‘Marginal’ Sacrilege

They Came for Us on Our Holiest Days. Lithuania’s Genocide Centre Calls the Lithuanian Part Marginal.

On the evening of 30 September 1941, the eve of Yom Kippur, the prayer houses of the Vilnius ghetto were so full that people stood on the steps and in the street. The ghetto’s council had ordered Kol Nidrei finished by half past six. The Jews of Vilnius chanted it in the dark. Herman Kruk, the ghetto’s librarian, wrote that people came to him that night to borrow prayer books.

At noon the next day, Yom Kippur itself, “when the synagogues were full,” Germans and Lithuanians entered the second ghetto and seized about 1,700 Jews, Yad Vashem records. That afternoon the SS demanded 1,000 Jews from the first ghetto by evening. When the Jews were not delivered, Yad Vashem records, Germans and Lithuanians entered the ghetto and began taking people from their homes. About 2,200 people who presented themselves at the gate were taken to Łukiszki. “Jews in prayer shawls ran through the streets looking scared,” Kruk wrote. “The prayer houses emptied out.” A young man named Abram Zeleznikov climbed into a chimney to hide. “The Lithuanian saw it,” he testified. He was pulled out, beaten bloody and thrown down the stairs.

Three months later, Abba Kovner stood before the young people of the ghetto and asked, “Where are the Jews [who were taken away on] the Day of Atonement?” He gave the answer himself: “All the roads of the Gestapo lead to Ponary. And Ponary is death!”

Lithuania’s state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has its own way of describing that history. On page 40 of the Centre’s 2020 Holocaust volume, the author, Darius Furmonavičius, begins with a conditional, “If there were Lithuanians who took part in these events,” and then reasons from the SS chain of command to the conclusion that their contribution was “essentially marginal.” I asked the Centre to correct or annotate the passage. On 3 November 2026 it refused. This series has set that word against the murders, the rapes, the murdered children, the plunder and the slavery. Here it meets the sacrilege.

Nothing here rests on the Centre’s authority. Where I quote the Centre, I quote it as a party speaking about itself. The facts come from wartime records, survivor testimony and historians outside the Centre.

What day it was

By the autumn of 1941, the Jews of Lithuania had been robbed, beaten, starved, raped and herded behind wire. Most of what they owned was gone. What remained was the calendar they had kept for three thousand years: the Sabbath, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot. A prayer shawl. A Torah scroll. An old man’s beard.

The record does not say whether every date was chosen. The victims did not need it to. They knew what day it was. On the morning they were marched out, it was Rosh Hashanah. On the day the roundup began while the synagogues of Vilnius were full, it was Yom Kippur. The beards and the scrolls were another matter. Nobody tears out a rabbi’s beard by accident.

The Days of Awe, 5702

The German commander Karl Jäger kept a ledger of his killings in Lithuania. In it he wrote that his raiding squad worked “in cooperation with Lithuanian partisans.” From Rosh Hashanah to the end of Sukkot 1941, the holiest weeks of the Jewish year, the ledger of Einsatzkommando 3 lists eleven entries totaling 20,753 Jewish men, women and children murdered. The killing did not pause for the holy days.

Rosh Hashanah. On 19 September 1941, the Lithuanian chief of the Vilnius district, Bronius Draugelis, signed an order directing local officials to deliver the Jews of Turgeliai, Rudamina and the surrounding townships to the Vėliučionys manor by six in the morning on 22 September, the first morning of Rosh Hashanah 5702, and to take charge of their property. Children, the sick, the elderly and workers were all to be there. Jäger records 1,159 murdered that day. The record of the site names members of the Lithuanian Special Squad at the pit, among them Vincas Sausaitis, Balys Norvaiša and Vladas Korsakas.

In Vievis, on the same first day of the New Year, Lithuanian police and armed local activists went from house to house, drove the Jews into the market square, robbed them and escorted them to Semeliškės.

In Eišiškės, on the first day of the New Year, a Lithuanian policeman walked into the study house, took Avraham Szwarc out, demanded his money, marched him to the cemetery and shot him.

In Žagarė, around Rosh Hashanah, the Lithuanian police ordered more than a hundred townspeople to dig the pit in the park.

The Sabbath of Repentance. On Shabbat Shuva, 27 September, Jäger records 3,446 Jews murdered at Eišiškės. Lithuanian auxiliary police had guarded them in the horse market.

The eve of Yom Kippur. On 30 September, the day the Jews of Vilnius gathered for Kol Nidrei, the Lithuanian men of the Vilnius Special Squad shot the Jews of Trakai, Onuškis, Lentvaris, Rūdiškės and Aukštadvaris in the Varnikai forest. Lithuanian police and white-armbanders had driven the families there. Jäger counts 1,446, and 597 of them were children. A 2022 memorial account identifies the Lithuanian junior lieutenant Balys Norvaiša as the man who gave the commands to fire. Eight days earlier, on Rosh Hashanah, the record of Vėliučionys places the same man at the pit.

Yom Kippur. In Butrimonys, Jews still held in the town were killed in the Jewish cemetery on 1 October, the Day of Atonement. In Vilnius, the roundup began at noon while the synagogues were full. On 2 October, the day after Yom Kippur, the Jews of Žagarė went into the pit their neighbors had dug. Jäger’s count is 2,236.

Sukkot. On 6 October, the first day of Sukkot, the Lithuanian members of the Special Squad shot 962 Jews from Semeliškės, Vievis and Žasliai at Dargoniai: 213 men, 359 women and 390 children. The research record names Vasilevskis as commander of the Trakai police contingent present.

During the intermediate days of the festival came the massacre at the Švenčionėliai training ground, where Jäger counts 3,726 Jews of the Švenčionys district. The historian Rokicki, cited in the Inturkė report, records that the special squad was assisted by 120 local policemen and Lithuanian insurgents.

Among the dead was Rabbi Eliyahu Osband of Labanoras, murdered, the Pinkas records, during the intermediate days of Sukkot.

On 11 October, the Kretinga security police chief, Pranas Lukys, telephoned the Palanga police chief, Juozas Adomaitis, to say that the prisoners in the Palanga camp were to be shot. That night, the night of Hoshana Rabbah, they were taken to the Kunigiškiai forest, a site the two police chiefs had chosen. The killing went on into the morning.

When the graves were examined in 1946, the remains included children aged two and three, and the skulls of young children had been fractured by heavy blows.

Yad Vashem places the next roundup in the second Vilnius ghetto on Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah, the days when Jews dance with the Torah, and records that about 3,000 more Jews were taken to Ponary to be slaughtered. Other accounts date that roundup a day or two later, after the festival ended.

The Sabbath between the holy days

On Saturday, 4 October 1941, the Sabbath between Yom Kippur and Sukkot, German and Lithuanian perpetrators sealed off the small ghetto of Kaunas and took about 1,800 people to the Ninth Fort to be shot.

Beards and scrolls

The holy days are on the calendar. The rest of the sacrilege was done by hand, and the town records name the hands.

• In Girkalnis, on 22 June 1941, local Lithuanians carried the Torah scrolls out of the house of prayer, trampled them and danced on them, dragged the rabbi into the street and tore out his beard.
• In Biržai, according to the testimony of Beder, Lithuanian killers forced Rabbi Bernshteyn under the water of Lake Širvėna again and again, set his beard on fire, burned his body with irons and then shot him. Rosin records that the town’s ritual slaughterer was tied by his beard to a horse’s tail and dragged through the streets until he died.
• In Jurbarkas, Lithuanian police tied a brick to Cantor Alperovitz’s beard and led him through the town while Germans took photographs. Torah scrolls were unrolled and trampled, mezuzahs were pried from doorposts with bayonets, and the sacred books were burned on the meadow.
• In Josvainiai, armed Lithuanian nationalists cut off the beard and sidelocks of Rabbi Avraham-Dov Tarna. In Kriukai, partisans from the town took Rabbi Yitzkhok Grin from his house, cut off his beard and beat him through the street with a stick.
• In Ylakiai, a restaurant owner, Mikas Glaubartas, cut old men’s beards with a knife until they bled. In Švėkšna, the Lithuanian barber cut crosses into Jewish men’s hair and shaved off half their beards. In Vieksniai, a cross was cut into the rabbi’s hair.
• In Linkuva, under the Lithuanian white-armband squad, the Jews were locked in stables with their beards cut off and given neither food nor water in the July heat. In Butrimonys, the rabbi’s beard was torn out in the prison yard before the men were marched to Alytus with their hands tied with wire.
• In Kaišiadorys, Rabbi Dovid Aron Jaffe was dragged through the streets by his beard until he died. The account I rely on does not name the men who dragged him. Naming them is the Centre’s job.

Houses of prayer

The buildings were attacked too. Across Lithuania, the places where Jews prayed were turned into prisons, storerooms and stables, and the books inside them were burned.

• In Žemaičių Naumiestis, according to the survivors’ collective testimony, Germans and Lithuanian partisans forced about thirty Jewish men to smash the synagogue furniture and carry out the Torah scrolls and sacred books to be burned. Rabbi Paklibak refused to light the fire. The prisoners were made to tend it. He was murdered in July.
• In Eržvilkas, Jews were forced to carry the books and Torah scrolls out of the study house and burn them, and Germans and Lithuanians cut the beards of the old men.
• In Rietavas, a survivor reports that ninety-year-old Reb Fishel Zilber was beaten to death holding his Torah scroll. Another describes the rabbi forced to burn sacred books and religious articles while the humiliation was filmed.
• In Jurbarkas, after the scrolls were trampled and the books burned, Jews were made to pull down their own synagogue and study house and haul the timber to Lithuanian workers and peasants.
• In Kėdainiai, the elderly Rabbi Shlomo Feinsilber was carried away in a manure cart. A survivor describes pigs kept in the Tiferet Bachurim prayer house, the great synagogue used as a storeroom and the cemetery stones broken.
• In Skuodas, the Lithuanian auxiliary police locked the Jewish women and children in a synagogue before marching them to their deaths. In Darbėnai, camp guards locked about forty Jewish girls in a synagogue. They were murdered later.
• In Žiežmariai, the synagogue served first as the prison for the town’s Jews and then, after they were shot, as the storeroom for their belongings, which a commission of the local administration handed out to Lithuanian residents.

A synagogue is where a community keeps its scrolls, says its prayers and mourns its dead. In these towns it became the room where the community was held before it was killed, and then the room where its clothes were sorted.

The Sabbath itself

The war on the Sabbath began before the war. In 1939 the National Lithuanian Party in Kalvarija proposed moving the town’s market day to Saturday, so that Jewish merchants would have to choose between their livelihood and their Sabbath. Two years later, in Pandėlys, confined Jews were made to sweep the streets on the Sabbath. In Švėkšna, Rabbi Levitan and Mosze Ment were beaten for refusing to break it, and Ment was made to handle the ashes of burned sacred books.

The girls of Plungė

In Plungė in July 1941, a group of Jewish schoolgirls were baptized by the Catholic priest Petras Lygnugaris in the hope that conversion would save their lives. The accounts give their number as about sixty, seventy-four or eighty-four. Lithuania’s own military heritage portal records that the high school girls who agreed to be baptized to save themselves were among the murdered.

According to the survivor Olšvangas, the Lithuanian white-armband officer Arnoldas Pabrėža dragged the baptized girls from the priest’s protection and shot them one by one. Jakovas Bunka, the last Jew of Plungė, recorded that one of them, Irlecke Tsin, seized a killer by the throat before she was struck with a rifle butt, pushed into the pit and shot.

The same thing was said aloud in Gargždai. According to a participant’s interrogation, Jewish women asked whether converting would save them. The police chief told them they would be executed anyway.

The girls of Plungė gave up the faith of their parents in order to live. The men who killed them would not honor even the sacrament of their own church.

To those who keep a faith

This article is addressed to rabbis, priests, pastors, imams and every person entrusted with a congregation, whatever the faith.

You know what a holy day is. You know what it would mean if armed men came into your house of worship at the hour of its holiest prayer and took the worshippers away. You know what it would mean to watch your scripture trampled and burned, and your eldest clergyman dragged through the street by the beard. Every tradition that keeps a sacred calendar, a sacred book and a sacred house can understand what was done to the Jews of Lithuania in 1941, because it was done to exactly those things. Christian clergy in particular should know what happened in Plungė, where a priest’s baptism did not stop the killers.

In Girkalnis, local Lithuanians danced on the Torah scrolls. In Jurbarkas, Lithuanian police tied a brick to a cantor’s beard. In Skuodas and Darbėnai, women and girls were locked in synagogues before they were killed. The Centre’s volume uses the SS chain of command to call the Lithuanian contribution “essentially marginal.” What does that chain of command tell a congregation about the men who trampled its Torah scrolls or turned its synagogue into a prison?

A state institution now describes the Lithuanian part in this history as “essentially marginal.” That word reaches beyond historians. It tells every person of faith that the violation of a house of prayer, a holy book and a holy day matters little when the victims are Jews. Religious leaders do not need to be historians to answer it. They need only say, in their own pulpits and in their own words, that the desecration of any faith is a desecration of all faith, and that no state may call it marginal.

Marginal

The IHRA working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion, adopted by consensus of IHRA’s member states, Lithuania among them, names as distortion intentional efforts to excuse or minimize the impact of the Holocaust or its principal elements, “including collaborators and allies of Nazi Germany.” IHRA has not ruled on page 40. The Centre was shown the record and kept the word anyway. Measure that conduct against the definition Lithuania itself adopted.

The Centre can still act. It can correct or annotate page 40. It can name the men who dragged Rabbi Jaffe through Kaišiadorys. It can tell its readers what day it was at Varnikai, at Semeliškės and in the Vilnius ghetto at noon on Yom Kippur, and what was done to the synagogues of Žemaičių Naumiestis, Jurbarkas and Kėdainiai. The Seimas, to which the Centre answers, can ask why it has not.

What they could not take

In the granaries of Valkininkai, Rabbi Ozerlansky led the New Year prayers for the confined families. A man named Yitzchak Sheskin refused to write on the Sabbath with a rifle pointed at him.

And in Telšiai, in the autumn of 1941, the husbands, fathers and sons were already in the ground at Rainiai. With the men murdered, the women who remained led the prayers themselves, on Rosh Hashanah and again on Yom Kippur.

Every year on Yom Kippur, Jews say Yizkor for their dead. This year, say the names of the towns with them. Say them for the women of Telšiai who led the prayers. Say them for Rabbi Paklibak, who would not light the fire. Say them for Rabbi Bernshteyn in the lake at Biržai.

What was marginal about setting Rabbi Bernshteyn’s beard on fire?