Rachel Kostanian | |
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| Other names | Rachilė Kostanian Rachelė Kostanian Rachel Kostanian-Danzig |
Rachel Kostanian is a Lithuanian Jewish activist, founder and longtime director of a Holocaust museum in Vilnius, and book author. She is a recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Kostanian was born Rachel Zivelchinski in Lithuania. Kostanian's father, Yosif Zivelchinski, was a judge in Šiauliai, and her mother Bluma (née Danzig) was a Yiddish teacher. [1] : 142 The family followed Bundism. [2] : 39 Kostanian and her mother escaped the Holocaust in 1941 because they were taken to the Soviet Union together with other families of Soviet officials. They lived in Balachna near Gorky until Kostanian was sent with 200 other Lithuanian, Jewish and non-Jewish children to a children's home in the Urals. [1] : 145 At the end of 1944, Kostanian returned to Vilnius. After finishing high school, she studied law at Vilnius University, [1] : 159 and earned a degree in law. [3] She could not find work as a lawyer. [1] : 159 She went on to work in Kirovakan as an English teacher at a music school. [3]
In 1989, Emanuelis Zingeris offered Kostanian the position of Scientific Secretary for the Museum. [2] : 40 Under her leadership, the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum with exhibits centering on the Holocaust, was established. [4] The museum opened in 1991 in the so-called "Green House", formerly part of the Museum of the October Revolution. [5] Kostanian expanded the museum's inventory of personal narratives [6] by placing advertisements in local and international media asking for "letters, books, photographs, manuscripts, clothing, dishes." [1] : 163 [7]
A first conference on the Holocaust in Lithuania was held in Vilnius in 1993, on the 50th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. Zingeris and Kostanian jointly published the proceedings of the conference in 1995. [8] In 2020, she participated in an international conference Remembering for the Future - The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide in Oxford. [2] : 42 [9] From this meeting, she wrote a paper describing the activities of Jews in the ghetto in the fields of health care, culture, art, science, music, sports, and religion. [2] : 42
At the age of 91, on February 9, 2021, Kostanian received the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon. [10] [11]
Abba Kovner was a Polish-born Jewish partisan leader, and later Israeli poet and writer. In the Vilna Ghetto, his manifesto was the first time that a target of the Holocaust identified the German plan to murder all Jews. His attempt to organize a ghetto uprising failed, but he fled into the forest, joined Soviet partisans, and survived the war. After the war, Kovner led Nakam, a paramilitary organization of Holocaust survivors who sought to take genocidal revenge by murdering six million German people, but Kovner was arrested in the British zone of Occupied Germany before he could successfully carry out his plans. He made aliyah to the State of Israel in 1947. Considered one of the greatest authors of Modern Hebrew poetry, Kovner was awarded the Israel Prize in 1970.
Karl Plagge was a German Army officer who rescued Jews during the Holocaust in Lithuania by issuing work permits to non-essential workers. A partially disabled veteran of World War I, Plagge studied engineering and joined the Nazi Party in 1931 in hopes of helping Germany rebuild from the economic collapse following the war. After being dismissed from the position of lecturer for being unwilling to teach racism and his opposition to Nazi racial policies, he stopped participating in party activities in 1935 and left the party when the war broke out.
The Fareynikte Partizaner Organizatsye was a Jewish resistance organization based in the Vilna Ghetto in Lithuania that organized armed resistance against the Nazis during World War II. The clandestine organisation was established by communist and Zionist partisans. Their leaders were writer Abba Kovner, Josef Glazman and Yitzhak Wittenberg.
The Vilna Ghetto was a World War II Jewish ghetto established and operated by Nazi Germany in the city of Vilnius in the modern country of Lithuania, at the time part of the Nazi-administered Reichskommissariat Ostland.
The Provisional Government of Lithuania was an attempted provisional government to form an independent Lithuanian state in the last days of the first Soviet occupation and the first weeks of the German occupation of Lithuania during World War II in 1941.
The Ponary massacre, or the Paneriai massacre, was the mass murder of up to 100,000 people, mostly Jews, Poles, and Russians, by German SD and SS and the Lithuanian Ypatingasis būrys killing squads, during World War II and the Holocaust in the Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland. The murders took place between July 1941 and August 1944 near the railway station at Ponary, a suburb of today's Vilnius, Lithuania. 70,000 Jews were murdered at Ponary, along with up to 20,000 Poles, and 8,000 Soviet POWs, most of them from nearby Vilnius, and its newly formed Vilna Ghetto.
The Holocaust in Lithuania resulted in the near total destruction of Lithuanian (Litvaks) and Polish Jews living in Generalbezirk Litauen of Reichskommissariat Ostland under the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian SSR. Out of approximately 208,000–210,000 Jews, an estimated 190,000–195,000 were murdered before the end of World War II, most of them between June and December 1941. More than 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was killed over the three-year German occupation, a more complete destruction than befell any other country in the Holocaust. Historians attribute this to the massive collaboration in the genocide by the non-Jewish local paramilitaries, though the reasons for this collaboration are still debated. The Holocaust resulted in the largest loss of life in so short a period of time in the history of Lithuania.
Emanuelis Zingeris is a Lithuanian philologist, museum director, politician, signatory of the 1990 Act of the Re-Establishment of the State of Lithuania, currently serving as a Member of the Seimas, chairman of its foreign affairs committee, Vice President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe and President of the Parliamentary Forum of the Community of Democracies. A Lithuanian Jew, he has been director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum, honorary chairman of Lithuania's Jewish community, and is Chairman of the International Commission for the Evaluation of the Crimes of the Nazi and Soviet Occupation Regimes in Lithuania. He is a founding signatory of the Prague Declaration on European Conscience and Communism, that proposed the establishment of the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism.
The Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Vilnius, is dedicated to showing artifacts and records from the 50-year period of Soviet occupation of Lithuania.
The military occupation of Lithuania by Nazi Germany lasted from the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, to the end of the Battle of Memel on January 28, 1945. At first the Germans were welcomed as liberators from the repressive Soviet regime which had occupied Lithuania. In hopes of re-establishing independence or regaining some autonomy, Lithuanians had organized a a Provisional Government. It lasted six weeks.
Mendel Balberyszski was a Lithuanian Jew, Polish politician and survivor of the Holocaust in Lithuania. He is chiefly known today as the biographer of the destruction of the Vilna Ghetto in his book Stronger Than Iron – The Destruction of Vilna Jewry 1941-1945: An Eyewitness Account. It is the account of life and organization in the Small Ghetto from its day of formation until its liquidation, it is also the only complete historical record of the fate of the Jewish population of Vilna from the day of the arrival of the Germans, through the two Ghettos, the concentration camps in Estonia until the liberation of the surviving 84 Jews by the Soviet Army.
The Šiauliai or Shavli Ghetto was a Jewish ghetto established in July 1941 by Nazi Germany in the city of Šiauliai in Nazi-occupied Lithuania during the Holocaust. The ghetto comprised two areas – one in the Kaukazas suburb and one on Trakai Street. Both were liquidated by July 1944, and their inhabitants were killed or transferred to Nazi concentration camps. In 1939, one quarter of the population of Šiauliai was Jewish, about 8,000 persons. By the end of World War II, only about 500 Jews of the city had survived.
Rachel Margolis was a Holocaust survivor, partisan, biologist and Holocaust historian.
Hirsch Schwartzberg was a Jewish leader of Holocaust survivors under the American occupation of Berlin.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Vilnius, Lithuania.
Jacob Gens was the head of the Vilnius Ghetto government. Originally from a merchant family, he joined the Lithuanian Army shortly after the independence of Lithuania, rising to the rank of captain while also securing a college degree in law and economics. He married a non-Jew and worked at several jobs, including as a teacher, accountant, and administrator.
Josef Glazman was a Lithuanian-Jewish resistance leader in the Vilna Ghetto. A member of the Revisionist Zionism movement prior to the German invasion of the Baltic states in 1941, afterwards he took part in resistance and youth movements in the ghetto. He also worked in the Jewish-run ghetto administration – first in the police, then later in the housing department. Glazman's relationship with the head of the ghetto, Jacob Gens, was difficult and led to Glazman's arrest several times. Eventually Glazman left the ghetto with a group of followers and formed a partisan unit in the Lithuanian forests. His partisan band was surrounded in October 1943 and Glazman and all but one of the members were killed by the Germans.
Wolf Durmashkin was a Jewish composer, conductor and pianist in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Rudolf Neugebauer was a German SS Hauptsturmführer during the Nazi era. He served as the head of the Vilnius Gestapo in German-occupied Lithuania and personally killed Jacob Gens.
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