Author Archive

Visit Žagarė,
northern Lithuania,
this weekend

Former Žagarė synagogue.

INVITATION TO A VERY SPECIAL EVENT IN ŽAGARĖ

Under the initiative and leadership of a Lithuanian activist Valdas Balčiūnas, A MEMORIAL PLAQUE TO COMMEMORATE THE ZAGARE JEWISH COMMUNITY will be unveiled. The ceremony coincides and may be considered to be taking place in the context of ZAGARE CHERRY FESTIVAL which will be held in July 12-15. The plaque will be in English, Lithuanian, and Yiddish. Here is what the English version will say:

The festival begins on July 12, 2012.  Here are some highlights of Jewish interest:

• Dedication of the memorial plaque -- Friday July 13 at 1600 in the Zagare Town Square

• "From the History of the Shtetl"– a presentation, exhibition, and concert organized by the Joniskis Municipality Museum -- Friday July 13 at 1700 at the Zagare Culture Centre

• Baltic senior football (soccer) competition including the Makabi team from Vilnius – Saturday July 14 at 1300.

Please let us know if you are planning to attend.   We look forward to seeing a strong representation of descendants of the former Jewish community of Zagare.  After the official events there will be a FRIDAY EVENING GATHERING AND 'KABBALAT SHABBAT' FOR VISITORS.  If you wish to be invited to this please let us know.

For more information please contact any of the following:

UK - Joy Hall (joy@joymaynard.myzen.co.uk        

LITHUANIA -Valdas Balciunas (valdas@me.com)

U.S. - Cliff Marks (c.v.marks@att.net)

ISRAEL - Sara Manobla (manobla@netvision.net.il)  

The first time I heard
the name of Žagarė

Žilvinas Beliauskas

By Žilvinas Beliauskas
Manager of Cultural Projects
Vilnius Jewish Public Library

The first time I heard the name of Zhagare (Žagarė) it was probably like for many Lithuanian kids related to cherries – Zhagre cherrys. Big and juicy ones. There were some of such trees in my parents’ orchard. Zhagare liqeuer came later. Maybe even later than mom‘s notice about St. Barbara of Zhagare (Barbora Žagarietė) from 17^th century, though not beatified yet but very revered in Samogitia (Žemaitija) as a real saint in charge of many miraculous healings. And that was it for many years until it turned out that the family of my wife comes from Zhagare. During the first walking tour with her I enjoyed marvelous streets of wooden houses along river Shvete, radiating strange and sadly atractive kind of romantic atmosphere of brick houses around the Central Square. The architecture prompted straightforwardly that they used to belong to Jews and association with the direction sign by the road at the entrance to Zhagre showing the way to the Graveyard of the Jewish Genocide Victims made this atmosphere still blurry ghostly, not quite tangibly yet but bringing a distant smell of its “echos and absences” to use Roger Cohen phrase in his letter to the forthcoming event this Friday. Later I asked my wife’s grandmother, who is 84, weather it had been difficult during the Second World War. She said, - ouch, we did not see much of the war here; we were made to work of course for the war and got some food supplies but the most terrible thing was about Jews that they were killed. She remebers a German officer commanding from the balcony for the collaborators in the Central Square to start the massacre of the crowd herded into the central area. She was just waving her hands – oh oh oh… Layers of silence or surpressed whispers with heavy locks on wording went afterwards. Maybe or hopefully, or at least some “dutiful nod to shadows” was made by some (R. Cohen again). It’s a riddle for  the younger generations. Perhaps to the older ones too.

It’s a long story and let those who know better to do the healing practice for everybody to speak the truth. Say for Rose Zwi, a writer, who has her ancestors in that mass grave. Her book the “Last walk in Naryshkin Park” to my mind had to be translated immediately after it was published in 1997. Today she is back to Lithuania to celebrate a sign of memory awakening little by little – a special plaque to be unveiled on July 13, 2012 in Zhagare Central Square. There are many other coming to the event from all over the world. R. Zwi made it from Australia. High guests will range from the Ambassador of Israel to film producer and director from Australia Rod Freedman, who made a documentary “Uncle Chatzkel“, „International Herald Tribune“ and “New York Times” columnist Roger Cohen (see his letter below), Joy Hall, the creator of the Lithuanian Link, Cliff Marks, the creator of ShtetLinks and to many others. Rose’s friend Sara Manobla came from Israel, her family has roots in Zhagare. And she she is one of those lucky few surviving Zhagare Jewish offsprings but not the only one to be present on that day.

There were very pleasant moments when on her way to Zhagare Rose Zwi and her friend Sara Manobla in companion of Rose’s local cousin Fryda visited the Vilnius Jewish Public Library on July 09, 2012. Her two presented books, “Last Walk in Naryshkin Park” and “Once Were Slaves” (about the Perlov family fate in Soviet gulags), with authors signatures will be of very high value for the library. The guests were very fond to find out the story of this new library to appear in Vilnius, its initator Wyman Brent and the role it is seeking to play in complex cutural polylog. Luckily, Fryda immediately came accross a book on the shelves “Life of the Jews of Joniškis region during the inter-war period (1918-1940)” where they found many familiar names and faces in the photos.  It seemed the conversation could have lasted for hours and hours and many touched upon and vividly started stories remained to be continued. Everything was possible due to their friend and host Julius Bieliauskas who made all the linking, introducing and provided safe transportation. See more of these moments and see everybody in Zhagare.

Echos and absences 

Roger Cohen

By Roger Cohen,
Columnist, International Herald Tribune and New York Times

            I look forward with considerable emotion to returning to Zagare for the unveiling of a plaque that will commemorate the slaughter of more than 2,250 Jews in the town on October 2, 1941. More than three score years and ten have gone by since that mass murder without full acknowledgment of its scope. The men, women and children taken from the main square into the woods to be killed have remained anonymous, mere shadows, their fates at first concealed by Soviet political calculation and taboos, and then only falteringly recognized after Lithuania gained independence in 1990. I do not know the Jews who were killed but I know that each of them valued life and its joys as we do, and I know that my grandmother, Pauline (“Polly”) Soloveychik would have been among them had she not left Zagare for South Africa in the early 20^th Century. For me, the fate of the Zagare Jews is personal.

When I visited the village for the first time in November last year, as I began research on a family memoir, the last Jew in Zagare, Isaac Mendelson, has just died. So ended a presence that began in the 16^th century. In 1897, three years after my grandmother’s birth, there were 5,443 Jews in Zagare. Mendelson, a community of one, used to stand on the corner of the market square with his dachshund, Chipa. He would recall the times after the war when he was a goalkeeper for the local soccer team. Never did he talk about the day Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators murdered the Jews, including members of his own family.

            Zagare is a place of echoes and absences, my grandmother’s being but one. It hovers over loss, a void that whispers. I came back to see what might have been. Next to a bridge on the Svete I noticed a plaque commemorating the death on June 29, 1941, of Jonas Bavanauskas, who was “killed defending his homeland.” He died a few days after the Nazis invaded Lithuania and embarked on one of the swiftest mass murders of a nation’s Jews in the entire European I extermination program, one largely completed before the gassing facilities of industrialized Jewish annihilation were in place.

Bavanauskas, who merits a plaque, was not a Jew. Yet he alone is identified in Zagare. He is thereby accorded a presence that feels like more than a dutiful nod to shadows. He lived, he felt, he resisted, he died. His name is there, legible. It is there at the center of a town that lies between two disused Jewish cemeteries, one in the “new” and one in the “old” district. In the cemeteries gravestones lurch, lichen advances and Hebrew inscriptions crumble or fade into illegibility. Fragments of letters recall Anna Akhmatova’s words in Requiem, “I’d like to call you all by name, but the list has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.”

The plaque to be unveiled on July 13, 2012, will go some way toward giving the people of Zagare a place to look to understand the history of their town. It is past time for that.