When Love is a Mission. In Memoriam: Zilvinas Beliauskas

In MEMORIAM: ZILVINAS BELIAUSKAS

17th April, 1958 – 26th July 2024

Inna Rogatchi (C). Memory in Blue. Homage to Zilvinas Beliauskas. Mixed technique. 2021 – 2024.

It was supposed to be a happy time for us, inspired by several unfolding meaningful projects, one of which was exceptionally warming. We were preparing a special exhibition and series of related events in commemoration of the one and only Leonard Cohen’s 90th anniversary which is on September 21st this year.  Not only because it is homage to the unique man who is loved by millions, but also because we had a dream-like partner, a brother in the most organic meaning of the word. 

Our Zilvinas. 

Zilvinas Beliauskas. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.

Zilvinas Beliauskaus, the founder and a long-term director of the Public Vilnius Jewish Library in Lithuania, did fight a very nasty illness bravely for two and a half years. His noble heart stopped in his sleep, on the Shabbat eve, in Vilnius, at the end of July this year. 

Reviving  Jewish Legacy

There is a group of people in this world who are consciously making a good versus evil balance better, with both small and big steps of their personal devotion and effort. Zilvinas was one of those people. Highly educated psychologist, long-term lecturer at the prestigious university in Vilnius, he was a true top European intellectual who was in a perfect accord with American freedom, openness and dynamics. 

He loved books, literature, theatre, cinema, visual arts, music, and culture in general. It all was just an organic part of him, who was always curious and always graceful, maintaining uncompromisingly high standards and a good taste. 

Having an opportunity to participate in the establishing of the Public Jewish Library in Vilnius in the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the first public institution of Jewish culture to be established in Lithuania in almost 70 years, after the end of the Second World War, Zilvinas has put all his devotion to this opportunity to revive the Jewish legacy in the city and in the country in which the Shoah tragedy was of a giant proportion. One needs to know the history of the Jewish people in Lithuania in general, and especially during the last hundred years, from 1920s to 2020s, to realize how deeply painful, how graphic, how catastrophic and unrepairable the loss was and is. 

One of the events at the Vilnius Jewish Public Library, with its director Zilvinas Beliauskas standing the first from the right. (C) VJPL, with kind permission.

In everything he did during the last fifteen years, which happened to be also the last fifteen years of his life, Zilvinas, in his personal capacity, and also as an official leading a visible public institution, was paying a part of the debt of Lithuania to their murdered Jews to the best he possibly could. 

And a library had a special meaning for Jewish heritage in Lithuania. Vilnius was the place of the famous Strashun Library, the largest Jewish library in Eastern and Northern Europe before the Second World War. The half of the library was looted by the Nazis and after the war has become the part of the YIVO Institute library in New York. Part of it was hidden by heroic people, both Jewish and not, in Vilnius. In the result of the war, there was no great library, and not its important building. The cultural, architectural, educational, psychological hole was left in the city where half of the population before the war was Jewish, for decades. 

And then, in the end of the 2000s, there was a human will to create something real and lasting in order to remember. Since day one, this library has been much more than a book deposit. It was a cultural centre, with as many meetings and events as it was humanly possible. Exhibitions, concerts, film screenings, book launchings, and always – panel discussions, human interaction, revived memories.  

We went this way with him in a very close cooperation since the very beginning. We hold endless meetings with Zilvinas and our other friends in Vilnius, who did care about paying respect to what once was a giant part of the country’s life. We also donated a lot of books, art collection and special art work in memory of Elie Wiesel to decorate the Library, and invited to do the same also many of the people we know world-wide. We launched the inauguration exhibition of Michael’s important Jewish Melody art project there, on Zilvinas’ invitation,  as a part of the World Litvak Congress, later we participated with Michael’s Libertango collection  in the curated by him the International Festival of Jewish Art during the European Days of Jewish Culture. 

Zilvinas Beliauskas, in the centre, with Michael and Inna Rogatchi, at the opening of Michael Rogatchi Jewish Melody inaugural exhibition. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.

What was special about Zilvinas’ events is that there were always a lot of people, students, diplomates, historians, writers, intellectuals, both Jewish and not, and that there always were serious, deep, engaged conversations,  many of which stay in memory, because they were intelligent, interesting and caring, not sort of formal lip-service. It was humane and it was putting at least some things in the right context and perspective.

We screened my The Lessons of Survival film about Simon Wiesenthal with an  important and thorough discussion about it in a super-filled audience, from which a young non-Jewish student just could not stopped of asking me more and more questions, saying along the way that “ I am already seventeen, and I never heard anything like that neither in our school, nor in any other places, so please forgive me if I have too many questions. I just need to know”, – and Zilvinas’s understanding smile as the teenager was speaking. These kinds of moments are inseparable from one’s memory, because they are the bricks of which the very building of our life is constructed. 

Devotion to Leonard Cohen

Zilvinas’s love for Leonard Cohen was limitless and all-embracing. He discovered Cohen for himself very early, in the beginning of the 1980s. First, Zilvinas discovered Cohen as a poet, he told us, finding by a pure chance, a small book of his poetry in a bad condition in one of the libraries he always loved so much. 

Since then, Zilvinas’ immense devotion to Leonard Cohen never left him. He was reading it deeper and deeper, finding allusions, getting deep down to everything Cohen meant to say in his poetry, and understanding him exceptionally authentically and deeply.

When Zilvinas, to his amazed happiness,  found out that Cohen’s family were Litvaks from Kaunas (Kovno), he understood the roots of his mighty attraction and his devotion to Leonard, which he started to feel in yet a more powerful way. We spoke about it often. I do not know many of all fantastic Cohen’s fans and experts, among whom are many of our good friends, did understand him as deeply and  authentically as Zilvinas did. He was a real Cohen expert, on the level of microanalysis of the Leonard world. 

Ever full shelves of the Vilnius Jewish Public Library. (C) The Rogatchi Foundation Archive.

Zilvinas was dreaming of inviting Leonard to Lithuania, especially when Cohen was so close to it in the late 2000s and early 2010s , coming with his great concerts to Warsaw, Poland, just next door. We were discussing possibilities to invite Leonard to Lithuania then and later on, it was Zilvinas’ dearest idea and an incredibly important, innermost project of his. We were ready and willing to assist our friend and to speak with Leonard about such a possibility. 

We knew that it was a very touchy theme for Cohen, as he felt the Holocaust very close to his heart, and his family’s origin from Kovno, and the very painful history of the Holocaust in Lithuania was not a low hurdle to overcome for Leonard. He needed time, and he needed to be ready for that, he was saying. It was a special Leonard’s motto in life and creativity which was the one for that exceptional man, to be ready, inside, making his own work for that readiness. 

Importantly, Leonard Cohen was – and still is –  extremely popular and much loved in Lithuania, as in many countries in Baltics, Scandinavia, Northern and Eastern Europe, and there was a hope, we understood, that a door was open for that daring visit. So we hoped and dreamed together with Zilvinas  that Leonard might consider  coming to his mother and her family’s place. Then Leonard got really ill, and the situation became even more complicated. 

I remember Zilvinas’ call on the gloomy autumn afternoon: “I finally decided to write, actually, to finish and send to you my letter to Leonard, that you are still waiting to get from me before talking with him about his visit here to Lithuania. I was walking all night, polishing and polishing my letter which, as you know, I drafted some while ago, and re-did so many times ( ‘just like Leonard did with his poems” – I remember thinking at the moment). So, I did it, finally, and I knew that it was the right text, finally. I came home, made a coffee, turned on my PC to learn that Leonard passed away the previous night”.  How can you respond in a situation like that? I just sigh. We sighed together. 

He was one of those rare people with whom it was very comfortable and natural to keep those moments of silence, both short and longer ones, when you knew that you are not alone, that your friend cares about you, that he is near,  that you are understood and are cared for.  

That unfulfilled and so dear to Zilvinas idea and dream of inviting Leonard Cohen to Lithuania and greeting him there, on the soil of his mother’s family, was always present, even years after Leonard’s passing in 2016. 

 Grateful Memory

That’s why Zilvinas immediately was enthusiastic and completely absorbed with our project to commemorate Leonard’s 90th anniversary  coming in the second part of September this year, with a special exhibition of homages to him and related events. We started to work on it together, and spent hours discussing, planning and preparing it. It was a joy which was warming up both Zilvinas and us. Zilvinas , because he would celebrate his beloved Leonard, in the team with his old friends. Us, because we saw and knew that the occupation with a Cohen project makes our severely ill friend happy and content. We could not have imagined that the crisis in the Zilvinas’ heavy illness would come so soon, and this time he would not have enough strength left to overcome it. 

We do not know what will happen with the project now. Somehow, it has been interwoven with Zilvinas to such a degree that it is really difficult for us to imagine that somebody else would run it. It was our idea and our art, but we did it for both Leonard’s memory and for our lethally ill friend who was fighting that nasty illness so bravely and will all his strength, that we wanted to distract his inevitably gloomy thoughts towards something else, something that he loved with all his innermost, and something that would bring a relieving smile on his face. If the project is conducted, it will be done in Zilvinas memory. It was his last project, seemingly. 

At least, a small part of it will be done, as we know. A special collectible art charitable calendar 2025  If You Life Is  a Leaf: Homage to Leonard Cohen, which was a part of initial commemorative Leonard Cohen-90 project will be produced and published in the autumn. It will be dedicated to Zilvinas Beliauskas memory.  

Fortunately and re-assuredly, Zilvinas library team took the loss of its founder and director close to their heart, and they have reacted to his premature passing as a family would do, cordially, sincerely and devotedly.  We do hope that our Foundation’s initiative and idea to name the Vilnius Jewish Public Library after its founder and first director would find a receptful and understanding ear among the Lithuanian officials who are responsible for commemorative cultural policy and practices , and that will become possible. It would be probably the best and lasting memory to the man who put his heart in restoring  fairness and practically contributing to respectful dialogue and dignified memory as a mode of human and societal behavior. 

We also hope that it would be possible to collect personal memoirs about Zilvinas from many people who were in touch with him and worked together on numerous projects worldwide, from San-Francisco to Warsaw and from Bolivia to Australia, to compile a book of personal reflections on that special and such a good man by his colleagues and friends from so many countries and so different paths and walks of life, to keep him remembered as he deserves to be. We will contribute our best to this special memoirs book project. Zilvinas loved books, it was a key subject in his life. Having a book as a sign of our all memory of him would be the most natural thing to do. 

He loved the sea. The Baltic Sea of his country and the sea in general. His understanding of water was philosophical. It was close to mine, as well, so I do understand and feel it very closely. He loved people, being a very generous and super-tolerant person. He adored his family, his wife, two young boys, and the extended family. His first reaction upon hearing the devastating diagnosis two and half years ago was: “I am not worried about myself. I am worried about the family”. They are very brave, but the pain is deep and persistent. 

The artworks from the latest The Rogatchi Foundation donation to the Vilnius Jewish Public Library in memory of Zilvinas Beliauskas. Summer 2024. (C) VJPL. With kind permission.

With an emotional mix of love and sorrow, we dedicated our recent donation of a special 7-pieces art collection to the Vilnius Public Jewish Library to our friend’s memory. Those pieces were seen by Zilvinas and were accepted by him enthusiastically. A few months back, he was keeping some paintings from that donation in his hands, looking into the face of Vilna Gaon, painted by my husband in a profound psychological portrait, and stroking it so very gently and devotedly. “ This is something I would never let go” – Zilvinas said after a while, still looking into Vilna Gaon’s eye, and smiled quietly and happily, with his disarming smile. He was a very charming,  galant and elegant person, indeed. 

Now, in his orphaned house, his library in the heart of Vilnius, Michael’s Vilna Gaon and six more artworks have joined our previous donations which are all on permanent display and art collection of the library. Among those works, many are fruits of our close cooperation with Zilvinas, as they were discussed in detail before commissioning, and for us, they are the result of our joint effort. All those 23 works from this special collection will stay there, at the Vilnius Jewish Public Library, and greet people. They will do it in Zilvinas’ name and his ongoing enlightening memory. 

 July – August 2024

Lithuania – Finland