Nazis; the renovation of the grave of the Vilna Gaon, a hugely influential 18th-century rabbi, and the upkeep of Jewish cemeteries; and a graffiti art project, “Walls That Remember,” in which artists have painted images harkening back to the era when the city’s Jewish community was thriving.
“Simultaneously, Vilnius honors the present Jewish customs and traditions, for example, by celebrating Hanukkah together with the local Jewish community every year,” Gulbinas wrote.
A pavilion at the National Museum of Lithuania that is open until Oct. 15 recreates Vilnius as it stood 200 years ago — at the dawn of the city’s Jewish heyday.
Meanwhile, the Jewish community has held events tied to the ghetto anniversary outside of the Vilnius 700 umbrella. Earlier this month, in the courtyard of the former Jewish Council headquarters in the Jewish Ghetto, Šimonytė attended an exhibition and concert on the liquidation anniversary.
On Thursday, the city of Vilnius introduced a commemorative route — ”Panerių kelias,” or road of Paneriai, named for the site of a massacre of 100,000 people, many of whom were Jewish, during World War II — along which processions were organized on that same day and on the 24th. An additional exhibition, “Healing Soul Wounds,” which, per an official from the city, “reveals the traumatic experiences and dilemmas of young girls, teenagers and women in order to survive the brutal conditions of World War II and the Holocaust,” opened last week.
In a few cases, the histories — that of Vilnius and that of the Vilna Ghetto — were commemorated together in official Vilnius 700 events. At a concert outside the former Vilna Ghetto Jewish Council in July, Michael Gordon, the American composer and founder of the acclaimed Bang on a Can music collective, whose father grew up outside of Vilnius, debuted an original composition for nine trombones.
The courtyard was Gordon’s idea. The organizers of the music component of Vilnius 700 reached out to him, he said, and sent a list of sites where he could debut an original composition. In his reply, he said, he pointed out that “there’s a big and long and illustrious history of Jewish culture, both secular and sacred, in Vilnius, and none of these sites are Jewish sites. Can we consider a Jewish site? And they said yeah, great.”
Gordon chose the courtyard in part because of its connection to Jewish arts: on one side of the courtyard stood a Yiddish theater; on another, a Yiddish conservatory. And the city also has a personal connection to Gordon, whose father, a Litvak, lived in Vilnius in the 1930s. He called his composition “Resonance.”
Roughly 300 people came to the concert, said Gordon, who spoke a little about the event about “the presence of Jewish culture in Lithuanian history.”
“I was happy about that,” he said. “I kind of felt it was my responsibility…I felt, wow, I have this opportunity to go here and, in a certain sense, honor the Jewish history in this place, in this very important center of Jewish learning and Jewish arts and culture.”
That kind of attention was all too rare in the past, according to Laima Lauckaite, the curator of a collaborative exhibition between the Lithuanian Art Centre TARTLE and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City that is open now. Lauckaite did not grow up fully aware of her city’s Jewish history while a schoolgirl during the Soviet years near where the Great Synagogue of Vilna once stood. Soviet authorities had razed the synagogue’s ruins and erected a school; underground remains were not identified until 2015.
Jonathan Brent, executive director and CEO of YIVO, and Gitanas Nausėda, president of Lithuania, examine holdings in the Strashun Rare Books Room at YIVO’s New York headquarters, Sept. 18, 2023. The room is named for a Jewish scholar in Vilna (now Vilnius) who collected nearly 7,000 volumes of Yiddish and other books before his death in 1885. (YIVO/ Melanie Einzig)
“I never knew about it, that there was the Great Synagogue,” she said. “I got to know about it only 30 years after.”
The collaborative exhibit in New York City displays an exhibition of Vilnius guidebooks that reflect the city’s 19th and 20th century history and “its multi-ethnic, multicultural landscape.” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda visited YIVO last week to pay tribute to the Jews who rescued rare books and documents from the Vilna Ghetto.
Dovid Katz, former professor of Yiddish Studies at Vilnius University, has spent the past 15 years editing Defending History, a site dedicated to fighting Holocaust distortion. He has also participated in numerous events to mark Vilnius 700.
“While it is very nice that authorities have included Jewish-themed programs in the year’s commemorations dedicated to the city’s history, it is shameful that they have not permanently taken down any of the state-sponsored public-space shrines to Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators,” Katz said.
He stressed that the narratives downplaying Lithuanian culpability in the Holocaust emanated from a relative few influential nationalists, not the mass of Lithuanians celebrating Vilnius.
“I love living here. The people of today’s Lithuania are terrific,” he said. “The problem is with a small ultra-powerful, state-funded ‘history fixing unit’ that dominates on these issues in politics, museums, media, arts and academia.”
Katz suggested, as well, that the Jewish community should have focused on a different anniversary — and that its attention to the September dates related to the ghetto’s liquidation reified the country’s Holocaust memory problems.
“Of the thousands of Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors we interviewed over more than three decades, all felt that the appropriate day for commemoration of the Lithuanian Holocaust is June 23rd,” he said. On that day in 1941, “600 years of peace was broken by the outbreak of barbarity, humiliation, slaughter in hundreds of towns across the land. By the end of 1941, all the close to 250 or so storied shtétlakh (shtetls) were destroyed, as were the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jews.”
Focusing only on the liquidation of the ghetto, he said, “reflects a state attempt to deflect from the primary narrative via one that focuses only on the Germans (the ghetto history) and not on the thousands of local participants all across the land.”
Vilnius 700 events are scheduled through the end of the year, ensuring that the tensions over history and memory in the city continue to simmer.
But not all see the need to bring up the city and Holocaust anniversaries in the same conversation. David Roskies, chair emeritus in Yiddish literature at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote in an email: “I don’t see any intersection between the two anniversaries. It’s pure happenstance. Who can say with any precision when Vilnius was established?”
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The post Vilnius is celebrating its 700th anniversary. Lithuanian Jews are commemorating a darker one. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Black Muslim Leaders Call on Supporters Not to Vote for Kamala Harris Due to Gaza, Israel Policy
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, US, Aug. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Erica Dischino
Black Muslim leaders across the United States are calling on their supporters to withhold their vote from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, accusing the incumbent US vice president of facilitating a so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
In a letter published by the Middle East Eye on Monday, 50 black Muslim leaders called on members of their community to embrace the legacy of “black liberation” by only voting for candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms blockade on Israel. The coalition of Muslim leaders urged their followers to reject the notion that Harris would be better on domestic issues and that a Donald Trump presidency would pose greater danger to Palestinians.
“As black Muslims, we also know that the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza is a war on Islam,” the letter read. “The Israeli government and its unhinged army of cowardly criminals have filmed themselves destroying mosques, burning Qurans, and slandering our sacred religious figures. The supremacist Israeli government has also destroyed churches and attacked the Palestinian Christian community.”
The black Muslim leaders condemned the Biden administration for supporting Israel’s defensive military operations against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza. The coalition also slammed Harris for not taking a more adversarial position against the Jewish state since she replaced US President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket.
“All of this has occurred under the watch of the Biden-Harris administration, which has provided steadfast military, financial, diplomatic, and rhetorical support for the Israeli government’s war crimes for four years, including at least $18 billion since the start of the genocide,” the group wrote.
The Muslim leaders lambasted Harris over her repeated refusals to implement an arms embargo against Israel. In recent months, anti-Israel activists have attempted to pressure Harris into agreeing to block weapons transfers to the Jewish state. In August, the her campaign released a statement denying any support for such a move and affirming Harris’s commitment to ensuring “Israel is able to defend itself.”
“Vice President Harris has explicitly opposed an arms embargo on the Israeli government even though US law requires it. She has refused to lay out any plan whatsoever to force [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal in Gaza that ends the genocide,” the letter stated. “She has validated the Israeli government’s efforts to spark a regional war with Iran, leading to instability in the region and the world at large. Just this week, she said that she would not have done anything differently than President Biden over the past four years.”
The coalition attempted to draw a parallel between the experience of black Americans and Palestinians, arguing that the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank are subject to brutal racial discrimination.
“As Muslims obliged to uphold justice and as black Americans whose ancestors experienced the worst of crimes, genocide must be our red line,” the letter added.
“There’s a false narrative that is being pushed that the majority of Muslims who are black are Kamala Harris supporters,” Imam Dawud Walid, a Muslim leader from Michigan, told the Middle East Eye. “There’s this narrative that is trying to divide the community to say that the majority of Muslims who aren’t black are supporting third party, but the majority of Muslims who are black are somehow divided from the rest of the community, and that’s not true.”
In the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election cycle, the Harris campaign has scrambled to coalesce support among Muslim voters. Despite aggressive overtures toward the Muslim American community, recent polls indicate that the vice president could experience a collapse of support among the demographic. Some polling data has shown Green Party nominee Jill Stein leading Harris among Muslim voters in the critical swing state of Michigan, while other polls show Harris and Trump tied with Muslim voters across battleground states.
Moreover, many Arab American leaders have continued to urge their community to withhold their votes from Harris, arguing that the Democratic party deserves “punishment” for supporting Israel. Groups such as “Abandon Harris” have encouraged Arab American voters to only throw their support behind anti-Israel candidates. Other groups such as the “Uncommitted Movement” have also pushed voters, especially in the Arab and Muslim communities, to refuse to cast a ballot in favor of Harris.
The post Black Muslim Leaders Call on Supporters Not to Vote for Kamala Harris Due to Gaza, Israel Policy first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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On Simchat Torah, We Mourn — But Also Hope
In his 2016 book Essays on Ethics, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “A people that can know insecurity and still feel joy is one that can never be defeated, for its spirit can never be broken nor its hope destroyed.”
This year, as Simchat Torah draws near, we are painfully reminded that joy and suffering often coexist. While it is a staple of the human condition for Jews, this paradox echoes relentlessly throughout our history.
In the Diaspora, we will feel this contrast differently. Shmini Atzeret — a day marked by solemnity with Yizkor and the prayer for rain — falls on the anniversary of October 7th. Only the second evening transitions into the joy of Simchat Torah.
In Israel, however, the two days merge into one, with the solemnity of Shmini Atzeret intertwined with the joy of Simchat Torah. This year, embracing the usual high spirits will be incredibly challenging for Israelis. The weight of national grief hangs heavy; indeed, no Simchat Torah will ever be the same again.
When we danced with the Torahs last year, despite knowing that a terrible attack was unfolding, the full extent of the horror was not yet clear. It was only after Simchat Torah ended that the devastating truth began to emerge: 1,200 people tortured, murdered, and mutilated; families torn apart; and hostages dragged into Gaza.
In the months since, every painful detail has come to light, making it nearly impossible to embrace the unrestrained joy that typically defines Simchat Torah. How can we celebrate when every smile is shadowed by memory, and every song tinged with sorrow?
And yet, my late mother’s story comes to mind — her first Simchat Torah after the Holocaust, celebrated in the city of her birth: Rotterdam, Holland. It offers a profound lesson for us today.
My mother was born in 1941, a year after my grandparents married during the Nazi occupation. The Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, and began deporting Jews to concentration camps in 1942.
Fearing for their lives, my grandparents went into hiding, spending more than two years in a cramped space behind a closet in the home of a gentile friend. My grandfather, active in the Dutch resistance, emerged only at night to carry out covert missions against the Nazis — knowing the risks but refusing to submit to despair.
Meanwhile, my mother was taken in by a Christian couple who raised her as their own, shielding her from the terrors outside. After the war, they returned her to her parents.
When the Nazis were defeated by the Allies in May 1945, Jewish life in Rotterdam began to re-emerge, although only a fraction of the community remained — 75% of Dutch Jewry, more than 100,000 people, had perished in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other camps.
That fall, the synagogue reopened, and Simchat Torah was celebrated once more. The Torah scrolls my grandfather had hidden with gentile friends were retrieved. Miraculously, Rabbi Levie “Lou” Vorst, who had survived Bergen-Belsen and the infamous “Lost Train,” stood at the helm of the diminished community.
But the celebration was bittersweet. Almost everyone in the synagogue had lost parents, siblings, spouses, or children. My grandparents had lost their parents, siblings, and their second child, my uncle Yitzchak, who had died of malnutrition during the war.
And yet, they danced. Survivors — many without homes or families — clung to the Torah scrolls as if their lives depended on it. My mother, only four years old, stood quietly in the synagogue, receiving candy from weeping survivors. With each piece placed in her open mouth, the message was clear: the future must be sweet, even when the past has been unbearably bitter.
When she was born in 1941, during the Nazi occupation, her parents named my mother Miriam Chana, but they also added a third name: Tikva — hope. Naming her Tikva was a bold act of defiance and a statement of faith that they would live to see better days.
Many Dutch Jews from Rotterdam later made their way to Israel, realizing the ultimate Tikva—the dream of building a new life in the Jewish homeland.
Today, some of my mother’s friends from Rotterdam reside at Beth Juliana, a residential retirement complex in Herzliya for Dutch immigrants. But even there, the echoes of violence persist. Just two weeks ago, during Yom Kippur, a Hezbollah drone from Lebanon struck the building.
Though no one was injured, the drone destroyed an apartment filled with precious heirlooms and decades of memories. Miraculously, the resident had sought shelter moments before the impact — a stark reminder that even now, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, the shadow of antisemitic hatred still looms over Israel.
As we mark the first anniversary of October 7th, I find myself returning to the image of those weeping survivors dancing with the Torahs in Rotterdam. If they could dance, surely we can too.
But just like them, our dancing this year will be different. Maybe it will be slower, or perhaps more enthusiastic — but whatever it is, it will be infused with memory, sorrow, and, most importantly, defiance. Our celebrations will not deny the pain but embrace it, just as my mother’s community did all those years ago.
The joy of Simchat Torah is not naïve happiness; it is the joy that comes from standing together, united in faith, knowing that despite everything, we are still here. Just as my grandparents emerged from hiding to rebuild, and just as the Torahs were salvaged from the ruins of Rotterdam, we too will lift the Torahs this Simchat Torah and say to our enemies: We are still here.
And we will hope. For without hope, there is no future. My grandparents named their daughter Tikva, believing in a day when evil would be defeated. We, too, must carry the torch of hope into the future. We will dance, and we will cry.
But above all, we will hope. Because even after the darkest of nights, the sun will rise again. And when it does, we will be ready to rebuild — one dance step at a time.
The post On Simchat Torah, We Mourn — But Also Hope first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Germany’s Eurovision Contestant Calls Out ‘So Much Hate’ Against Israeli Singer Eden Golan During Competition
The representative of Germany Isaak at the Eurovision Song Cotest entering the main stage on May 11, 2024 in Malmo, Sweden. Photo: Sanjin Strukic/PIXSELL/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Germany’s representative in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest shared his thoughts in a recent interview about the hatred and booing that Israeli singer Eden Golan received while competing on behalf of Israel in the international competition earlier this year.
“I can definitely understand why everyone was booing, but I think the Eurovision Song Contest says we are all ‘united by music’ and I didn’t see no unity,” German singer Isaak, 29, said in an interview with Irish blogger allthingsadam.ie, referring to the official slogan of the Eurovision competition. He further said of Golan: “It’s a young musician performing quite well and everyone f—ked her off. There was so much hate in this room, and hate shouldn’t be a place in the Eurovision Song Contest.”
Isaak finished in 12th place in the Eurovision finals this year in Malmo, Sweden, while Golan finished in fifth. The Israeli singer competed with a song called “Hurricane,” a reworded version of her original song “October Rain,” which was disqualified for being too political since it referenced the Hamas massacre in Israel that took place on Oct. 7, 2023.
Golan made it to the top five of the Eurovision contest despite being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Golan also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the contest.
Isaak told Irish blogger allthingsadam.ie that he believes Golan was bullied during the competition. He then criticized people for wrongfully targeting Golan with hatred when they have issues with the state of Israel but not the singer herself. The German singer then said the animosity was misguided and it was wrong for Golan to face such abuse just for her affiliation with Israel. He said a personal experience like what Golan faced can deeply scar a musician
“Do you know how young she is?” Isaak asked about the 21-year-old Israeli singer. “This is your life goal and you wanna be part of Eurovision Song Contest and you’re going on that stage … just image Germany f—ks up in some point. And I’m German and I wanna be part of the Eurovision. And I’m just a random musician, I just wanna show them my music. I’m not the f—k president. I’m just a random musician, I just wanna make a small kid’s dream come true. And then I go on that stage and no matter how good I am, no matter how f—k amazing I can sing, the people just see my country and they just boo me out. I think that would be the most terrible thing that could maybe ever happen to me. I think that can definitely leave scars.”
Isaak also talked in the interview about his experience backstage with the other singers at the Eurovision competition. “You didn’t really have that feeling [that] we are all ‘united by music.’ It was a little bit sad behind the stage, that’s what I think. There could have been more love, more connectivity, and more passion,” he said.
The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Basel, Switzerland, in May. Bakel Walden, chairman of the Eurovision Song Contest Reference Group, discussed in a recent interview with Swiss media some changes to next year’s competition. He said the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the competition, “will pay more attention” to the well-being of artists in the future and stated that it is vital for the competition to maintain political neutrality. He insisted that “antisemitism has no place at the ESC.”
“The ESC stands for freedom of expression. The artists can comment on anything and also demonstrate in front of the hall. But on stage you need certain rules,” he said. “We want an ESC in which everyone puts their heart and soul into it. We cannot solve the many wars and conflicts in the world during the ESC. But it is a strong statement if we treat each other fairly, peacefully, and respectfully.”‘
Walden added that for next year’s competition the EBU will also have a crisis management team and “retreat rooms” for artists to relax where there will be no filming allowed.
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