Lists over 2,000 Jewish communities in eastern Europe, giving locations and lists the names of some Jews known to have lived in each community as compiled from newspapers, book subscriber lists, directories, etc.; of great value for locating obscure commu

Ellen Cassedy’s longing to recover the Yiddish she’d lost with her mother’s death eventually led her to Lithuania, once the “Jerusalem of the North.” As she prepared for her journey, her uncle, sixty years after he’d left Lithuania in a boxcar, made a shocking disclosure about his wartime experience, and an elderly man from her ancestral town made an unsettling request. Gradually, what had begun as a personal journey broadened into a larger exploration of how the people of this country, Jews and non-Jews alike, are confronting their past in order to move forward into the future. How does a nation—how do successor generations, moral beings—overcome a bloody past? How do we judge the bystanders, collaborators, perpetrators, rescuers, and ourselves? These are the questions Cassedy confronts in We Are Here, one woman’s exploration of Lithuania’s Jewish history combined with a personal exploration of her own family’s place in it. Digging through archives with the help of a local whose motives are puzzling to her; interviewing natives, including an old man who wants to “speak to a Jew” before he dies; discovering the complications encountered by a country that endured both Nazi and Soviet occupation—Cassedy finds that it’s not just the facts of history that matter, but what we choose to do with them. (20120417)

Missing from most accounts of the modern history of Jews in Europe is the experience of what was once the largest Jewish community in the world--an oversight that Gershon David Hundert corrects in this history of Eastern European Jews in the eighteenth century.The experience of eighteenth-century Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth did not fit the pattern of integration and universalization--in short, of westernization--that historians tend to place at the origins of Jewish modernity. Hundert puts this experience, that of the majority of the Jewish people, at the center of his history. He focuses on the relations of Jews with the state and their role in the economy, and on more "internal" developments such as the popularization of the Kabbalah and the rise of Hasidism. Thus he describes the elements of Jewish experience that became the basis for a "core Jewish identity"--an identity that accompanied the majority of Jews into modernity.

One of the key ways in which the traditional Jewish world of eastern Europe responded to the challenges of modernity in the 19th century was to change the system for educating young men so as to reinforce what were seen as time honored, conservative values. The yeshivas at that time in Lithuania became models for an educational system that has persisted to this day, transmitting the talmudic underpinnings of a self-consciously defined traditional Jewish way of life. To understand how that system works, one needs to go back to the institutions they are patterned on - why they were established, how they were organized, and how they operated. This book is the first properly-documented, systematic study of the three key Lithuanian yeshivas as they existed from1802 to 1914. It is based on the judicious use of contemporary sources - documents, articles in the press, and memoirs - with a view to presenting the yeshiva in its social and cultural context. Pride of place in the first part of the book is given to the yeshiva of Volozhin, which was founded in 1802 and was marked by a novel structure - total independence from the local community. In many respects, it was the model for everything that followed. Chapters in the second part of the book focus on: the yeshiva of Slobodka, famed for introducing the study of musar (ethics); the yeshiva of Telz, with its structural and organizational innovations; and the kollel system, introduced so that married men could continue their yeshiva education. The book also covers the leadership and changes in leadership, management and administration, the yeshiva as a place of study, and daily life. This English edition is based on the second Hebrew edition, which was revised to include information that became available with the opening of archives in eastern Europe after the fall of communism.

For 900 years the Polish shtetl was a home to generations of Jewish families. In 1944 almost every Jew was murdered and with them died a way of life that had survived for centuries. Yaffa Eliach has written a landmark history of the shtetl.

On August 2, 1940, as on every other morning for weeks before, a long line of Jewish refugees waited outside the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania. Many had already witnessed Nazi atrocities in Poland and other Axis-occupied lands, and they were desperate to escape. To leave Europe they needed foreign transit visas. And at the window, the smiling Japanese consul was issuing them. Before his government closed down the consulate and reassigned him to Berlin, he would issue thousands of such visas. This is the story of Chiune Sugihara, a diplomat and spy who saved as many as 10,000 Jews from deportation to concentration camps and almost certain death, Because of his extreme modesty, Sugihara's tremendous act of moral courage is only now beginning to become widely known. Unlike Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat whose government sent him to Hungary with the express purpose of saving Jews, and Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who at least initially had a vested economic interest in protecting the lives of "his Jews," Sugihara had no apparent reason to perform his acts of rescue. Indeed, he acted in direct violation of official Japanese policy, which directed all government and military personnel to cooperate with the murderous policies of their Nazi allies. Examining Sugihara's education and background -- a background shared with the colonial administrators and military men who committed "the rape of Nanjing" -- author Hillel Levine finds nothing that explains his extraordinary behavior. Levine's search has taken him from the old Japanese consul building in Kaunas (now Kovno), Lithuania, to the Australian outback; across Japan from the rice fields ofSugihara's native town to the boardrooms of conglomerates where his younger schoolmates still hold power. But the more Levine sought answers to Sugihara's puzzling behavior, the more he encountered questions. Remarkably, Chiune Sugihara was not the only Japanese official to save Jews. Yet none was ever punished for insubordination. Was there a secret Japanese plan to save Jews from Nazi genocide? Much Holocaust scholarship focuses on the perpetrators of evil, trying to illuminate what drove ordinary men and women to commit horrifying and murderous acts. But perhaps as difficult to understand is the phenomenon of rescue: what inspired courageous individuals to swim against the tide of cruelty and indifference. This sensitive and nuanced biography concludes that there is no link between a person's background and his moral inclinations. Mercy remains a divine mystery despite our human craving to reduce it to behavioristic formulas. This book does not attempt to explain "man's humanity to man." Instead Levine has woven a fascinating narrative of one man's heroic efforts to save lives, in the midst of so many seeking to destroy them.

This book includes a dialogue between the author and Nobel Prize laureate Czeslaw Milosz about the city. An absolutely indispensable work on the city that produced John Gielgud, Bernard Berenson and the Budapest String Quartet.

Vilnius completes a trilogy of Bradt pocket-size guides to the Baltic capitals, providing all the essential listings and background on these new European members. Highlights of each city quarter are presented in a comprehensive city tour that takes in the cathedral, archaeological exhibitions, the old university with its astronomical observatory, and the Gates of Dawn (Lithuania's most famous place of pilgrimage). No stay in Vilnius would be complete without a visit to the nearby Trakai National Park, with its picturesque medieval island castle and old town, home to the Karaites sect.This guide features:>Exploring Vilnius's Old Town, castles, churches, and monuments>Hotel suggestions to suit every budget and taste>Restaurants, including local specialties and where to find live folk music>Transportation within and beyond the city, and other practicalities