Touching their own history in Lithuania

GILLIAN KLAWANSKY

An estimated 70 000 Lithuanian Jews came to South Africa mainly in the first half of the 20^th century. Through taking trips to Lithuania, either to visit their own birthplaces or those of their ancestors, these are a few of many whose journeys helped them connect deeply with their past.

Joyce Levin and Dora Seeff

Joyce Levin first travelled across Lithuania with her parents, Dora and Morris Seeff, and with her uncle Sydney Seeff in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Seeff brothers were invited on a family tour taken by Mendel Kaplan, as they had come from the same shtetl as Kaplan’s grandmother.

Joyce was invited as a member of the next generation. “We went to my father’s shtetl, Krakenowa,” she explains. “We were there all of 20 minutes, but it was the most important 20 minutes of my entire life.

“My father threw down the stick he used to walk with and just started running around the entire town, recognising the shul, houses and so on. It was up to me to capture this for my family with my cameras and audiotape. It was quite dramatic and my dad got quite ill the next day. The experience had such an impact on me.”

Joyce and Dora returned to Lithuania for a family reunion in 2009. “A group of 37 of us went back to Ramygala where our grandfather came from and we had a big family photograph there – we had four generations with us.

“I returned to my father’s shtetl and because he’d now passed away, I became my father and jumped off the bus and ran around.”

Also in the process of doing research between the two trips, Joyce found her mother’s sister’s birth certificate, which said she was born in Ukmerge Street in Ponevezh. “When we got to the street, my mother said: ‘You’ll find nothing’ and then she got off the bus… Looking around, she saw a green door and said: ‘I know that door – that’s where my sister was born.’.

“She told me how she’d been sent to a neighbour when my granny gave birth and she remembered returning to the news of her sister when she came back through that green door. I fell apart,” said Joyce. “It was amazing to be with my mother, a living person who remembered that detail.”

Carole Smollen

Textile artist Carole Smollen was so struck by her visit to Lithuania, that she began making Torah scrolls and even wrote a book about the experience, detailing three generations of her family – Linking the Threads: A Tribute to a Litvak Tailor.

Born in Port Elizabeth, Carole developed a love of cloth in her Lithuanian grandfather’s tailoring room. Years later, living and working in London, she was invited to Vilnius to make a mural for the previously communist Tolerance Centre that was being rebuilt. She used the opportunity to trace her heritage.

Armed with only a photograph of her great-grandparents, as well as her grandfather’s ticket to South Africa, bought in 1906 in Lithuania, Carole flew to PE to visit her grandparents’ gravesites to find her great-grandparents’ names, Reb Shlomo and Gittel Levinthal, before departing.

“In Lithuania, I took a car and a guide and I went to all the shtetls and found my great-grandfather’s house,” she says. “Opposite the house was their shul, all boarded up, but still standing. The last Jew in Zagare remembered my great-grandfather. It was indescribable – I had goose flesh,” she says.

“I also found a miniature Torah at the Tallin Museum. I proceeded to make 150 miniature Torah mantles and I exhibited them at the Yeshiva Museum in New York and also in London.”

These mantles told the story of Carole’s family exodus from Lithuania to South Africa, incorporating fragments of family travel documents and ketubot, photographs, and other memorabilia.

“Now the mantles I make are ordered for special simchas. By going to Lithuania, I gained a whole life – I gained my ancestors, and the inspiration for all the art I’ve done for the last 10 years.”

Dina Diamond

Together with two friends, Sorelle Cohen and Michelle Rosen, Johannesburg-based businesswoman Dina Diamond, recently returned from a weeklong journey to Lithuania and Latvia.

The friends decided to make the journey, when they travelled to Poland two years ago, which awakened a desire to explore where they came from.

“Before we left we all did a huge amount of research,” says Dina. “I had a book that my gran’s brother had written about their lives in Lithuania before they left, but it all became more real for me when we were there.

“We were referred to genealogist and tour guide, Regina Kopilevich, who helped us in Lithuania. We went to the archives in Vilnius and found amazing things. I found the physical shipping ticket for my great-grandparents and grandmother from 1935 when they escaped Lithuania, which blew my mind.

“We hired a car and drove through the towns we’d heard about – there are over 200 shtetls in Lithuania and they’re still shtetls – but without Jews! It was such a rich but bittersweet trip.

“Sorelle found the grave of her great-great-grandfather in a decimated cemetery and Michelle found a family grave too. There were 240 000 Jews in Lithuania at its peak and of that 220 000 were murdered. Today only about 5 000 Jews remain in Lithuania.

“All that our grandparents spoke about, came alive during the trip – I can still hear them with their Yiddish accents. I went to my grandmother’s school in Ponevezh; it was absolutely surreal. I phoned my father and said: ‘Can you believe where I am?’ It gives you an appreciation for how we live today – for the freedoms and quality of life we have – all because our families decided to leave. If they hadn’t left we all would have perished.

“We’d been told to find Fania Brantsovsky, a woman who escaped the Vilna ghetto with a friend of hers two hours before its liquidation. We didn’t have time to look her up, but coincidentally, we went to the Paneriai Forest where 70 000 Jews were killed and when we got there, she was there conducting a tour! It was an honour to listen to her; she was a survivor who was literally giving us a part of her life.”

Dr Saul Issroff

Born in Port Elizabeth, Dr Saul Issroff grew up in Johannesburg and moved to London in 1980. Currently the project manager of the Migration and Genealogy project at the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre at UCT and deputy chairman of the International Institute of Jewish Genealogy headquarters in Jerusalem, Dr Issroff is a retired dermatologist.

“My bobba used to tell me stories of the shtetl Linkuva and our family in Lithuania. She came to South Africa in March 1905 with my father, aged nine, and his two younger sisters.  My mother came from London and her parents were from Marijampole in south-east Lithuania,” he says.

“With the fall of the Soviet Union, I visited in 1993. Four of us went from a genealogy conference in Jerusalem. In a week, we covered a lot of Lithuania. I’d been told about one Jew, Isak Mendelsohn in Zagare.

“Our guide was adamant that no Jews were alive, yet he helped us find him. Isak had been to school with Grunjia, an elderly cousin of mine; he thought she’d been killed in the Holocaust.

“When I told him she was still alive in Israel, he actually cried. We became friends and he took us all over. He described how, when the killing started in the town square, he was 16. He rode his bike to Riga in Latvia and joined the Red Army. He took out his jacket with medals to show us.

“When he got back, amidst the chaos of the defeat of the Germans, he found out that his friend from school had actually killed his parents. He described to me in Yiddish how he went in the middle of the night and strangled the man. Isak became secretary of the Co-operative in the area. His wife Daljia helped him maintain the local cemeteries.

“A very moving experience for me was also finding the tombstone of my great-grandmother, Grunjia Girs in Linkuva. I had a photograph taken by my father in 1923 when he went back to Lithuania, a distinctive tombstone which had a rounded top in a brick ohel. The brick had disintegrated, but I actually stumbled over the stone in thick grass, as though I had been led there!

“To me, the most important aspect of visiting Lithuania was meeting the people, especially the elderly men like Josefas Levinsonas who catalogued around 220 mass murder sites – it’s estimated there are over 250 sites.”

On visiting the mass murder sites, the group realised that no one knew who was killed there.

“With Rose Lerer Cohen, I started a project researching the names and published The Holocaust in Lithuania, a book of Remembrance 1939-1945. The list is still incomplete though.”

Dr Rose Lerer Cohen

Genealogist, provenance researcher and independent Holocaust researcher, Dr Rose Lerer Cohen has been to Lithuania more than 20 times. Now based in Israel, she hails from Parow in the Cape.

“I embarked on family research and decided to visit the places where my parents were born and meet survivors of the Holocaust of my family,” she says. “On my first visit in 1993, a few months after my father passed away, I met my father’s sister who survived the Holocaust (now deceased) and his cousins, who were born soon after the war and whose father survived the Holocaust.

“My travels have been of family discovery. My son Ari accompanied me in 2016 to participate in the 75th anniversary memorial of the murder of my grandparents aunts, uncles and cousins in the Pasilve Forest in Uzventis in Lithuania.

“We travelled to places of interest relating to both our personal history and the history of the Jews of Lithuania. The destruction and murder of our family in particular, and of the Jews of Lithuania in general, moved him deeply. He couldn’t understand how neighbours and friends turned on one another.

“Watching my son walk down the streets of Uzventis and Plunge where his grandparents had lived before immigrating to South Africa and take photographs at the Telz Yeshiva building where his grandfather after whom he is named studied for 10 years, was most rewarding, and proved the worth of my research of 27 years; it closed a circle.”

– To research your Lithuanian Jewish origins, visit www.litvaksig.org and view the “All Lithuania” databases on www.jewishgen.org.