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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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Herzog Confirms Behind-the-Scenes Negotiations with Hamas – Deal ‘Possible’
Israeli President Isaac Herzog looks on during a meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, not pictured, in Washington, DC, on Oct. 25, 2022. Stefani Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – President Isaac Herzog revealed on Sunday that contacts are ongoing between Israel and Hamas for a ceasefire and hostage release deal.
In a conversation with Yael Alexander, the mother of the abductee Edan Alexander who has been held captive for 422 days by Hamas, Herzog said that “there are negotiations behind the scenes – and it is possible.”
“I reiterate the call – now, after the agreement in Lebanon, it’s time to make a deal and bring the captives home,” Herzog said.
His meeting comes after Hamas released a video over the weekend showing Edan Alexander, an American-Israeli who was captured on October 7, 2023, while serving in the IDF. The video showed him pleading for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President-Elect Donald Trump to secure a deal.
“There are negotiations with a bitter and cruel enemy whose entire purpose in the video was to demoralize us all,” he said. “On the contrary – I think this video gave us a lot of strength.”
“I had a sleepless night,” Yael Alexander said – “Edan, his voice. and the video which plays continuously. You can see from the video that Edan is going through hell, he is screaming and his eyes look sad, but this gave me a lot of strength – Edan strengthened us with his call to us. We released this video, so everyone can see – Edan is alive, and many other captives are alive and the time has come to do something and release them.”
Out of the 101 hostages held in Gaza, estimates range as to the number still living, with some going as low as two dozen.
The post Herzog Confirms Behind-the-Scenes Negotiations with Hamas – Deal ‘Possible’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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The Voice of Jacob
Chabad Rabbi Zvi Kogan. Photo: @Chabad/X.
JNS.org – The Jewish world is grieving the horrific murder of Rabbi Zvi Kogan in the United Arab Emirates. A gentle ambassador of Judaism, his young life was snuffed out by the perpetrators of evil. We grieve with his young widow, his parents and his family. May God grant them strength, solace and only simcha (“happiness”) in the future.
In this week’s Torah portion, Toldot, we read of the birth of twin sons to Isaac and Rebecca. These twins could not have been less identical. Genesis 25:27 tells us, “The boys grew; Esau became an expert hunter, a man of the field, while Jacob was a guileless man, dwelling in the tents (of Torah).”
Esau was a wild man, hunting animals as well as women. Jacob was a student of Torah. One was a gladiator, the other a sage. Esau would become the father of Rome, the destroyers of our temple, while Jacob went on to become one of the founding fathers of our faith, the patriarch who fathered the 12 tribes of Israel.
Who should we want our children to emulate: the wild warrior or the gentle scholar?
“The voice is the voice of Jacob, and the hands are the hands of Esau,” said Isaac when he was going to bestow the all-important blessings to his son and heir apparent. Jacob is forever represented by the soft voice of the Torah, of wisdom, reason and ethics. Esau, however, is not symbolized by the voice but by the violent hands that strike out and hurt others.
Jewish heroes have always been the peaceful giants of philosophy, wisdom, ethics and morals. Violent murderers are the antithesis of everything we stand for.
I feel that there is a danger today, when our heroes are our Israel Defense Forces soldiers, pilots and naval officers, as they surely should be. They are superheroes of body and soul. Every time a young man or woman puts on a Tzahal uniform, they put their lives on the line. They are prepared to give their lives to defend our homeland and our people. The most secular kibbutznik becomes a tzaddik, the holy of holies, when he makes that courageous commitment.
In fact, the Sheloh—Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz (1558-1628)—wrote that at the holiest moment of the year, on Yom Kippur, at the very climax of the Neilah service when we shout out Shema Yisrael (“Hear O Israel”), we should have in mind to give our life for God, Al Kiddush Hashem “to sanctify his name,” and it will be considered as if we actually did.
Those courageous chayalim make that pledge daily. And far too many have sacrificed their lives in the current war against terror. So it is entirely appropriate that they should be our superheroes. But the inherent danger here is that our children and the younger generation idealize war and military action, heroic though it may be. These wars of defense are a regrettable necessity in our neck of the woods. And today, sadly, Jews everywhere need to be able to defend themselves.
While we honor, cherish and admire our chayalim, they themselves would much rather be at their desktops, in the library or the yeshivah instead of on the front lines.
We dare not forget who we really are, the children of Jacob, B’nai Yisrael. Jacob is our eternal role model. Esau is the antithesis of everything we stand for.
Yes, believe it or not, Jews are pacifists. We are peace-loving people despite the scandalously libelous claims of genocide against us. Our enemies at the United Nations won’t acknowledge it, but it’s who we are.
Yes, we need the IDF, and we need it to be strong and fearless. But that is an unfortunate necessity, not an ideal.
Rabbi Zvi Kogan was a faithful scion of Jacob. His life was cut short by the hands of Esau. Perhaps the appropriate response to this tragedy would be to emulate his ways and enhance our own observance of this sacred ideal or to encourage another to embrace it.
May the voice of Jacob forever drown out and overpower the tumultuous, blood-stained hands of Esau. And may our reluctant warriors be able to go home and resume their gentle lives in peace and security.
The post The Voice of Jacob first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Unable to Destroy Israel Militarily, Its Enemies Resort to Lawfare
An exterior view of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, Netherlands, March 31, 2021. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
JNS.org – Jerusalem has decided to appeal the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) decision to issue warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Israel submitted an announcement to the ICC on Wednesday regarding its intention, along with a demand to delay the warrants’ implementation.
In its decision, the ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for acts including murder, persecution and starvation as weapons of war as part of a “widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza.”
Netanyahu has called the accusation a “modern Dreyfus trial.”
Once again, the Jews have been placed in the docket, this time as antisemites seek to punish Israel on trumped-up charges of “genocide” against the Palestinian people, he said.
Netanyahu met in Jerusalem on Wednesday with U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who updated him on the efforts he is advancing in Congress against the ICC and countries that cooperate with it.
Amb. Alan Baker, director of the Institute for Contemporary Affairs at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs and the head of the Global Law Forum, told JNS that practically, “assuming states agree to honor the arrest warrants, despite their being inherently invalid and ultra vires [running against] the ICC statute, they could theoretically try to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant if they enter their territory.”
In a statement published on Wednesday, the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office said Jerusalem’s notice of appeal “shows in detail to what degree the decision to issue the arrest warrants was baseless and without any factual or legal foundation whatsoever.”
Israel denies the authority of the ICC and the legitimacy of the warrants issued against the prime minister and the former defense minister, the statement continued.
Should the court reject the appeal, it will underscore to Israel’s friends in the United States and elsewhere the ICC’s bias against the Jewish state, it added.
The court lacks jurisdiction in the case for several reasons.
First, Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute that established the court, and second because Israel has its own independent, robust judiciary. Third, Palestine is not a state and does not meet the criteria for statehood under international law.
By calling for the arrest of Israel’s leaders, the ICC is violating the Rome Statute, which clearly states that complementarity is the crucial factor in such a decision.
Since Israel has a robust judicial system, it is unnecessary and unlawful for the ICC to involve itself in Israel’s internal matters, and by doing so the court breaches its foundational principles.
Furthermore, as a recent Wall Street Journal editorial noted, “The charge of deliberate starvation is absurd. Israel has facilitated the transfer of more than 57,000 aid trucks and 1.1 million tons of aid [into Gaza], even though Hamas’s rampant theft means Israel is provisioning its battlefield enemy, something the law can’t require.”
The warrant also, absurdly, calls for the arrest of Hamas leader Ibrahim al-Masri, otherwise known as Mohammed Deif, whom Israel and Hamas both say was killed in an Israeli airstrike in July.
By naming him together with Israel’s leaders and thereby feigning even-handedness, the ICC has only demonstrated morally repugnant equivalence.
The Wall Street Journal also highlighted the case of Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. After she declared that the war against Hamas does not meet the qualifications for genocide, the United Nations announced that her contract will not be renewed, though it has denied the two things are linked.
According to Nderitu, the term “genocide” encapsulates the Holocaust, the Hutus’ mass murder of Tutsis in Rwanda, the Serbian attacks on Bosnian Muslims and the killings being carried out in Sudan.
“As a legal matter, establishing a pattern of violence as a genocide requires demonstrating intent. Israel’s campaign of self-defense doesn’t qualify,” the Journal‘s editorial noted.
The court’s baseless case against Israel’s leaders, coupled with Nderitu’s dismissal, demonstrates that the ICC is abusing the law for political means.
Several world leaders, including President Joe Biden, have harshly criticized the ICC decision.
Biden stated on Thursday evening that warrants were “outrageous.”
Rep. Mike Waltz, tapped by President-elect Donald Trump as National Security Advisor, tweeted, “The ICC has no credibility and these allegations have been refuted by the U.S. government. Israel has lawfully defended its people & borders from genocidal terrorists. You can expect a strong response to the antisemitic bias of the ICC & UN come January.”
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has invited Netanyahu to visit his country, assuring him he faces no risk of arrest.
While ambiguous at first, France has declared it will not enforce the warrants as Israel is not a signatory to the ICC.
Some analysts have questioned whether France’s decision was linked to the ceasefire announced Wednesday between Hezbollah and Israel.
Famed lawyer Alan Dershowitz has announced he is assembling a “dream team” to defend Israel in The Hague.
This support is crucial because so much of the international community has fallen for the widespread anti-Israel propaganda.
Hala Rharrit, a former U.S. State Department diplomat who has made her anti-Israel opinions well known, said in an Al-Jazeera interview that most of the world is feeling that “finally, finally, there is a sense that the international community is taking action, far little too late.”
She said that in the State Department, “secretly, many American diplomats are celebrating this.”
Rharrit resigned in April in protest over Biden’s support for Israel.
Several world leaders have condoned the ICC decision.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the ICC warrants “courageous.”
European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said, “The states that signed the Rome convention are obliged to implement the decision of the court. It’s not optional.”
Some experts have questioned whether the warrant and its implications could prevent civilized nations from fighting terrorism.
“If this progresses to a large-scale issuance of arrest warrants for a wider range of military people and politicians, it could certainly serve as a warning to states involved in fighting terror,” said Amb. Baker.
“But this issue is more of a blatant Israel-directed issue and would not necessarily be used against other states fighting terror,” he added.
According to Natasha Hausdorff, legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, “Every phrase of every sentence” in the court’s warrant “was in fact false.”
In a conversation with Matt Frei of Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC), Hausdorff provided a stinging rebuke to the ICC. “One example is that in furtherance of this allegation of starvation, the prosecutor relied on a report that suggested that famine might come to parts of the Gaza Strip,” she said.
“That report was subsequently debunked by a Famine Review Committee report that indicated it had been based on insufficient or incomplete information and it drew implausible conclusions,” she said.
“The overall conclusion of that process and also from the press release the court put out on Thursday is that they have made that determination to arrest Netanyahu and Gallant on the basis of this slew of false information,” she said.
Should Israel be approaching this challenge differently?
According to Baker, Israel needs to show the countries that are party to the ICC statute “that the issuance of the warrants is ultra vires the terms of the statute since the ICC cannot exercise jurisdiction in the territory of a non-state entity that has no sovereign territory.”
He added that it is “widely acknowledged that no state of Palestine exists, and the fact that the Palestinian leadership has manipulated the United Nations and ICC to treat them as if they are a state doesn’t alter the basic legal and political fact that there is no state of Palestine. Hence the ICC cannot be given jurisdiction by a non-state, and cannot issue arrest warrants.”
“Also,” he said, “as Israel is not a party to the ICC statute, its senior officials enjoy state and diplomatic immunity and thus cannot be arrested.”
The post Unable to Destroy Israel Militarily, Its Enemies Resort to Lawfare first appeared on Algemeiner.com.