Tagged Lithuania

Lithuanian descendants return for dedication

Tucsonans Joel Alpert and Nancy Lefkowitz attended the Synagogue Square Memorial dedication in Yurburg, Lithuania, on July 19. (Courtesy Joel Alpert)
September 27, 2019 / Debe Campbell, AJP Assistant Editor

The town of Yurburg, Lithuania, dedicated a new Synagogue Square Memorial on July 19. Tucson genealogist and author Joel Alpert and his wife, Nancy Lefkowitz along with 10 of his relatives from Israel, Canada, and the United States, represented the descendants of emigres from the once-thriving Jewish community. “It… Read more »

A Chicago teacher showed her grandfather was a Nazi collaborator. Now Lithuania is paying attention.

Silvia Foti visits a friend in Vilnius, Lithuania, July 2013. (Ina Budryte)
October 4, 2018 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

(JTA) — Barring unexpected delays, Silvia Foti is months away from fulfilling an old promise that’s become her life’s work: to write a biography of her late grandfather, who is a national hero in his native Lithuania. Foti, a 60-year-old high school teacher from Chicago, made the pledge to… Read more »

Tucson genealogist’s links to Yurburg, Lithuania, help spur memorial project

Tucsonan Joel Alpert, in white shirt, in the Israeli studio of sculptor, left, David Zundelovitch, with a model of the Yurburg memorial and, from far left, Alpert’s cousins Itzhak Zarnitsky and Benny Naividel, and architect Anna Zundelovitch.
January 25, 2018 / Debe Campbell, AJP Editorial Assistant

Those entering Tucson’s Holocaust History Center or the Tucson Jewish Community Center will notice a black and white film portraying life in turn of the 20th century Eastern Europe. In fact, it depicts life in the small western Lithuanian town today known as Jurbarkas. The majority of the population… Read more »

Memory of Holocaust in Lithuania saved from oblivion by Israeli soccer agent and Lithuanian writer

Relatives of Holocaust victims walk the memorial march in the Lithuanian town of Molėtai (Malat) , Aug, 29, 2016. (Malat Memorial Foundation)
August 30, 2016 / Anna Rudnitsky/TPS

When Israeli soccer agent Tzvi Kritzer decided to build a monument in the Lithuanian town of Molėtai (Malat in Yiddish), where most of his family was murdered during the Holocaust, and to bring the relatives of the victims to the town for a memorial march, he was told to… Read more »

This Lithuanian concentration camp is now a wedding venue

A boy playing soccer at the entrance to the former concentration camp known as the Seventh Fort in Kaunas, Lithuania, July 12, 2016. (Cnaan Liphshiz)
July 25, 2016 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

KAUNAS, Lithuania (JTA) — In this drab city 55 miles west of Vilnius, there are few heritage sites as mysterious and lovely looking as the Seventh Fort. This 18-acre red-brick bunker complex, which dates to 1882, features massive underground passages that connect its halls and chambers. Above ground, the… Read more »

Smuggled out of ghetto, newly discovered photo trove turns out to be family of famous American scholars

After a documentary photographer stumbled upon Anushka Warshawski's photo album, it took some sleuthing to figure out who she was. (Courtesy of Richard Schofield)
May 6, 2016 / Uriel Heilman, JTA

NEW YORK (JTA) – When documentary photographer Richard Schofield stumbled upon a trove of unidentified prewar photographs in September 2013 in the storage room of the Sugihara House museum in Kaunas, Lithuania, he knew he had found something special. The photos, dating from about 1910 through 1940, were from a… Read more »

It’s Jew vs. Jew (and rabbi vs. rabbi) in fight over Lithuanian site

The Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports, a complex that was shut down a decade ago, is the site of a proposed $25 million conference center. (Flickr Commons)
September 6, 2015 / Cnaan Liphshiz, JTA

VILNIUS, Lithuania (JTA) – It’s one of the most intriguing sites in all of Vilnius: a massive Soviet-style sports complex built in 1971 that since its closure in 2004 has become a run-down haven for vagrants. Now the Lithuanian government has some grand plans to renovate the rotting behemoth and turn… Read more »

Seeking Lithuanian roots, finding insight
February 7, 2013 / Sandra Katz, M.D., J.D., Special to the AJP
Old Town in Kaunas, Lithuania (Courtesy Sandra Katz)

The iron curtain has risen, but it has left behind a thick and dirty rust ring. My paternal grandparents, Sol and Helen Katz, left Lithuania in 1905 and 1910. They never talked about their lives there and I have always been curious about my roots. Recently, I decided to… Read more »

Mother-daughter memoir plumbs Holocaust legacy
September 16, 2011 / Phyllis Braun, AJP Executive Editor

Many Holocaust memoirs cross our desks at the Arizona Jewish Post. “Waltzing With the Enemy: A Mother and Daughter Confront the Aftermath of the Holocaust” (Penina Press) has an evocative title and an Arizona connection (Phoenix, not Tucson), but what intrigued me most are the many dualities in this… Read more »