Yad Vashem to host panel on Lithuanian Jewish leadership in the ghettos during the Holocaust
In less than a week, the Nazi regime ruthlessly captured Lithuania from Soviet control. The results for Lithuanian Jewry were devastating: nearly 180,000 Jews (about three-quarters of Lithuanian Jewry) had been murdered by the invading Nazi troops.
Most of the ones who remained were relegated to the ghettos and eventually to their end in the death camps. On November 19, Yad Vashem’s conference, “Jewish Leadership in the Lithuanian Ghettos,” sponsored by the Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union of Yad Vashem’s International Institute for Holocaust Research, will shed light on life in those ghettos.
The conference will bring esteemed scholars from around the world who will discuss an often overlooked aspect of the Holocaust: how the Jewish leadership endeavored to ward off inevitable deportation to the death camps and had to comply with the orders of the murderous German Nazi demands.
The keynote address will be given by Christoph Dieckmann, University of Bern, on the topic of Jewish perspectives during the Holocaust in Lithuania. Also speaking at the conference will be Vadim Altskan of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, who will speak about the Jewish Council in the Siauliai Ghetto, and Dalia Ofer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem lecturing on the topic of the role of the Jewish police in the Kovno Ghetto.
The conference will offer simultaneous translations in Russian, Hebrew and English.