The Vanished World of Lithuanian Jews.

NIKŽENTAITIS, Alvydas, Stefan SCHREINER & Darius STALIUNAS (Eds.)
Amsterdam/New York, NY, 2004, XV, 323 pp.

Series:
On the Boundary of Two Worlds: Identity, Freedom, and Moral Imagination in the Baltics 1

“a path-breaking collection …The authors of the studies are recognized as leading scholars in the field and their articles offer a wide-ranging objective picture of the issues that are generally free from polemic and stereotypical descriptions”
Religious Studies Review -Vol. 31, Issue 1 & 2, January, April 2005

“constitutes on the whole a useful contribution to the historiography of the Baltic region, but also to Jewish studies and the growing historiography of non-Russian regions of the Russian empire and Soviet Union.“
Nordost-Archiv XIV (2005)

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 Telšiai (2001), Lithuania. Participants came from Israel, the USA, Great Britain, Poland, Russia, Belarus, Germany, and Lithuania.

Table of Contents:
Leonidas DONSKIS: Preface
John D. KLIER: Traditions of the Commonwealth: Lithuanian Jewry and the Exercise of Political Power in Tsarist Russia
Darius STALIUNAS: Changes in the Political Situation and the “Jewish Question” in the Lithuanian Gubernias of the Russian Empire (1855-April 1863)
Theodore R. WEEKS: Politics, Society, and Antisemitism: Peculiarities of the Russian Empire and Lithuanian Lands
Vladas SIRUTAVICIUS: Notes on the Origin and Development of Modern Lithuanian Antisemitism in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century and at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
Ezra MENDELSOHN: Some Remarks on the Jewish Condition in Interwar East Central Europe
Eglč BENDIKAITÉ: Expressions of Litvak Pro-Lithuanian Political Orientation c. 1906-c.1921
Ceslovas LAURINAVICIUS: Lithuanian General Aspects of Domestic Policy 1918-1940
Saulius SUŽIEDČLIS: The Historical Sources for Antisemitism in Lithuania and Jewsih-Lithuanian Relation during the 1930s
Verena DOHRN: State and Minorities. The First Lithuanian Republic and S.M. Dubnov’s Concept of Cultural Autonomy
Yitzhak ARAD: The Murder of the Jews in German-Occupied Lithuania (1941-1944)
Arunas BUBNYS: The Holocaust in Lithuania: An Outline of the Major Stages at their Results
Gershon GREENBERG: Holocaust and Musar for the Telšiai Yeshivah: Avraham Yitshak and Eliyahu Meir Bloch
Yevgeni ROZENBLAT: The Holocaust in the Western Regions of Belarus
Martin C. DEAN: Lithuanian Participation in the Mass Murder of Jews in Belarus and Ukraine (1941-1944)
Joachim TAUBER: Coming to Terms with a Difficult Past
Summaries
About the Authors

About the Authors

Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Director of the Lithuanian Institute of History in
Vilnius, Lithuania. He is the founder and the former director of the Centre
for West Lithuanian and Prussian History at the University of Klaipeda,
Lithuania. Areas of interest: the history of mediaeval Lithuania, Lithuania
in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and stereotypes in
historiography. He published several books in Lithuanian on the Grand
Duchy of Lithuania in the Middle Ages, and is the author of the book,
Witold i Jagiello. Polacy i Litwini we wzajemnym stereotypie [Vytautas
and Jagiello. Poles and Lithuanians in Mutual Stereotyping] (Poznan,
2000).

Stefan Schreiner, Chair for History of Religion and Jewish Studies, and
Head of the Institutum Judaicum at Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen,
Germany. He is mainly engaged in the study of Polish-Jewish cultural
history and the history and culture of the Karaites in the former Polish-
Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Darius Staliunas earned his doctorate from Vytautas Magnus University
in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1997. Currently, he serves as Deputy Director of
the Lithuanian Institute of History in Vilnius, Lithuania. The author of
Visuomene be universiteto? (Aukštosios mokyklos atkurimo problema
Lietuvoje: XIX a. vidurys–XX a. pradžia) (Vilnius: Lithuanian History
Institute Press, 2000) [Society without a University? (On the Reestablishment
of a Higher-Education Institution in Lithuania between the
Mid-Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries)].

John D. Klier is Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History in the
Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at University College London,
UK. He received his BA and MA from the University of Notre Dame in
Indiana, USA, and his PhD from the University of Illinois (Urbana-
Champaign), USA. Klier is the author of numerous articles devoted to
Jewish history and culture in the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire. He is
the author of Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the Jewish
Question in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb, 1986) [expanded Russian
edition Rossiia sobiraet svoikh Evreev (Moscow and Jerusalem, 2000),
and Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge, UK,
1996), and the editor, with S. Lambroza, of Pogroms: Anti-Jewish
Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge, UK, 1992). Klier is
presently completing a major study of the pogroms of 1881–2.

Theodore R. Weeks was awarded his PhD by the University of
California at Berkeley, USA, in 1992, and joined the SIUC History
Department in 1993. He teaches courses in European, Eastern European,
and Russian history. Dr Weeks’s research interests focus on nationality
and ethnicity, particularly in the context of East Central Europe. He has
published Nation and State in Late Imperial Russia: Nationalism and
Russification on the Western Frontier, 1863–1914 (1996). His present
research projects examine socio-economic and ethnic change in the
Lithuanian and Belarusian provinces of the Russian Empire and relations
between Poles and Jews from the 1850s to 1914.

Vladas Sirutavicius serves as Senior Fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of
History. Head of the scholarly programme “Modernisation of Lithuanian
Society and Ethnic Conflicts: Non-Dominant Ethnic Groups in Lithuania
from the nineteenth century to 1940.” He is the author of a monograph,
scores of articles published in Lithuanian, English, and Polish, and editor
of several collections of articles. His main scholarly interests lie in social
and cultural history of Lithuania and East Central Europe, nationalism
and national movements. For now he is focused on the development of
modern Lithuanian antisemitism. He also teaches in the Institute of
International Relations and Political Science at the University of Vilnius,
Lithuania.

Ezra Mendelsohn acts now as Professor of History at Boston University,
USA, and also as Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Contemporary
Jewry and in Russian and East European Studies, Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Israel. Having earned his PhD from Columbia University,
USA, he served as lecturer in the afore-mentioned Institute at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem from 1969 to 2002. Professor Mendelsohn is the
author of many books including Painting a People. Maurycy Gottlieb and
Jewish Art (Brandeis University Tauber Institute for the Study of
European Jewry Series: University Press of New England, 2002), On
Modern Jewish Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), The
Jews of East Central Europe between the World Wars (Bloomington,
Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1983), Zionism in Poland. The Formative
Years, 1915–1926 (New Haven, N.J.: Yale University Press, 1981), and
Class Struggle in the Pale. The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers’
Movement in Czarist Russia (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press, 1970).

Egle Bendikaite is a doctoral student in the History Department of the
Faculty of Humanities at Vytautas Magnus University; Research
Assistant at the Lithuanian Institute of History; Lecturer in Vilnius
Yiddish Institute at the University of Vilnius. Fields of interests: Jewish
nationalism in Lithuania: its thought and politics; the history of
antisemitism in Lithuania; the history of ethnic and national minorities in
inter-war Lithuania and East Central Europe.

Ceslovas Laurinavicius is Senior Fellow at the Lithuanian Institute of
History. The field of research: political history, diplomacy, geopolitics.
He is the author of Peace Treaty between Lithuania and Soviet Russia,
Vilnius, 1992 (in Lithuanian) and Politics and Diplomacy: The
Fragments of Becoming and Development of the Modern Lithuanian
State, Vilnius, 1997 (in Lithuanian).

Saulius Sužiedelis acts as Associate Professor of History at Millersville
University in Pennsylvania, USA. From 1994 to 1998 he was editor of the
scholarly quarterly, The Journal of Baltic Studies. At present he is also
working on a history of Lithuania during World War Two, entitled The
Other War: Crisis, Conflict and Holocaust in Lithuania. In September
1998 he was appointed to the Republic of Lithuania’s Presidential
Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet
Occupations. Areas of competence: Russia, USSR and Eastern Europe,
especially the history of the Baltic States and Soviet nationalities; World
War Two. Extensive college teaching experience in Western civilisation,
philosophy and international relations. University-level courses in
Russian, Soviet and East European history. He is the author of The Sword
and the Cross: A History of the Church in Lithuania. Huntington,
Indiana: OSV Press, 1988; Historical Dictionary of Lithuania. [European
Historical Dictionaries No. 21]. Scarecrow Press: Lanham, MD, and
London, 1997. Listed as an Outstanding Academic Book of 1998 by
Choice magazine.

Verena Dohrn, read History and German at the University of Hanover,
Germany; 1986 gained Doctorate in Slavonic Studies from University of
Bielefeld; 1987–93 free-lance writer; 1994–99 research officer in the
Research Project on the History of Jews in Eastern Europe at the
Universities of Bremen and Göttingen, funded by the German Research
Council [DFG]; Higher Doctorate [Habilitation] in Modern History (main
field: East European History) at the University of Göttingen, researching
“The Jewish Enlightenment and state cultural assimilation policy in the
Russian Empire”; free-lance Associate Professor in the Mediaeval and
Modern History Seminar, University of Göttingen; head of a publishing
project, Die Erinnerungen Simon Dubnows [The Simon Dubnow
Memoirs], on behalf of the Simon-Dubnow-Institut (University of
Leipzig). Pubications: Reise nach Galizien (1991), Baltische Reise
(1994), various articles in learned journals concerning the history and
culture of East-European Jewry.

Yitzhak Arad was born in Lithuania in1926. During the war was fighting
in the ranks of Soviet partisans. At the end of 1945 reached Israel. Served
in Israeli army in the years 1948–1972, and retired in the rank of brigadegeneral.
He earned PhD from Tel-Aviv University. In the years 1972–
1993 was Chairman of Yad-Vashem in Jerusalem. Dr Arad published six
books, among them Ghetto in Flames, Operation Reinhard Death Camps
– Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and some others, and also dozens of articles.
He accomplished recently a two volume research, The Holocaust in the
Occupied Territories of Soviet Union, which will be published soon.

Arunas Bubnys is Senior Felow in the Department of the Twentieth-
Century History at the Lithuanian Institute of History. The field of
interest – the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. His major works include
Lietuviu antinacine rezistencija 1941–1944 m. [Lithuanian anti-Nazi
Resistance, 1941–1944], Vilnius, 1991; Lenku pogrindis Lietuvoje 1939–
1940 m. [Polish Underground in Lithuania, 1939–1940], Vilnius, 1994;
Vokieciu okupuota Lietuva (1941–1944) [Lithuania under German
Occupation, 1941–1944], Vilnius, 1998.

Gershon Greenberg’s field is the history of religious thought through the
Holocaust. He is currently researching Jewish religious practice in the
camps and ghettos at the International Institute for Holocaust Research at
Yad Vashem. Dr Greenberg acts as Professor of Religion at the American
University in Washington, D.C., USA. He has served as visiting professor
of Jewish thought at the following universities: Hebrew University, Bar
Ilan University, Tel Aviv University, and Haifa University in Israel, and
at the Free University in Berlin. Professor Greenberg is the recipient of a
Skirball Fellowship in Hebrew Studies at Oxford, and was awarded a
Fulbright Teaching Fellowship for Lithuania. He has published thirty
articles and book chapters about wartime Jewish religious thinkers and
movements in reaction to the catastrophe. In addition, he has published a
three-volume annotated bibliography of Jewish religious literature and the
Holocaust through the war.

Yevgeni Rozenblat, an Assistant Professor in the department of World
History at Brest State University, Belarus. He earned his doctoral degree
in 1997 for: “The Nazi Policy of Genocide in Relation to Jewish
Population in the Western Regions of Belarus, 1941–1944.” Areas of
interest: the Holocaust in Belarus and the USSR; Jews in western Belarus
in 1939–1941; history of the Jews in Poland (1921–1939); antisemitism
in Poland and Belarus.

Martin C. Dean earned his PhD in History from Queens’ College,
Cambridge, UK, in 1989. Currently he serves as an Applied Research
Scholar of the Centre for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Dr Dean is the author
of the book, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police
in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (London & New York: Macmillan
and St. Martin’s Press, 2000), and also of a number of articles in
genocide, Holocaust and collaborationism studies published in several
countries.

Joachim Tauber, Dr Phil; studied Germanic and Latin philology; in
1989 defended his doctoral thesis at the Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg,
Germany. Currently, Dr Tauber is a Researcher at the Institut für Kultur
und Geschichte der Deutschen in Nordosteuropa in Lüneburg. His
research interests are: German-Lithuanian relations in the twentieth
century; Lithuania between the wars; and the Second World War. Dr
Tauber acts as a lecturer at the universities of Hamburg and Klaipeda, and
also is a member of the editorial board of the journal Lithuanian Foreign
Policy Review; appointed to the Lithuanian Presidential Commission for
the Investigation of the War Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupations.

Abstracts

John D. Klier: Traditions of the Commonwealth: Lithuanian Jewry and the Exercise of Political Power in Tsarist Russia
Just as the years 1881-2 proved a crucial moment in the history of East European Jewry, with the emergence of the so-called 'New Politics', they also marked a change in the status of Vilna and Lithuanian Jewry. The decisive political role of Lithuanian Jewry, which this essay has described, was on the wane. Specifically, Lithuanian Jews were no longer alone in the political arena. On the regional level, the Jewish communities of Kiev, Odessa and Kharkov were playing a greater role than ever before, to say nothing of the distinctive role of the Jews of Warsaw in the politics of Poland. Migration within the Pale helped spread the ideas and activities which at one time had been distinctively 'Lithuanian'. On the national level, an articulate leadership took shape in St Petersburg which claimed to speak for all of 'Russian Jewry'. Although Vilna continued to serve, not just as the 'Jerusalem of Lithuania' for the religious Orthodox , but also as a 'Holy Community' for both the partisans of Zionism and the socialists of the Bund, she lost the priority which she had held since the days of the Commonwealth. The pressures and opportunities of modernity were merging Lithuanian Jewry into a greater mass which could, albeit with many qualifications, be called 'Russian Jewry'.

Darius Staliunas: Changes in the political situation and the “Jewish Question” in the Lithuanian gubernias (1855-March 1863)
This article analyses the ways in which the “Polish Question” changed the attitudes of Governor General Vladimir Nazimov (1855-63) of Vilnius towards the Jews. Until 1860-61, that is while he still regarded the local social elite (the Poles) as his allies and sought compromise with them, Nazimov regarded the Jews as a parasite group and associated improvements in the lot of this ethno-confessional group with the expansion of Russian education. The "merger" of this ethno-confessional group was supposed to take place gradually and at first "privileges" could be expected only by a small group which had undergone Russian education. The Vilnius governor general's proposals were of a clearly coercive nature. For example Jewish merchants wishing to remain members of that class had to graduate from Russian schools. The danger posed by the "Poles" after 1861 forced the governor general to make other types of political proposals for the Jews than had been made previously. Now not only were Poles no longer regarded as allies in the cause of "retraining" Jews (gentry masters were supposed to oversee Jewish farmers, according to an 1860 proposal) but also there was a need to try to protect Jews from the Poles' anti-government activities. Therefore the governor general offered certain concessions and even, it seems, was inclined to support the same policy as had been implemented in the Kingdom of Poland on the initiative of Aleksander Wielopolski. However, the central authorities were not inclined to maintain this kind of policy throughout the territory of the former Commonwealth of the Two Nations. Most probably Russian bureaucrats feared lest Jews "exploit" Russian peasants even more if discriminatory laws were to be repealed within the Pale of Settlement, whereas most peasants in the Kingdom of Poland were Polish.

Theodore R. Weeks: Politics, Society, and Antisemitism: Peculiarities of the Russian Empire and Lithuanian Lands
In the Russian Empire, Jews and Lithuanians lived in close proximity. Unlike in the neighboring Polish provinces, however, a well-developed antisemitic movement never developed among Lithuanians before World War I. This article attempts to explain this phenomenon in the context of European antisemitism and the political structures of the late Russian Empire. I conclude that while relations between Lithuanians and Jews were not uniformly positive and one can find antisemitic voices among Lithuanian nationalists before 1914, antisemitic tendencies remained limited, in large part because the Polish and Russian threats to Lithuanian cultural-national interests were far more obvious than any potential Jewish threat.

Vladas Sirutavicius: Notes on the origin and development of modern Lithuanian anti-Semitism in the second half of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century
This article analyses the specific character of the formation of modern Lithuanian anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth century. It is asserted that anti-Semitism did not play a greater role in the process of the Lithuanian national movement’s politicization, which development particular momentum in the period under review. Unlike its counterparts in central-European countries the Lithuanian national movement did not set up political structures whose aim was to mobilize society for the struggle against the Jews as agents of capitalism and modern society that threatened Lithuanian identity or the aims of the national movement. The article concludes that this happened because Jews were not regarded as presenting a direct danger to Lithuanian cultural and political aims which were imbued with significance in the early twentieth century by the search for political autonomy. They were not regarded as dangerous because of their specific place in Lithuanian society and their culturo-psychological closed nature. It is noted that the emerging modern Lithuanian political and social elite regarded Poles and polonicity in a completely different way. Of course, this does not mean that anti-Semitism did not appear in one form or another in the ideology of the Lithuanian national movement. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century there were attempts to systematize opposition to the Jews by placing increasing stress on divergence between Lithuanian and Jewish economic interests. In Lithuanian political and social thought Jews came to be depicted more and more as economic rivals whom it was necessary to overcome in order to achieve the development and modernization of Lithuanian society. The article suggests that the appearance of the “Jew-economic rival” concept may have been influenced by social and economic changes in Lithuanian society at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, accuratius by the process of disintegration within agricultural structures which formed conditions for Lithuanian peasants to take up artisan trades and commerce. At the same time it is stressed that society’s social-economic dynamic was relatively slow and thus influenced only a very small section of the Lithuanian peasantry. The Jews succeeded in maintaining their socio-economic niche and their dominant place in commerce and artisan trades while the Lithuanian community remained too “weak” and slightly structured to be able to change its society’s social structure that has remained the same for a long period of history.

Ezra Mendelsohn: Some Remarks on the Jewish Condition in Interwar East Central Europe
The interwar period was a time when some of the oppressed national minorities of the region finally obtained what they deserved - political independence and the opportunity to rebuild their national cultures. I am thinking of the Poles, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Estonians, the Czechs and Slovaks, among others. Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, the triumph of these "victims of history" was not shared by other "victims" - such as the Jews and other groups whose minority status was not altered as a result of the war. On the contrary, these groups continued to suffer from varying degrees of discrimination, hatred, and violence. The victory of the Poles was no victory for Poland's Ukrainian, German, Belorussian, and Jewish communities. To point this out is to highlight the central role of victimization as part of national identity of the small nations of East Central Europe. It is obvious today, after the terrible tragedies of World War II and in the wake of the Communist domination of Eastern Europe that one of the greatest obstacles to understanding between Jews and the other peoples of this region has to do with their self-perception as victims. It is difficult to make room in the Jewish historical narrative, which privileges the sufferings of the Jewish people, for other sufferers, and I suspect that this may be so in the case of the Lithuanians as well.

Egle Bendikaite: Expressions of Litvak pro-Lithuanian political orientation c. 1906 – c. 1921
This article attempts to analyse the political orientation of the Litvaks in their homeland during a period of crisis in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It treats the Litvaks as an autonomous ethnic community with its own national/ethnic interests, political aims and vision for the future. The political self-determination of the Litvaks and the settling of relations with newly emerged subjects, the new national states, were influenced by outside factors and circumstances. The Jews were the only minority to have a determining influence on the country’s fate without having any territorial pretensions of their own. Their experience during the First World War and the country’s new geopolitical situation transformed Litvak attitudes to nationalist Poland and Soviet Russia and turned them into supporters of the re-established state of Lithuania. Living in one state together with the small Lithuanian nation protected in theory at least the local Jews’ position, guaranteed them cultural autonomy and equal political rights and thus was safer for the Litvaks and suited the interests they sought to defend. To solve the issue of the rise of a “power vacuum” in the east the Litvaks saw in the Lithuanian Republic an optimal guarantor of stability for the local community that would defend them from extreme nationalism and radicalism.

Ceslovas Laurinavicius: Lithuanian General Aspects of Domestic Policy 1918-40
This study claims that Lithuania’s dramatic history between 1918 and 1940 was conditioned by the gap between the Lithuanian state projected in great power politics as a balancing element between Germany, Russia and Poland, and the actual ethno-demographic situation in the territory which the projected Lithuanian state was supposed to occupy. This project, which we can only deal with as a hypothesis, was based on the theory of a balance of power and Lithuanian statehood’s historical tradition that was supposed to help consolidate local inhabitants for political coexistence under the new conditions. Meanwhile the peoples living on the projected Lithuanian territory, the Lithuanians, Poles, Jews and Belorussians, had their own national agendas which did not coincide with the projection offered for a new Lithuanian state. In the real Lithuanian state which was formed in the aftermath of the First World War and occupied only part of the projected territory, the dominant position was taken by the Lithuanians who made a certain alliance with the Jews against the Poles. However, this was a marriage of convenience which threatened to become a conflict because it was not affected by any stronger consolidating external or internal factors. When World War Two began the nationality conflict in Lithuania became a tragedy.

Saulius Sužiedelis:The Historical Sources for anti-Semitism in Lithuania and Jewish-Lithuanian Relations during the 1930s
The years of independence were not a period of systemic persecution for Lithuania’s Jewish community. Important factors mitigated anti-Semitic tendencies, especially before the international and domestic crises of 1938–1940. During its two decades of existence, the First Republic passed not a single anti-Semitic statute and continued to subsidize Jewish religious and cultural life. The animosity of many Lithuanians towards Nazi Germany, stemming largely from the conflict over Klaipeda, limited the inroads of anti-Semitic propaganda. Jews themselves often compared their lot favourably to that of their kinsmen in other countries, most notably, Poland. Even in the later 1930s, racial anti-Semitism found a response among only a part of the Lithuanian public. Ethnic disturbances in Lithuania were relatively infrequent and localized. There is no record, as of this writing, of anyone having been killed in an anti-Semitic pogrom during the period (1920–1938) when the government was in effective control of the country.
Furthermore, the clashes over control of the economy and cultural orientation should not obscure some positive, albeit tenuous, developments in the life of Lithuania’s Jewish community. One should not minimize the significance of independent Lithuania’s legal and political structure which provided a basic guarantee for the country’s minorities and, when necessary, a physical barrier of police force against base nativist instincts. Invasion and war would sweep away this structure with fatal consequences for Lithuania’s Jews as well as much of the population at large.

Verena Dohrn: State and Minorities - The First Lithuanian Republic and S. M. Dubnov’s Concept of Cultural Autonomy
The Jewish historian from Russia Simon Dubnov describing himself as a “Lithuanian emigrant” did not participate directly in founding of the first Lithuanian Republic, but he had some influence – as a politician, as an ideologist and as a historian – on the creation of the state in three significant respects. Firstly, there was a long and strong Litvak tradition of Jewish politics in Eastern Europe, which was capable of modernizing itself during the last decades of Tsarist reign, and Dubnov’s political activities were an integral part of it. Secondly, for Dubnov especially the Litvak tradition and history served for a model of his modern Jewish Diaspora concept (the concept of autonomism). Thirdly, given the reality for Jews in Eastern Europe, which was dramatically changing and posed a threatening situation (e.g. World War I), Dubnov pragmatically transferred his conceptual politics on an international stage and with his impartial charisma, activities, and connections influenced international politics which enforced, conceptualized, and tried to control the foundation of the ‘minority states’ in Eastern Europe and in this framework – Lithuania.

Yitzhak Arad: The Murder of the Jews in German-Occupied Lithuania (1941–1944)
According to estimates, about 7–8,000 Lithuanian Jews of those who were evacuated from the Baltic States on the eve of the German retreat survived in Germany. About 1,700 Jews survived in Lithuania, among them about 900 as partisans in the forests and the rest in hiding or with the help of Aryan documents. Some of them were aided by local people, those "Righteous Among the Nations." Out of the 203-207,000 Jews who had remained in Lithuania under German occupation, less than 5 percent survived; among them, less than 1 percent within Lithuania and in the forests of west Belorussia. This number (or percentage) of surviving Jews was one of the lowest in comparision to other countries in Europe under German occupation. The explanation lies in the widescale collaboration with the Germans on the part of the local people and the large numbers among them who enlisted voluntarily into the police units that carried out most of the murder actions against the Lithuanian Jews and participated in the killings of Jews in Belorussla, the Ukraine, and the Generalgouvernement of Poland. From about 15,000 Lithuanian Jews who were deported or escaped to the Soviet Union, about 12,000 survived. Most of those who perished were soldiers in the 16 Lithuanian Division in the Soviet army and fell in battle. The glorious history of so many generations of Lithuanian Jewry, with its famous religious and secular institutions, came to its tragic end in the years 1941–1944.

Arunas Bubnys: The Holocaust in Lithuania: An outline of major stages and results
This article attempts to distinguish the most important stages of the Holocaust in Lithuania, elucidate the characteristics of each stage and illustrate the consequences of the genocide against the Jews. The author divides the genocide process into three periods: from the end of June to November 1941 (with two sub-periods of late June to mid-July and late July to November 1941); December 1941 to March 1943 and April 1943 to mid-July 1944. The most intensive murder of Jews took place during the first period. Until the end of July 1941 political motives were dominant. Jews were arrested, imprisoned and shot as former Communists, members of the Comsomol, as Soviet officials and supporters. Other Lithuanian citizens were treated in a similar way for the same reason, be they Poles, Lithuanians or Russians. Jewish men were the largest persecuted group. Women and children were not murdered systematically and en masse as yet. The period of racial genocide began at the end of July 1941. Jews were murdered not for political reasons but for racial ones, that is because they were Jewish. Jews were murdered most intensively in the large towns and provinces of Lithuania from mid-August to November. During this period around 80 (eighty) percent of Lithuanian Jewry was murdered. Because representatives of the Wehrmacht and German civilian authorities intervened only Jews who were able to work and their families were left alive. They were to carry out work of importance for the German war effort. At the end of 1941 there were 45,000 Jews left in Lithuania out of the 200,000 who lived in the country before the beginning of the Nazi-Soviet War. They were locked up in the ghettos of Vilnius, Kaunas, Šiauliai and Švencionys. The initiative for the persecution of the Jews came from the German civilian government (the military commendants, security police, SD agents and special groups and later the commissars of the civil authorities). German occupying institutions also headed the process of persecuting and murdering Jews. Even so the Lithuanian administration subject to the nazis was also drawn broadly into the process (district administrators, town mayors and especially the public and security police, police battalions and auxiliary police groups [the so-called "partisans"]). The role of the Lithuanian administration was of particular importance in the Holocuast, especially in the murder of provincial Jews. During the second period of the Holocaust (Dec 1941-April 1942) nazi attention was turned to using the Jews for the war effort. During this stable or calm period there were no mass murders. Almost all fit men of working age (approximately 30,000 in all) worked in factories, various firms and the ghetto workshops. The calm period came to an end in spring 1943. As underground opposition grew in strength and Jews escaped from the ghettos and labour camps, during the spring and summer of 1943 the largest ghetto in Lithuania, the Vilnius Ghetto was liquidated. Its inmates were transported to Estonian and Latvian concentration camps. The ghettos in Kaunas and Šiauliai were turned into concentration camps and their regimes were made much harsher. As the eastern front approached Lithuania in summer 1944 the Kaunas and Šiauliai ghettoes were liquidated and their inmates transported to Germany (Stutthof, Dachau, Auschwitz and so on). Just a few thousand Lithuanian Jews lived to see the end of the war. Around 200,000 Jews died in nazi-occupied Lithuania and in nazi camps beyond Lithuania's borders (in all around (95 [ninety five] percent of Lithuanian Jewry). Never in Lithuania's history has so large a proportion of its population been murdered in so short a time.

Gershon Greenberg: Holocaust and Musar for the Telšiai Yeshivah: Avraham Yitshak and Eliyahu Meir Bloch
The words of Avraham Yitshak Bloch in 1939 and 1940 revealed his religious path to martyrdom. His life was of Bitahon, and ultimately this Bitahon meant a total surrender to God and His goodness, independent of and transcending the darkness of the era. His final act of Mesirat nefesh affirmed and completed the Bitahon of the era of Ikveta dimeshiha. His younger brother carried his effort further—not in the face of death but before the threshold of new life. Having reconciled himself to the place of suffering in the process of completing the soul and reaching God in Telšiai, once in America he applied it to the future. In America, rooted in Torah, Israel could shatter the darkness and burst forth towards God’s goodness which awaited it. Avraham Yitshak Bloch’s Bitahon was overshadowed by a cloud of dark confusion. But he did not despair of Bitahon—for example, resorting to pleading for God’s mercy (Rahamim). Instead he prepared himself for martyrdom. As it turned out, his preparation anticipated the reality to come. Eliyahu Meir Bloch viewed the dark confusion as God’s Din which provided an opportunity to enhance the soul. The very incomprehensibility of the suffering allowed the path of light to God to expand—if commitment to God endured. As it turned out, and he faced not murder at Rainiai but possibility in America, his preparation also anticipated the reality to come. Committed to Bitahon, the brothers together led their people into death, and into life in history, blending existential commitment to the goodness of God and the creation which shared it with the metaphysical reality of Hesed—through Mesirat nefesh for one, and through Torah for the other. As if speaking with one another across time and space, the brothers together led the way of Musar through the Holocaust.

Yevgeni Rozenblat: The Holocaust in the western regions of Belarus
The article investigates one of the urgent problems of Belorussian history dated back to the Great Patriotic War. The author carried out a complex analysis of main trends of Nazi policy in relation to the Jewish population in the Western regions of Belarus: ghettoization, robberies, intensive exploitation. The author also showed stages, methods, and forms of political and legal discrimination of Jews. The article analyses the Judenrat activities, the work of organizations of food supply, social and medical care for the Jewish population before and after the creation of ghettos. In addition to that, it documents the discriminating character of the main objectives of the German occupation authorities, their social and economic policy towards the Jewish population in the western regions of Belarus, the exploitation of Jewish manpower, and the organization of forced labour using qualified Jews in the production sphere in the years 1941-43. Furthermore, based on archive materials, published sources, and a number of publications of Belarussian and other researchers, the author specifies the number of victims of the Holocaust in the western regions of Belarus.

Martin C. Dean: Lithuanian participation in the mass murder of Jews in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941-1944
In summary - about 5,000 Lithuanians served outside their home country on rear area guard duty during the period 1941-43. At this time Hitler was most reluctant to grant them an equal status as allied military units fighting against the Soviets directly at the front. Instead, as part of Himmler's extensive Police apparatus in the East, some of them were called upon to take part in executions of Jews under the direction of the Security Police, the Order Police and the Wehrmacht. The most detailed evidence of such actions concerns the 12th Schutzmannschaft Battalion which was involved in a series of executions in the autumn of 1941. The details regarding this unit are well known, as they have been the subject of a number of separate War Crimes investigations. Nevertheless, live eye-witness evidence is hard to obtain, mainly due to the mobile nature of the killing operations. As the victims did not know the perpertrators, evidence can only be gained from the unit members themselves, most of whom are now dead or unwilling to testify. Additional evidence also points to the widespread participation of some other Lithuanian police units in murder operations, especially during the second wave of Jewish executions in Belorussia and Ukraine in 1942. A few Lithuanians even served directly with the Security Police in Belorussia probably having been detached there from Einsatzkommando 3 in Lithuania. Having proved themselves quite effective in the pogroms against the Jews and Communists encouraged by Einsatzgruppe A on entering Lithuania, it was understandable that the German police should employ Lithuanian units for similar tasks elsewhere. Lithuanian police units were not alone as collaborators with the Germans in the Holocaust in the East. Many local policemen in Belorussia assisted the Germans in these crimes, as did Ukrainian and Latvian police auxiliaries both in Belorussia and their home territories. Nevertheless the few Lithuanians sent to Belorussia earned their countrymen an unfortunate reputation through their willing and brutal participation in atrocities. The example of Germany itself has demonstrated that a start can only be made in exorcising these demons if the truth is confronted openly, however unpleasant that task may be.

Joachim Tauber: Coming to Terms with a Difficult Past
The article first focuses on the role of the holocaust in Lithuania within the process of the annihilation of Europe's Jewry. It contends that comparing the holocaust in Lithuania with other regions in Eastern and Western Europe is an appropriate mean to get a clearer picture of the peculiarities of the destruction process in Lithuania. How the Federal Republic of Germany tried to cope with a murderous past, is the second question to be answered. Only beginning in the late 60's German society and historians really tried to open their minds to an unsettling past. Since then the Holocaust has become one of the most important themes of public discussion and academic research.