How an Iconic Statue Went Up, Down, Up, Down, Up through Lithuanian Regime Changes

Three Crosses Monument, or Triju Kryziu Kalnas in Vilnius

This tall white structure towers over Vilnius, Lithuania's capital city, from a prominent hilltop. The monument dates back to 1613, when it was first made of wood and erected on the same spot. Over the intervening four hundred years since it was erected, it has been taken down twice and put up two more times. What staying power. Here's the travel of the poor thing.

1. UP in 1613, made of wood to commemorate 14 Franciscans. Legend has it that they came as missionaries and were martyred on this site.

2. DOWN in 1864 when Lithuania was under control of the Russian empire, the Russian administrator removed it after a revolt.

3. UP in 1916, this time made of concrete, funded by donations from the city's residents.

4. DOWN during the Soviet era, when religious icons were destroyed.

Soviets destroyed the concrete monument and left it on the ground

5. UP in 1989 when Lithuania became liberated from the Soviet Union, as the monument stands today.

View over Vilnius from Three Crosses Monument

Mass Murder Concealed in Lithuania's Ponar Forest - A Wrong Still Not Acknowledged

Ponar Forest Memorial -- Completely Inaccessible to anyone who speaks a language other than Lithuanian, Russian, Yiddish or Hebrew

Unless you can read Lithuanian, Russian, Yiddish or Hebrew, you would never know of the 100,000 lives that were brutally taken in the Ponar Forest in Lithuania during World War II.  And, even if you could understand those languages, the message is so vague that it fails to tell the full story.

My husband and I visited the Ponar Forest having heard of it, but not knowing much. If we had not been led by an expert guide, we would have learned very little.

Ponar Memorial -- For What? You might ask....

Svetlana Shtarkman, an excellent guide, telling the story of what happened in Ponar; at a small killing pit

Pit Where Nazis forced Jews to live so they could work in the killing forest, digging up bodies from the pits and burning them to destroy evidence

More than 70 years have passed after World War II ended. Most of the horrors have been told. Many memorials have been erected across Europe to commemorate places where Nazis killed hundreds, thousands, and millions of people.

There is a curious holdout in Lithuania. The place is called Ponar Forest. It is just outside of Lithuania's capital city, Vilnius, and until World War II, was a pleasant summer retreat from the city. Before the Nazis invaded Lithuania, Russia's Red Army had occupied this area and had dug pits for military fuel storage tanks. The Nazis pushed out the Red Army and invaded Vilnius. The Nazis took over Ponar and between 1941 and 1944, they transported about 100,000 people to the forest in trucks. They were dumped into pits and killed. Many were Soviets and about 70,000 of them were Jews.

A Polish journalist named Kazimierz Sakowicz lived in view of the forest and surreptitiously kept notes on what he observed in terms of numbers of people transported, sounds, and activities day and night. He buried his notes in bottles in his garden. He was killed during the war. His diary notes were later unearthed and published in 2005 by Yale University Press to reveal the gruesome story.

But, the Nazi horrors is only part of the significance of Ponar.

Lithuania's government avoids talking about what happened. Yes, there is a monument, but No, it is not accessible to most people in the world. When a delegation from Israel visited the monument, which was only in Lithuanian at the time, they asked for a translation. It said, "For the memory of innocent Soviet citizens who died during the Nazi regime".

What? No mention that 70% of those who were killed there were Jewish? The Israelis asked why nothing was said about the Jews. The Soviets had erected the monument; and told the history as they saw it. They honored the Soviets who died at Ponar. Ironically, the dead were Red Army soldiers who perished at Ponar because they were left abandoned when the Soviets pulled out.

But, according to our guide Svetlana, the thing that stings the most now is that Lithuania does not acknowledge the collaboration by local Lithuanian citizens. Half the population (i.e. the Jews) was forced by the Nazis to leave their homes, while the other half of the population (i.e. the Lithuanians) were silent. People still talk today about how Lithuanian villagers would openly enjoy the belongings of their persecuted Jewish neighbors, wearing their coats or using their household goods.

Memorial in Ponar Forest erected by Jews who raised their own money for this gravestone to "Our Beloved People Who Died in World War II"

Synagogue Spotting in Lithuania

Former Synagogue now used for a Kaunas Auto Body shop. LEFT SIDE: Women's section was on the upper floor

I traveled to Lithuania to see where my father's family came from. His parents were part of the enormous influx of Eastern European Jews who migrated to the United States through Ellis Island in the early 1900s.  It turns out that my roots were hard to find.

But, by traveling with a guide who is an expert in architecture and sociology, we learned to spot where Jews had lived one hundred years ago. Our guide, Svetlana Shtarkman, pointed out the typical exterior architecture of Lithuanian synagogues: a large meeting hall taking up more than half of the length of the building (right side of the photo above), with the remainder arrayed over two stories with smaller windows (left side of the photo above). This arrangement allows for a high-ceilinged sanctuary plus an upper floor gallery for the women’s section. The women were segregated upstairs behind curtains or screens. Hundreds of synagogues were erected across Lithuania in its cities of Vilnius and Kaunas, and in the dozens of small rural villages called shtetls spread across the country.

Lithuania’s nearly total loss of Jewish residents resulted in scores of synagogue buildings going empty. With no Jews left to worship in them, the structures have been converted to serve other purposes. Some are used as community centers or gathering places. Those often bear a plaque telling their prior history. Others not. 

Synagogue in Ziczmariai, a former shtetl, undergoing renovation as a community center 

Same synagogue, viewed in the courtyard where it was the center of Jewish life when the town was a shtetl

Shop Detectors: How to know if a Lithuanian House was Jewish

Typical Jewish House in Ziczmariai (Ziezmar in Yiddish), a Shetl in Lithuania 

During the 1800s, Lithuanian Jews had been encouraged to settle into rural shtetls. In over 200 shtetls that were established and spread across the area near the cities of Vilnius and Kaunas, the Jews were relegated to serve a specific purpose - to jumpstart commerce. The Jews were expected to conduct a market in the town for trading twice a week. They located their homes in the center of town, primarily bordering the central square marketplace and radiating out from there. Jews made their homes serve double purpose as a shop and a residence. Some Jewish homes even had two doors facing the street: one for the shop and the other for the residence. 

Shtetl home originally built by a Jewish merchant: one door for the shop; one door for the home

However, the typical homes of Lithuanians have the entrance door through the side, with only windows facing the street. The Lithuanians were traditional farmers who were self-sufficient, feeding themselves and their families from their own farms. They did not orient their homes to the street like the Jewish merchants did.

Typical Lithuanian Home - Entrance door is on the side

After the Jews Moved Out, Their Homes Were Converted 

After Jews left their homes, the Lithuanians converted the layout to their custom, replacing the street door with windows, and relocating the entrance to the side of the property. In the photo below, the street-facing door has been removed, but the threshold step still remains in the place where the door had been.

Former home of a Jewish merchant; converted to Lithuanian home by removing street-facing door

Very few Jews remain in Lithuania after what the Russian Tzars, Nazis and then the Soviets did to them.  Today, there are less than 5,000 Jews in the country of Lithuania, down from 2.4 million in the region of Lithuania and Poland before World War II.

My family lore was that the Russian Army was the reason they left. My father's family ripped up their lives, scraped money together and traveled halfway around the world to the United States where they knew no one and did not speak English. But, I wondered, what was it about the Russian Army that caused them to leave? I had maintained visions of Tzarist soldiers on horseback, stampeding into the Jewish shtetls, wearing brass buttoned capes and swinging bayonets to terrorize the Jewish inhabitants.

It took a visit to Lithuania, with travel to shtetls with a knowledgeable guide, to understand more.

What happened to the Jews?
Beginning around 1850, Russia controlled Lithuania and Poland. There were about 2.4 million Jews in the territory, making Jews among the largest minorities in the Russian Empire. In the view of Tsar Nicholas I, the Jews needed to be assimilated and Russified.  The way to do that was through education - specifically, military education.  Russia imposed an edict of military conscription. At the age of 12, Jewish boys were taken from their families and sent far away from their families, to schools where they were not allowed to practice Judaism. At age 18, they were required to serve in the Russian military for the next 25 years. Eventually, many of the Jews who served in the Russian military converted to Christianity. I cannot fathom what it felt like to have one's sons taken away for 31 years.

From the time of the Tsarist conscription through the Nazi era, the Jewish population of Lithuania has dwindled to nearly none.

Lithuanian menu: One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, MORE

Kepta Duona Su Suriu: fried bread with garlic and hot cheese dipping sauce

For the first night in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, it seemed advisable to eat at a traditional Lithuanian restaurant “like your grandmother’s cooking”. Senoji Trobele is a small cottage with an open air garden. The homey decor and welcoming waitresses were the perfect antidote to a day of airports and cramped up plane rides. We had been warned that the Lithuanian menu is pretty much all potatoes. As a diversifier from the potatoes, we ordered fried bread with garlic and hot dipping cheese. Those were delicious and our favorite item of the meal. The closest thing to compare them to is a plate of crispy French fried potatoes.

The amount of potatoes in our meal was astonishing.

1. Cepelinai, sounds like "zeppelin" because it is one. A big wad of potato flour is formed around a ball of ground pork stuffed in the center.  After eating that as an appetizer, you really should stop eating because it makes you full. But we didn't stop because we had ordered tons more to eat.

Cepelinai

2. The Lithuanian word for this purple soup dish is Saltibarsciai. It is Beet Borscht -- just like I remember my grandmother making it. She mixed sour cream into the beet soup, turning it a bright magenta. Hard boiled eggs, dill and boiled potatoes (again with the potatoes)....and a side of boiled potatoes (but not worth a photograph).

3. Potato pancakes (grated potatoes mixed with onion and fried in oil), served with cottage cheese. So delicious. Could have stopped there, but did not.

4. The main course was whipped potatoes served with lamb (too full to take a picture).  

Herb after dinner drink, kind of like Jaegermeister, served cold in a cup made of ice

Taste test results: the fried bread, non-potato item was the best, even though it tasted like potatoes.

Singing a Letter from George Washington

Cantor Seplowin singing, Salve Regina chorus accompanying George Washington's letter put to music

Just about everyone in Newport knows about George Washington's 1790 letter to the Jewish congregation at Touro Synagogue.  The letter is read each August, reenacted in colonial costume in the sanctuary.

But now, there is a new twist. A lucky group of concertgoers got to hear the letter as music. In the opulent venue of the Ochre Court mansion, now owned by Salve Regina University, the spring choral program featured an original composition that included Washington's letter. The event was held on Sunday April 29, 2018, produced for the first time in Newport. Cantor Jonathan Comisar, a pianist and composer from New York, created the piece, which he calls a cantata, inspired by the Washington letter. It weaves hymn-like music with colonial fife and drum sounds, and incorporates portions of the wording of the letter. The lyrics were sung beautifully by Cantor Judith Seplowin from Temple Beth El in Providence, Rhode Island and by a 13 year old boy soloist, Jonathan Kenny. The piece is 12 minutes long. It is called "To Bigotry No Sanction".

The title refers to the most famous words in Washington's letter, "to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance. " George Washington included that line in the words he sent to the Jewish congregation at the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island.  He had visited them to acknowledge the importance of the Jews' participation in the newly formed country. In his travels around the colonies, he sought support from every state to ratify the first set of constitutional amendments, one of which clarified religious freedom.

Jonathan Comisar's work was originally commissioned in 2017 by a synagogue in suburban Philadelphia to celebrate its 170th birthday. That synagogue is Keneseth Israel, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania. (Fun fact for me is that I grew up in that synagogue and was confirmed there). The Dorothy and Jay Isenberg fund sponsored the Newport, Rhode Island performance.  Comisar is working on a documentary film of the production. Stay tuned and read your mail for updates.

Dr. Donald St. Jean of Salve Regina introducing the Program. Cantor Seplowin and amazing boy soloist, Jonathan Kenny, looking on.

Cantors Judith Seplowin and Jonathan Comisar

Jewish Kid's Coin Collection Became Nicaragua's Political History Museum

As a boy, Moises Ghitis Rivera began collecting coins and then paper currency spanning the history of his country, Nicaragua. He has more than 800 items, continuing up through all of the denominations of today's money.  The collection is now its own museum, on display at his family's property on the farm, or Finca Tel Aviv. The Finca and its museum are open to the public.

The museum is organized by government administrations, showing the sequence of currencies printed by each president. Apparently, each administration designed and printed a new currency, much like the occupants of the American White House redecorate it. One president included his sister's likeness on one of his denominations.

Currency rubberstamped to increase during rampant inflation.  See upper right for denomination of 20, increased to 20,000 

Portraits of Nicaraguan Presidents

The hitch is that it is not easy to get to. The museum, called El Ceibo museum is situated on dual-volcanoed Ometepe Island, which is a one and a quarter hour ferry ride on Lake Nicaragua. The lake is the largest lake in Central America and the 19th largest fresh water lake in the world. Once you get out on it, you may as well be on an ocean because you can't see the other side. The winds whip up and the ferry ride can get pretty rocky. (No bathrooms and not enough life preservers, either).