Pondering the Past: The Tragic Story of Lithuanian Jewry PDF Download

Author: Meir Pinsk
Publisher: Gefen Books
ISBN: 9789657023235
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
This book surveys the rich history of Lithuanian Jewry from the turn of the first millennium to its devastating conclusion during the Second World War, when the Lithuanian Jewish communities were totally wiped out by the Nazis and their collaborators. The participation of many Lithuanians in the persecution of the local Jews is a topic that is hardly popu¬lar in the modern independent state of Lithuania. Pondering the Past counters Lithuanian historians' attempt to justify the mass murder. Archival materials disprove various false ac¬cusations and myths that the Lithuanians fabricated against the Jews. Dr. Pinsk has traveled to Lithuania many times, both to the major cities and small towns. The war monuments and killing pits serve as a constant reminder of the tragedy of the Jews on Lithuanian soil. These emotional visits inspired him to reflect on the past and the present of Lithuania, whose Jewish population today numbers merely four thousand individuals. He surveys the enduring anti-Semitism of this country. He also relates the story of several hundred brave Lithuanians who saved some Jews and describes the new generation of Lithuanians.

Author: Dov Levin
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1571812644
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Discusses some aspects of antisemitism in Lithuania, especially in socioeconomic terms, in the Middle Ages and under the Russian tsars. The 20th-century interwar period saw the introduction of anti-Jewish laws that negatively impacted on Jewish political involvement, economic activity, and physical security, and the situation worsened with a right-wing coup, at which time Nazi influence grew among the German minority. The peak of antisemitism is treated in pt. 4 (pp. 187-247), "World War II, the Holocaust, and the Jewish Survivors". Although Soviet rule in 1940-41 ended many restrictions, it harmed Jews culturally and economically; many were arrested or exiled. The Nazi occupation which followed led to the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry. Even before the arrival of the German army, ca. 10,000 Jews were murdered by Lithuanians. German troops brought the Final Solution, in which Lithuanian collaboration was massive. Discusses ghettos, forced labor, and concentration camps, as well as Jewish partisan resistance. 96% of Lithuanian Jews were killed. Popular antisemitism was revived in postwar Lithuania. The issues of Lithuanian-Nazi collaboration and the Lithuanian association of Jews with communists to justify the massacre of Jews during World War II remained problems in the postwar and even post-communist periods.

Author: Nancy Schoenburg
Publisher: Jason Aronson, Incorporated
ISBN: 1461629381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 517

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Book Description
Lithuanian Jewish Communities is a remarkable resource for students of Lithuanian Jewish history and for people descended from Lithuanian Jews. This volume lists, in alphabetical order, the major Jewish communities that existed in Lithuania before World War II. The name of each community is accompanied by information about it: when it was founded, the Jewish population in different years, shops and synagogues, and the names of citizens. An appendix locates each town on a map of Lithuania. Since most of the Jewish communities in Lithuania were destroyed in the Holocaust, this volume will be a valuable tool in recreating a picture of Lithuanian Jewry. Other appendices provide member lists from Lithuanian Jewish organizations throughout the world and list agencies that will provide help in further research on Lithuanian Jewry. Descendants of Lithuanian Jews who wish to trace their genealogy will be greatly helped by Lithuanian Jewish Communities.

Author: Efroim Oshry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Pt. 1 (pp. 1-173), "The Kovno Ghetto, 1941-1944", is a history and memoir by Oshry, a former student at the Slobodka Yeshiva. Figured prominently are many great Torah scholars, as well as simple Jews (including children) whose spiritual resistance to the Nazis included devotion to religious practice to the point of martyrdom. Oshry, a rabbi, survived until liberation in a hidden bunker for 38 days. Pt. 2 (pp. 178-291), "The Annihilation of Lithuanian Jewry: The Cities and Towns of Jewish Lithuania", provides short histories of 47 communities, with a focus on their outstanding religious personalities and institutions, and an account of the destruction of each of these communities and almost all of their inhabitants during the Holocaust.

Author: Alvydas Nikžentaitis
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9789042008502
Category : Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
The Lithuanian Jews, Litvaks, played an important and unique role not only within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but in a wider context of Jewish life and culture in Eastern Europe, too. The changing world around them at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth had a profound impact not only on the Jewish communities, but also on a parallel world of the "others," that is, those who lived with them side by side. Exploring and demonstrating this development from various angles is one of the themes and objectives of this book. Another is the analysis of the Shoah, which ended the centuries of Jewish culture in Lithuania: a world of its own had vanished within months. This book, therefore, "recalls" that vanished world. In doing so, it sheds new light on what has been lost. The papers presented in this collection were delivered at the international conferences in Nida (1997) and Telsiai (2001), Lithuania. Participants came from Israel, the USA, Great Britain, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Germany, and Lithuania.

Author: Frank Buonagurio
Publisher: Jewish Heritage Project
ISBN: 9780967769790
Category : Jewish women
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The Last Bright Days is a moving portrait of Jewish life during the 1930's in the small Lithuanian shtetl of Kavarsk and the personal story of one of its inhabitants, Beile Delechky. In 1938, as Europe was about to plunge into the darkness of war and genocide, Beile emigrated to the United States, leaving her family behind but bringing with her hundreds of photographs and dozens of her notebooks. Over one hundred of these compelling photographs, reproduced in The Last Bright Days, give us a fascinating look back in time to a Jewish world that existed within Eastern Eruope and was destroyed forever in the Holocaust. Beile's journal entries and poetry give us a window into the emotional life of a young woman coming of age in a small town as the problems of the wider world close in around her. Beile left Lithuania for America excited to be going to a new home and determined to find happiness. But her hopes for happiness would always be tempered by the memories of the family in Lithuania she so tragically lost. Beile never returned to Kavarsk. Her photographs and journals helped preserve her memories of growing up in the Jewish world of Lithuania in the days before that culture was lost forever. They give the rest of us a poignant glimpse of those last bright days."--from publisher's description.

Author: Šarūnas Liekis
Publisher: Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry
ISBN: 9781904113935
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
This volume of Polin, based on scholarship that has emerged since the fall of communism, is a wide-ranging contribution to the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania. Focusing on the specific character of Lithuanian Jewry, the volume opens by examining how their relationship with the surrounding society developed after 1772, both under tsarist rule and then in independent Lithuania. Moving to more recent times, the devastating impact on the Jewish community of the Soviet and Nazi occupations during the Second World War is discussed, as are the further negative consequences on Jewish life of the reoccupation of the country by the Soviets between 1944 and 1990. The volume concludes with material on the slow revival of Jewish life since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the re-emergence of an independent Lithuania, which was accompanied by the revival of many disciplines, such as the study of Jewish history, repressed by Soviet censorship. This revived interest in the country's Jewish past is now playing a key role in the broader transformation of historical memory of the post-Soviet era and the problem of coming to terms with the widespread local collaboration in Lithuania during the Holocaust - a process which has led to important scholarly advances but also to bitter controversy. Collectively, the studies in this volume contribute to a better understanding of the complex history of the Jews in Lithuania and of Lithuanian - Jewish relations and constitute a part of the necessary process of creating a more rounded and inclusive history of the country. CONTRIBUTORS Aelita Ambruleviciute, Marta Aleksandra Balinska, Egle Bendikaite, Michael Casper, Ellen Cassedy, Immanuel Etkes, David E. Fishman, Jack Jacobs, Grigory Kanovich, Saulius Suziedelis, Andrey Krotau, Larisa Lempertiene, Aearunas Liekis, Miriam Offer, Avi Ohry, Karin Ohry-Kossoy, Ausra Pazeraite, Antony Polonsky, Anna P. Ronell, Vladas Sirutavicius, Darius Staliunas, Saulius SuA iedelis, Vytautas Toleikis, Anna Verschik, Theodore R. Weeks, Mordechai Zalkin.

Author: N. N. Shneidman
Publisher: Oakville, Ont. : Mosaic Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book relates the story of growth and success, as well as devastation and annihilation, of a thriving Jewish community. It is an incredible account of personal survival placed within the context of the history of the city, and its Jewish population. It combines historical data, academic analysis, and autobiographical material, based on reminiscences and memoirs written during the war.

Author: Shlomo Kodesh
Publisher: Jewishgen.Incorporated
ISBN: 9781954176171
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Every man has a story - his own life story. It starts in his father's home, in the fields and meadows of a man's childhood. This, undoubtedly, is the nucleus. This nucleus is well preserved, and it blossoms on rare occasions in the conditions which stimulate growth. The development of the story is not continuous. It has its breaks and winter slumber, but it awakens and presses on with some changes. Occasionally, it repeats itself but in other cases sails on to unexpected destinations. This is the way my story moves too. It opens in the small township of Kupishok, which, for me, includes the whole of my Lithuania, the Jewish Lithuania, the Lithuania that is gone forever. The Lithuanian stories started in my hometown. When I left the country, the stories continued to accompany me. Nevertheless, the story inclination has become even stronger after the great ruin. Moreover, the experiences that I used to consider meaningless and unimportant appear today as significant and worth describing.

Author: Vladas Sirutavičius
Publisher: Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh
ISBN: 9783506705754
Category : Geschichte
Languages : en
Pages : 524

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Book Description
This book presents a research of Lithuanian Jewish history and culture till the beginning of the twenty-first century. This study is an attempt by an international group of scholars from Lithuania, Israel, the United States of America and Germany to link different approaches towards the history of the Jews in East-Central Europe which in so far did not have many points of contact. It also aims to create an integral picture of the social, economic and cultural history of the Jews in Lithuania during the course of more than six hundred years. The main focus of this study is the relationships between the Lithuanian Jews, or Jews in Lithuania, and the dominant (Non-Jewish) majority, and the shifts in the collective identification of the Jews.