Opening of an exhibition of photographs by photographer Rimantas Dichavičius showing the Uzupis Jewish cemetery in Vilnius in 1964, before it was destroyed by the communist regime.
The exhibition marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Vilnius presentation of the new book by Dr. Richard Freund, the Maurice Greenberg Professor of Jewish History at the University of Hartford in Connecticut: The Archaeology of the Holocaust: Vilna, Rhodes, and Escape Tunnels.
Click to read more about the book
The official opening ceremony for a new memorial commemorating the memory of the Jews of Jurbarkas, Lithuania — in Yiddish, Yurburg.
The event will have several parts, including a concert at 2:30 pm by the choral group Aukuras from Klaipėda, at the Apparition of Christ Orthodox church. At 3:30 there will be a look back at the Synagogue Square Memorial Project at the Grybas Museum at Vydūno street no. 31, and at 4:30 there will be a meeting and discussion with the authors and creators of the memorial at the Jurbarkas Regional Public Library at Vilniaus street no. 4.
The municipality approved renaming the junction of Kauno and Kranto streets in the town center – The Synagogue Square.
This square, adjacent to the historical location of Yurburg’s two major Synagogues, was chosen as the site for a memorial dedicated to the Jewish Community of Yurburg. In April 2016, mayor Skirmantas Mockevicius asked Amir Maimon, the Ambassador of the State of Israel to the Republic of Lithuania, to contact Israeli sculptor David Zundelovitch and his creative group CAN New Artists Collegium with a request to design and create the future memorial, with is a sort of urban land sculpture.
Click to see the Facebook page for the memorial
Cemetery clean up summer camp
The Summer Camp in Vištytis aims to preserve the town’s Jewish heritage and prepare information and material for the inventory process of the local Jewish cemetery. Ultimately, it will help to understand about the situation of the cemetery as well as people who had been buried there. The inventory process will cover cleaning and tidying the cemetery from debris and excess of vegetation; digitisation and identifying coordinates of graves; identifying and copying legible inscriptions. Your volunteer work will be a vital part in making this almost lost information accessible to the public again.
The initiative is organized by the NGO Maceva- Litvak cemetery catalogue and Action Reconciliation Service for Peace, with the cooperation of the NGO Goodwill Foundation.
Exhibition of Photographs by Vincent Giordano.
The photographs are part of a multi-media archive, created by Giordano, who died in 2010, that was sponsored by International Survey of Jewish Monuments and in 2019 will find a new home at the Hellenic American Project and Special Collections at the Library of Queens College, New York.
Giordano’s photographs document two related communities of Greek Romaniote Jews – in Ioannina, in northwestern Greece and on Broome Street on New York’s Lower East Side. Romaniote Jews trace their religious and cultural heritage to the Judaism of the ancient Greco-Roman world two-thousand years ago, and these two tiny congregations are among the few remaining to follow these traditions. Romaniotes have their own liturgy and cultural traditions, as well as their own language, a dialect of Greek that combines words and phrases from Hebrew and Turkish. This luminous black and white photo essay includes a poignant exploration of liturgy and ritual, conveying how people engage with religious space and carry on their time-honored sacred traditions.
The exhibition will open on Thursday, September 19th , 2019 at 6:00 p.m. it will continue through October 3rd, 2019.
A panel discussion by experts will take place at the Consulate on Wednesday, September 25th, 2019 at 6:00 p.m.
Online lecture by Leon Saltiel on his research on the destruction of the Jewish cemetery of Thessaloniki (Salonika), Greece.
The lecture is sponsored by the @UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center.
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