EXHIBITION:A new Irish-Jewish documentary and exhibition explores the fate of Lithuania's remaining Jewish community, which barely survived the Holocaust, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE.
THE LINKS BETWEEN Ireland and Lithuania strengthened in recent years as Lithuanians came here looking for work and helped to build our late, lamented boom. But there were links between Ireland and Lithuania forged long before, when Jews left Tsarist pogroms in Lithuania, then ruled by Russia, to settle here in the late 19th and early 20th century.
“Almost all the Jews in Dublin when I was growing up were of Lithuanian origin,” says writer and lecturer Shivaun Woolfson. “Most of the Lithuanian Jews came from Akmene, a town in the north of the country. It was said in Jewish circles in Dublin that if you weren’t from Akmene then you weren’t in the club.”
On her recent trip to Lithuania to make the documentary Surviving History, which was filmed by her two sons, Jesse and Daniel, Woolfson visited an old Jewish cemetery. The caretaker of the cemetery had civil records going back 300 years. "And the names were the same as the Jewish names in Dublin: Mirrelson, Samuels, Abrahamson, Clein, Eppel."
The Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, which is the 2009 European Capital of Culture, was once known as “the Jerusalem of the North”.
“There were a lot of Rabbinical scholars there,” says Woolfson. “Vilnius became a citadel of Jewish learning.” The resulting culture became known as Litvak – after the combination of Lithuanian and Yiddish, the language that Lithuanian Jews speak to this day. It was only when she got to Lithuania that she recognised that the culture she had grown up with in Dublin was Litvak. “Going to people’s houses there was like going to my auntie’s house.”
Before the second World War, there were 240,000 Jews in Lithuania. After the war, there were 20,000. The speed and efficiency with which this liquidation was achieved was due in part to the collaboration of Lithuanian police and civilians. Today, there are just 5,000 Jews left in Lithuania.
This Holocaust is the subject of Surviving History, which was shown at Cannes earlier this month. It is not a subject that is popular in modern Lithuania. The country's history is as brutal as it is complex: the Museum of Genocide Victims in Vilnius was once Nazi headquarters and subsequently the KGB building. In post-war Lithuania, the idea of the hated Communist became conflated with that of the Jew.
“We came to film in the small town of Veisiejai,” remembers Woolfson. “And the people pointed to Jesse and Daniel and said ‘They’re Jews, they’ve come to get their property back.’ ”
In Vilnius itself, fewer than 200 elderly Litvak Jews live with their memories of the Holocaust, and it is these people who are interviewed in Surviving History, and whose portraits are contained in the accompanying photographic exhibition, Portraits from Vilna. Recently, one of the survivors, Fania Brantsovskaya, now in her 80s, was sought for questioning about her alleged activities as a Jewish partisan during the war.
Woolfson is fulsome in her praise of Donal Denham, the Irish Ambassador to Lithuania, who has been very supportive of the Surviving Historyproject.
“He has been very forthright and outspoken in his support of the remaining Jewish population. Donal Denham recognised that the case against Fania Brantsovskaya was an outrage, completely inappropriate. He organised a reception to honour her ‘life achievements’.”
Yet, as an Irish person, Woolfson can understand how Lithuania’s complicated history has bred a national amnesia. “It’s a small, peripheral country which suffered under a much bigger imperial neighbour. It can’t bring itself to be inclusive,” she says. She is quick to point out that during the war some Lithuanians risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbours. And that some younger Lithuanian scholars, told by their parents of the Holocaust, now work to revive memories of what happened there. But there were others who turned on their Jewish neighbours and murdered them, or buried them alive, then robbed their possessions.
Surviving History: Portraits from Vilnaopens on Wednesday, May 27th, with a series of public talks, screenings of the documentary, and the photo exhibition at the Newman Building at UCD Belfield. The Lithuanian ambassador to Ireland, Izolda Brickovskiene, launches the exhibition on May 27th, and there will be talks by Lithuanian historian Ruta Puisyte; UCD Holocaust scholar Dr Robert Gerwarth; researcher Shivaun Woolfson; and Holocaust survivor Tomi Reichental.
The exhibition runs from May 27th to 30th, with the support of the Holocaust Educational Trust of Ireland and the UCD Humanities Institute of Ireland. Pre-registration is required for the evening seminar sessions on Wednesday May 27th and Thursday May 28th – see www.livingimprint.org or call the Humanities Institute of Ireland on 01-7164690 for details. The exhibition will travel to Vilnius in September.