Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė at March Photo credit: March of the Living
Marking the National Memorial Day for the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews, the Prime Minister of Lithuania, Ingrida Šimonytė, along with other senior Lithuanian Government officials and the International Commission for the investigation of the Nazis crimes in Lithuania, on Thursday joined members and leaders of the Lithuanian Jewish community and Holocaust education and commemoration organization, the International March of the Living, in a symbolic march from the site of the Jewish Ghetto in Vilnius, to the mass grave on the Paneriai (formerly Ponary) suburb of the city.
The Lithuanian Jewish community has a long and rich history, dating back to the 13th century. At its peak, in the early 20th century, the Jewish population of Lithuania was over 160,000, or about 7% of the total population. Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe, with over 100,000 Jews living there.
The Lithuanian Jewish community made significant contributions to Lithuanian culture and society. Lithuanian Jews were prominent in business, the arts, and academia. They also played an important role in the Lithuanian independence movement.
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And it is most famous for being the home of the Vilna Gaon (Great Sage of Vilna), Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, one of the greatest Tora scholars who ever lived. Three hundred years ago he was the rabbi who is credited with the foundation of the yeshiva movement on the Orthodox Jewish world. To this day, non-Hassidic ultra-orthodox Jews are associated with his teachings and are known as “Litvakers,” the Yiddish term for Lithuanians.
But during the Holocaust most of the community and its great schools were wiped out. Between July 1941-August 1944, some 70,000 people, mostly Jewish Lithuanians were murdered in cold blood by the Nazis and their collaborators, at the Ponary mass grave. Each year, Lithuania remembers the victims in a national memorial day, marking the anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto – which was carried out 80 years ago, 23–24 September 1943.
Lithuanian Jewry consisted of approximately 200,000 Jews before the Holocaust, with 70,000 living in the capital city of Vilnius, where the main ghetto was built. The Nazis nearly obliterated the Jewish community in Lithuania in the Summer and Autumn of 1941 in what is called “Holocaust by Bullets,” when Nazis shot the Jews of Eastern Europe and buried them in mass graves. Over 200 Jewish communities were obliterated in Lithuania alone. Ponary marks one of the most prominent symbols of the Holocaust, for Eastern European Jews and in general.
Today only a few thousand Jews live in Lithuania.
The march of remembrance saw thousands of people, among them hundreds of young students, retrace the fateful journey of many of the Jewish men, women, and children of the ghetto who were taken to Ponary to be murdered.
Attending the march for the second consecutive year, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė noted last year: “What happened is not just a tragedy of the Jewish people, it is a tragedy of all the peoples who lived then and live now in Lithuania – it is a tragedy of the whole world because the world. However, such catastrophes can happen again – outbreaks of violence and incitement to hatred have not gone away.”
