After the war — Association of Jews of Vilna and vicinity in Israel

A Day to Demand Reckoning for the Survivors Heroes in Life and Heroes in Death

A letter from a partisan from Vilna, a Hashomer Hatzair activist - The HaMishmar daily newspaper 14/3/1945.

I did not have the strength till now to write to you. At least I sent you telegrams. How would I write things that cannot be written down. The whole world is also full of lies about our fate and our lives here, under German occupation. The world knows so little about the horrors of these three years - it does not want to know - so far, I have not felt like writing something that is not known, writing it in a letter and shouting out the whole truth.

My dear, you know the numbers, you know the recent totals. You do not believe yet that the scope of the German murder is so vast. Why would you, you the distant ones, believe it when we receive letters from everywhere in the Soviet Union, addressed to Jews in Vilna. The letters do not ask whether that particular person is alive, but congratulate Haim and Yaakov for once again having become free citizens in a liberated Vilna. Of all these liberated citizens - none remain.

About one thousand eight hundred Jews walk the streets of Vilna, of which no more than 800 are Vilna residents out of seventy-five thousand. Perhaps 20, maybe 30 Jews are left in small towns. Families? Maybe one or two. Across the Baltics, the number of Jews remaining barely reaches five thousand.

In Poland, what remains it's the same really horrible story.  Only about two hundred Jews remain in Bialystok. In the Bialystok area - eighty! In Jewish towns in Poland - weeds grow.

And in Treblinka - the extermination camp near Malkin - the Germans strangled and burned three million Jews! Of these, about one hundred and twenty thousand are from Germany, forty thousand from Austria, a million six hundred thousand from Poland, one hundred thousand from Czechoslovakia, fourteen thousand from Bulgaria, and over a million from Russia.

In Kovno, were found forty crates of precious books left by Dutch Jews whom the Gestapo "settled" in the Ninth Fort. They came here with belongings, with property, furniture and top hats. Majdanek has already become world famous. Its graves were opened. Treblinka will also be opened soon and even Vilna, the city of destruction. Ponar, where one hundred thousand were buried - has also become known. And how many fields of death are yet unknown?

Not only are the numbers bleak. The overall quality is just as bleak: there remains only a few. People of stature, the ones who were the least elusive - went together with Am Yisrael—the Jewish people. The most beautiful and the youngest fell in battle.

The survivors of Vilna make pilgrimages to Ponar to nourish the feeling of revenge in the ashes of the bones.

To this day, I have not gone up to look at the Mount of the Dead (where, besides thousands, my mother and my relatives are buried). Death was the most horrific thing in the ghetto. What was the most terrible was the constant spitting on you, day after day, hour after hour - to the depths of your soul. Twenty-five months – waiting - to see the shadow of Jerusalem DeLita - to see the sunset - to see life at the mercy of the slaughterer.

Anyone who has not stood outside the gate can understand this. His senses will not grasp it.

Do not be surprised if I say: the cruelest of it all, left behind by three years of fascist rule, is not the grave of millions - it is the abyss.

And at the bottom of the abyss lies man- stripped of all faith. Not the murder, but the disgrace – the human degradation.

And at all times, always, standing on the edge of the abyss, I have only a pinch of consolation left. Perhaps the only ray of light left in this darkness: those close to me, our movement, and my students. They came out of the threat upright, spotless, pure. Most of them fell - and not by chance. But as free people - with rifle in hand.

if a person grows absorbing true morality, his fruits cannot be bitter.

The people of the movement you are asking about are no longer alive. They were among the organizers and fighters of the FPO (United Partisans Organization), partisan loyalists of the "Revenge" company.

Here are just a few names: Adik Borax was sent by us from Vilna to organize the armed uprising in the Bialystok ghetto. He was the commander of the Jewish Fighting Organization there - and fell first.

Zerach Zilberberg, Gedaliah Shoyak, Kuba Rogozinski, and many others, died as heroes during the ghetto uprising.

Only Chaika Grossman, at the command center, remained after the uprising in the Bialystok ghetto.

Arie Wilner was sent by us to help organize the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and perished there as one of its commanders.

They were people of deep heroic faith. Heroes in life and heroes in death.

I said, perhaps my only consolation is that: in a sea of ​​mud and blood, young legends grew.

Vilna was liberated by the Red Army on 12^th July 1944.

About 6,000 survivors from the surrounding areas and forest gathered together in the city.

During the 1950s, following the Holocaust and the war, and after the redivision of Europe, the Polish leadership developed a dependence on the USSR. Inter alia, the great leader and reformer Vladislav Gomulka, created an opportunity for Jews to immigrate to Israel. This change enabled the immigration (repatriation) of Soviet citizens and native Poles to their ‘homeland’. Once the Jews of the Soviet Union became aware of this, Jews from the various republics, including Lithuania, tried to get to Israel via Poland. Approximately 30,000 Jews (the majority from Lithuania and Vilna) took advantage of this opportunity and left the Soviet Union.  About 20,000 of them immigrated to Israel.

Persecution of the Jews increased towards the end of the 1960s. With the increase in the number of Jews receiving exit visas, the Soviet authorities tightened their attitude towards the Jewish community and stopped issuing exit visas. One of those who managed to immigrate to Israel was the professional singer Nechama Lifschitz, who became a symbol of the struggle of the Lithuanian Jews to maintain their heritage and fight for free immigration. Nechama was here for the silent Jewry and, more than once, she endangered her own life.

The struggle of the Aliyah (immigration to Israel) activists bore fruit. In the 1970s, about 180,000 Jews from the Soviet Union, including a few tens of thousands from Lithuania) made Aliyah.

Diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and Israel were severed in 1967. However, the antisemitic stance of the communist regime had started even before the break and even intensified following it. This was reflected when they started holding trials against Jews. The pretext was that they were ‘conducting anti-Soviet propaganda’. Persecution reached its peak when a group of refuseniks (Jews who had been denied an exit visa) from Leningrad and Riga tried to hijack an empty civilian aircraft. They were apprehended and prosecuted. Most of them were sent to prison for a few years. Two of them, Mark Dymshits and Edward Kuznetsov were sentenced to death. However, the death sentence was not carried out following the intervention of Golda Meir, the then Prime Minister of Israel.

It is interesting to note that Jews were prosecuted in a number of Soviet cities, but in Lithuania, despite Zionist activities, there wasn’t a single trial. It is well-known that the Lithuanian leader Antanas Sniečkus declared that, “As long as I am the head of this Republic, there will be no trials against Jews”.

The Lithuanian Jews, with the majority coming from Vilna, were arrested for their Zionist activities, each time for a length of two weeks or, alternatively, were placed under administrative detention. The Lithuanian Jews learned Hebrew, and held seminaries for refuseniks despite the danger in doing so! People were fired from their jobs and thrown out of universities.

In 1956, an opportunity arose to set up a Jewish theater and band, and they became the focal point of Jewish life in Vilna, Kovno and the vicinity. In other words, we didn’t lose our nerve but managed to not only preserve Jewish culture but also to bring what we had created there to Israel and integrate it into the Israeli culture. The band was called We are Here, the partisans’ hymn ‘Mir Zaynen Do’. The members of the band in Vilna sought a connection to their tradition and signs of self-identity which the authorities had prevented from them. The band was a resounding success. The audience in the packed halls went wild with excitement and enthusiasm. This was clear cut proof of the depth of the Jewish public’s longing for the Jewish word, song and dance.  There were 120 participants on stage even though the band was struggling for their existence at that time. We felt as if we were a source of inspiration for Jewish youth throughout the Soviet Union. This was a clear expression of national yearning, which turned into the Let My People Go movement. This movement gained momentum and gained international support.

Members of this Jewish band from Vilna were amongst the first to make Aliyah. Soon after their arrival in Israel, together with immigrants from other cities, they re-established the band with the Hebrew name for ‘We are Here” - ‘Anachnu Kan’. The first concert was held in the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv in 1972, in the presence of the then Prime Minister, Golda Meir. Subsequently, young singers, musicians and dancers replaced the original band. "Generations come and generations go".

It is only natural to end with the founders’ words: “Some ask what Zionism means today. For me, the Here we Are band is a Zionist dream come true. It started off in the underground while striving to reach a homeland, followed by the realization of Jewish and Zionist values of an ingathering of exiles, and the representation of all ethnic groups and a cultural enterprise which has lasted for over 60 years, but with a foreseeable vitality for many years to come”.

It should be realized – this struggle will always be remembered. We shall not forget those who led this long and exhausting journey for the Jewish people. The Jews of the Soviet Union, and particularly the Jews of Lithuania, are an integral part of the victory of the spirit and courage to stand up to those who persecuted us. (Author: Shmuel ben Zvi).

Additional reading:  A Russian newspaper article in Vesty dated 5.11.2019, regarding Shmuel ben Zvi’s extensive work and the part he played in bringing Soviet Jewry to Israel.

After World War II 
After the Soviet army liberated Lithuania (July 12, 1944) about 6,000 survivors from the forests and other places assembled in the city. In the 1959 census 16,354 Jews (6.96% of the total population) were registered in Vilna, 326 of whom declared Yiddish to be their mother tongue. In 1970 the number of Jews was estimated much higher. The only synagogue left generally served a small number of elderly Jews, except on holidays, particularly on Simchat Torah, when many hundreds congregated, including younger people. After the Six-Day War in the Middle East (1967) identification with Israel became more pronounced, especially among the young, in spite of the official anti-Israel campaign, and Jews from Vilna were among those who protested against the refusal to grant them exit permits to Israel.

Revival of Jewish Life in Vilna

During the Soviet period, before the restoration of Lithuanian independence in 1990, there was not an organized Jewish community. Only in 1989 the first steps were undertaken towards the establishment of a new Jewish community in Lithuania by the founding of the Association of the Culture of Lithuanian Jews. As of November 1991 it became the new Jewish Community of the Jews in Lithuania. The community is governed by the Community’s Council, which is elected by the Conference along with the Chairperson of the Community. The Jewish population of Lithuania is estimated at some 5,000 (6,000 in 1997), most of them living in Vilna.

Cultural Activities
The community is active in a number of fields, among them a special attention is given to maintaining the Jewish national identity and the restoration of the religious life and of the Jewish cultural heritage. The community organizes meetings, lectures, and exhibitions dedicated to an array of subjects including Israel related topics as well as Jewish holidays. Remembering the Holocaust victims remains a top priority of the Jewish community: there are over 200 places of mass extermination on the Lithuanian territory that need to be cared for. Each year solemn ceremonies are held on September 23, the Day of Remembrance for the Holocaust in Lithuania, at the 9th Fort in Kaunas and in Ponary, the sites of the most terrible mass murders of Jews.
The Jewish Gaon State Museum, founded in 1989, has also a permanent exhibition on the Holocaust and among various temporary exhibitions “The Jews of Lithuania in the Fight against Nazism” was opened in 2000 to mark the 55th anniversary of the victory against the Nazis. The list of the Vilna ghetto prisoners was published in a new book.

Of the cultural institutions and organizations a special mention should be made of the Jewish Cultural Club that attracts Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, of Ilan, a children and youth club, and of Abi men zet zich, a senior citizens club.

The Jewish community publishes the Jerusalem of Lithuania – a four-language periodical in Yiddish, Lithuanian, English and Russian reporting the events in the life of the community with a special emphasis on the cultural aspects.

Education

Today, again there are Jewish schools in Vilna: The Shalom Aleichem State School has some 200 students. Its curriculum includes in addition to the general subjects, the study of the Hebrew language, the Bible, and the history of the Jewish people. The Chabad community in Vilna runs a private religious school.

Welfare Program
The Jewish community runs an extensive welfare program in support of its needy members. These are mainly pensioners who either remained alone after their relatives had emigrated to other countries or had been severely affected by the economic crisis that followed the collapse of the U.S.R.R. The aid program includes distribution of food, clothes, financial support, and medical care as well as other free of charge services, among them housecleaning, laundry, etc.

The welfare program has been possible thanks to the generous assistance of various Jewish organizations, especially the American Joint Distribution Committee, and private donors.

Litvaks during the Soviet Era – Testimony of Roza Litai / Written and edited by Meir Lapid, son of the late Mordechai Lapid (Marik Blum)

To understand what Jewish life was like in Lithuania during the Soviet era, it is essential to be aware of the history spanning hundreds of years of Jewish life previously, in the land of the Lithuanians.

This article will not deal with Lithuanian Jewish history spanning entire centuries, but rather with the period between World War One and the year before World War Two, after which we will address the “Perestroika” era (end of the 1990s) and thereafter, the years in which Lithuania became independent once more. I would like to use part of the speech given by Nechama Lifshitz.

A seminar in Russian was dedicated to the memory of Shaul Avigur, who was one of the leaders of the “Hagana” and head of the Mossad for the Second Aliyah (Aliyah Bet) and who also founded the Nativ Liaison Office. The seminar took place on 11^th January 1979 at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and was sponsored by the Hebrew University and the Israeli Liaison Office. I quote my mother Nechama Lifshitz :

“In Lithuania where I was born and raised, Jewish culture enjoyed complete autonomy. Every Jewish child would breathe Yiddishkeit (Judaism) from birth, even if he or she were not conscious of it. At home, in the kindergarten, the youth movements, community life, we breathed Yiddishkeit and Jewish culture in a simple, natural way, literally like breathing air. We grew up with two mother tongues, one – Yiddish - was a living language going back a thousand years or so, and the second – Hebrew, the ancient tongue of our ancestors, two languages with which we grew up, and both are very dear to us.

Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah – these were not just biblical concepts for us - they were actually present in our lives as our fathers and mothers. We knew for a fact where they lived, how they lived and the essence of their lives. In the same way as a living being does not think about how he or she breathes, walks, sees, hears, laughs and cries, none of us ever questioned the fact that everything around us was Jewish. This was how we lived, and this was how I lived too. We didn’t search deeply for our roots, something that is so popular nowadays. We were like branches on an ancient, solid tree.

Who was interested in searching for “roots”? We simply grew and aspired upwards.

The culture of a people is created not in a day, not in a year, not even in a century – and all the more so where our people are concerned, scattered over the entire world and composed of diverse communities. There is a kernel, concealed deep down, preserved with the greatest reverence in every one of us, a kernel that connects all of us – a kernel that is absolutely unique! Our ancestral heritage before the exile and the destruction of the Temple, and now – the State of Israel. A shared mystical destiny encompasses all of us.

How do we convey to our younger generation that they have something to be proud of - the beauty and wisdom of Judaism and Jewish creativity, how can we portray that message?

“Beware lest you abandon the Levite”

And what should we emphasize? The important thing is not only “how to sing”, but rather “how and what to sing”. What and how to sing today depends what, how and even where we will sing in another 20, 50 and 100 years’ time…

It is vital to find the answer, vital to create the atmosphere, the groundwork and how to access the roots… how to rediscover how to breathe and grow…

For how can we survive without air or roots”?

From this we can understand how and why Jewish culture thrived and was preserved in the ghettos of Vilna, Kovno and others. And how, despite fear of the regime, and despite the unbearable conditions in which our people found themselves, the Jews were able to express their creativity from within, using cultural means, conveying a message that they could overcome all the limitations and censoring applied by the enemy, in even the most difficult of times.

Hitler wanted to destroy us physically; Stalin and the Soviet regime wanted to murder our souls. Neither was able to prevail over the Jewish people.

After the devastation caused by the Holocaust, only a small percentage of the magnificent Jewish community managed to survive in Lithuania, remaining there together with some others who had managed to escape from Lithuania beforehand, and who came back after the war, as well as those who survived the extermination camps and thought that some of their family might still be alive in Lithuania – all these people began rebuilding their lives in Lithuania. Others escaped from the camps straight to the free world and to Israel, and did not go back to Lithuania.

In the late 1940s (from 1945 onwards), different Jewish organizations were set up to help Jews escape to the free world. Their activities were sometimes successful, but occasionally the organizers were exposed and captured. There was even an incident, in 1945 I think, when a group of Jews planned to steal a plane, but they were found out, and the Jews involved were caught and exiled to Siberia. When their exile in Siberia was over, one of the families who was friendly with my family Lifshitz, returned and made Aliyah to Israel even before we did, to Haifa, Chayale and Moshe – I don’t remember their surname – together with their daughters Rina and Anneta, from whom I heard this story about the attempt to hijack an airplane.

The “Bricha” (Escape) organization (not only from Lithuania) started out spontaneously, later becoming part of the Haganah. With the backing of the Haganah, they were able to become more organized, thus forming one of the most important enterprises in the illegal immigration effort and the struggle to establish the State of Israel.

Although there were so few of us in Lithuania, our ancestors were the “branches” on which we could grow, as my mother wrote.

After the death of Stalin, Khrushchev released all Stalin’s prisoners. Like all the other prisoners, the Jews too returned to their hometowns all over the USSR, and to Lithuania too. One of them was the Hebrew composer, Prisoner of Zion Yechezkel Pulerevitch who, when in Siberia, wrote the Prisoner of Zion anthem “Hey Panu Derech Li” (Hey, clear a path for me) (a song my mother Nechama Lifshitz sang in secret in the USSR, and openly in Israel). Pulerevitch later made Aliyah to Israel with his family, with the help of his friend Menachem Begin (who eventually became Prime Minister), and his son First Lieutenant Dr. Shabi Maor Pulerevitch (who was named after Shlomo Ben Yosef, one of the Olei Hagardom who was later memorialized as one of the missing military personnel from the Dakar submarine. It is important to mention here that historically, it may well be that for the Jews, being exiled by the Soviets to Siberia in the 1940s was oddly a “blessing in disguise”, as they were saved from the claws of the Nazis and their collaborators.

The Nazis destroyed part of the Great Synagogue of Vilna. The Soviets, who came back and occupied Lithuania in 1944, put the finishing touches to their despicable job in the early 1950s by blowing up the synagogue… Actually, the synagogue is the only building in the old city of Vilna that has not been reconstructed and renovated. In the 1950s a kindergarten was built on the ruins of the synagogue. Until today the area where the synagogue once stood is like an ugly stain in the architecture of the old city of Vilna. One of the saddest childhood memories seared into my brain from the early 1950s is seeing my mother cry while telling me that today they blew up the great synagogue.

In my opinion, nothing compares to this architectural stain to illustrate the silent cry of all the Jews who were murdered and who disappeared like the great synagogue… a Judenrein Lithuania… and this may be the time to mention that while reconstructing and restoring the Jewish places too, it is important to give expression to the awful process of extermination. This means that a way must be found to leave silent spaces… spaces that will be interwoven as an integral part of the plans for restoration… and perhaps like an unpainted space is left in every new house (a square cubit) in memory of our holy Temple, a space can be left to memorialize the destruction of the Jerusalem of Lithuania…

Of all the dozens, nay hundreds, of synagogues that existed in Lithuania before World War Two, only two remain, one in Vilna and the other in Kovno. The cantor of the Kovno synagogue was Yakov Yarmolovsky  (the father of my mother’s sister’s husband) whose rendition of the “Kol Nidrei” prayer I was fortunate enough to hear when I was still in primary school. After Lithuania was declared independent (in the 1990s), another synagogue was built in Vilna by Chabad.

At that time writers, composers and people of culture from the past who had survived all those horrors, were still living in Lithuania, and like in the ghetto, despite the danger involved with the new Soviet reality, they could not stop their creativity. The Hebrew language was banned, Yiddish too was considered illegal where the regime was concerned, Jewish educational institutions were closed by the regime, but in spite of all this, things happened.

Nechama Lifshitz appeared in a Yiddish program with Ino Toper, and after he left for Poland, Nechama continued singing in Yiddish, and here and there added some Hebrew, for example in the song/prayer “Eli Eli Lama Azavtani?” (Oh God, my God why have You forsaken me?) she added “Shema Yisrael” (Hear O Israel). It is interesting to note that the Soviet censorship decided to translate it as “Hear (me, O State of) Israel”, in reference to which Nechama, during one of the interrogations which she had to undergo, told the KGB interrogator that their translators weren’t particularly professional…

Nechama Lifshitz, who was the soloist in the Lithuanian Philharmonic, had the ability to convey in her singing everything that her audience thought and felt, expressing how they were prevented from their right to a Jewish identity. She became a symbol of the protest of the Children of Silence, a symbol of the Zionist revival in the USSR.

Nechama usually had two kinds of performances: one for the general public, and the other for her friends only, the latter taking place not on a stage but in the forests, hotels, and at meetings that were often secret (although it was obvious that the KGB knew about this “secret”)…

Thanks to activities of this kind, Lithuania became one of the most important Zionist centers, for many people from all the other republics in the USSR too. For example, in Riga Mordechai Lapid (Marek Blum), organized a group of youths who would accompany Nechama when she travelled to all the Baltic republics, and thus, through Nechama’s concerts and the activities associated with them, contact was made between them and other Zionist youths in these places. Naturally, because these concerts were always packed out, tickets had to be obtained for the youth, and Nechama made sure of that.

Yosef Kotliar, Hirsch Oscherowitsch and others wrote in Yiddish which was translated into Russian and Lithuanian. Icchokas Meras the “Holocaust Troubadour” who was rescued by a Lithuanian family began writing books about the Holocaust. At around the same time, the writer Grigory Kanovich also wrote in Russian about Lithuanian Jewry during the 20^th century. The artist Rafael Chwoles painted a Vilna that no longer exists…

In Vilna there was an author called Masha Marija Rolnikaite , or - as she was nicknamed - “The Anne Frank of Vilna”, who survived the Holocaust, and who wrote about her experiences in the Vilna ghetto and in the Strasshof and Stutthof concentration camps in her memoir entitled “I Must Tell”. She translated the diary herself into Lithuanian, which enabled this horrific and important testimony to be publicized in 1963 in Vilna. Later on in 1965 she published the book in its original Yiddish which was then translated into Russian as well.

During the war Masha was part of the underground, and was the one who wrote “The Strasshof Anthem” that became one of the most popular songs of the resistance struggle against the Nazis. After the war, she was promoted to senior positions in the Lithuanian Philharmonic and was appointed by the Lithuanian regime to direct activities in the fields of culture and literature, taking charge of publishing brochures advertising the Lithuanian Philharmonic. As part of her job she had contact with the censorship and so was able to help, and indeed she helped my mother include in the concert program songs such as “Eli Eli” and others, by adding explanatory details in such a way that an alternative significance was provided for the songs’ content, thus allowing them to be passed by the censor. She got married in 1964 and moved to Leningrad, where she died in 2016 at the age of 88.

Masha Rolnikaite was a popular writer. In her memoirs she wrote a story that she dedicated to my mother Nechama Lifshitz, mentioning how they managed to deceive the censor and allow “Eli Eli” to pass with the verse “Shema Yisrael” included in the song… she wrote that the two of them invited the Minister of Culture at the time, Yuozas Banaitis, to attend one of my mother’s concerts. The minister agreed to come, and after the concert, Masha asked the minister to give his permission for her to sing another song from her repertoire – “Eli Eli”, explaining that the content of this song expresses opposition to the pogroms during the era of the Russian Tzars.

The minister signed, even though Masha realized it was obvious to him that the song had a different meaning. Masha brought the signed document to my mother, her face bright red with embarrassment, ashamed about the “lie” she had told, but satisfied with the outcome anyway… my mother told me the whole story too, and they both recalled it too on my mother’s 85^th birthday. Masha phoned her from “Peter” (St. Petersburg/Leningrad) to congratulate her on her birthday, and when she asked my mother whether she remembered “Eli Eli”, they both burst out laughing!

Now I would like to mention my childhood memories of Masha Rolnikaite (for me “Auntie Masha”). When I was a little girl and my mother was busy with Philharmonic-related issues, “Auntie Masha” would look after me and let me play with the typewriter she had in her office owing to her official position. All this took place when it was forbidden by the Soviet regime to own a typewriter unless the authorities permitted it, in the event that it was being used to print anti-regime propaganda…

Other artists also expressed “Yiddishkeit” (Judaism), as well as “universal” art. With the backing of the erstwhile Lithuanian government and the help provided by the Jewish wife of Antanas Sniečkus, the head of the Lithuanian Communist Party, an alphabet in Yiddish was published, they established a theater, a Jewish choir and dance troupes in Vilna and Kovno. In this context, I should mention the names of the people who founded these bands: in Kovno - Chaim Sourasky and the Sayevitch family, Hasya Kotliar and others; in Vilna – Berl Tcesarkas, Mark Moises and Misha Pianko, as well as Zina and Grisha Sharfstein and their children, Marik Brudny (who was my mother’s partner in clandestine activities for Jewish culture in the USSR), director Leonid Lurie, conductor of strummed instruments – Shloime Meyerovitch, Shaul Blecharovitch and his children – Aliza and Misha, Sarah Strimling and others who were also part of this Jewish-cultural process.

There were others like Shaul Blecharovitch  who also brought their children, and their friends joined too, and thus they established a theater, a dance troupe, a choir and an orchestra. Among those who joined were Boris Gershuny, Benny Glazer (Gal), Ina Kaplan, Shmuel Ben Zvi (who followed in his father’s footsteps), and others.

These bands appeared not only in Lithuania, but also in Riga, Kishinev, Leningrad and Minsk, and brought with them the “Yiddishkeit” for which everyone was yearning. Some couples were formed and even weddings took place as a result of these trips and performances, and of course this became a basis for Zionist contacts, and actually the cultural process led to an ever-widening circle of groups joining the renewed Zionist movement after the death of Stalin. As time went by the Soviets began to abuse these expressions of culture claiming they were Soviet propaganda, and as proof, so to speak, that Jewish culture existed under the Soviet regime. This led to a split between the Jews who were included in these groups, and the large majority of them, as well as most of the original founders, came on Aliyah in the 1970s, and here in Israel formed the band called “We are Here!” Those that stayed continued performing in Lithuania.

I would like to tell you how the Jewish youth dealt with anti-Semitism. In Kovno the Jewish youth learned boxing, whereas in Vilna they were more into wrestling. In both Vilna and Kovno they were successful in local competitions as well as in the regional Baltic republics. When I was about 12 years’ old I went to Palanga with mother, a small holiday resort town in Lithuania frequented by many Jews from Lithuania, Russia and from all over the USSR. This used to fire up the local anti-Semites, and the local youth would start to harass anyone they thought looked Jewish, all of which was unofficially endorsed by the Palangan police. In response, the Jewish youth organized themselves into a self-defense force until the local anti-Semitic provocation ceased altogether. The fact that so many Jews were proficient in the arts of boxing and wrestling helped the Jewish youth to put an end to these incidents. I remember a case when a Russian boy aged around 15 arrived at our neighbor’s house; it turned out that he had been stabbed with a knife because he was dark-skinned and they thought he looked Jewish. He was lucky to have been able to escape and find his way to our neighbors.

Now is the time to tell of an incident that took place around Passover time, when I was studying at the Vilna high school during the early 1960s. One day a close friend of my mother’s came to our house, Professor Ugnius Paulauskas, a non-Jewish Lithuanian who was both a colleague and a good friend of hers from when they were students together at the music conservatory. He was distressed, and told us that a little girl had been killed, and the Jews were being blamed for killing the child in order to prepare the Matzot (unleavened bread) for the Passover festival… and that a pogrom was being planned… My mother immediately phoned Yuozas Banaitis, who was the Minister of Culture at the time and told him what was happening. In response, Banaitis got the army involved thus saving us from a pogrom. Eventually it was discovered that the killer was Lithuanian, a mentally unstable young man of 19 years’ old from a prominent family. It turned out that his mother apparently did not want him to stand trial, so she cut his veins and thus murdered her own son…

This might be the time to add that a very distinguished professor from Lithuania whose name I prefer not to mention, said very naturally to my mother that of course he knows that the Jews don’t do things like that now, but in the past, this did happen, didn’t it, Nechama? And my mother replied that if even you, an enlightened man, ask a question like that, what can we expect from the masses?...

Most of the Jews left Lithuania in the 1970s, the majority moving to Israel, and those who remained continued their lives in Lithuania.

Although it was very difficult for Soviet Jews in general to receive permission to go on Aliyah, the restrictions in Lithuania were somewhat less severe. Therefore, Jews came to Lithuania for the purpose of making Aliyah from there.

Now I would like to quote the First Secretary of the Lithuanian Communist party, a position that meant that he was the de facto leader of Lithuania, Antanas Sničkus, mentioned above, who slammed his hand on the table, declaring: “In my Lithuania there will be no prosecutions against Jews!”

This historic quote reflects the general trend even beforehand in Lithuania, which was not the same as the policy in most of the USSR republics, and which allowed more freedom for the Jews to be active and creative.

In the 1990s, when Lithuania became independent again, only a few of the Jewish cultural and educational institutions were reintroduced. These institutions are active until today, most of them in Vilna, and actually hardly any Jewish presence remains in Lithuania from the entire Jewish Litvak world. And as my grandmother Batya Lifshitz would say: My Vilna no longer exists.

But thank God, in spite of it all, and who knows how – the People of Israel Live!