From the Founding Director

Although the groundbreaking, Vilnius-based Litvak Studies Institute (LSI) is a complex, multifaceted organization, and a highly ambitious undertaking, with a richly diverse cultural, academic and civic agenda—indeed, as per its statement of intent, its goals include (but are not limited to): serving as a resonant voice for contemporary Lithuanian Jewish issues; providing a great variety of resources about Litvak culture and the global diaspora of the Jews of Litvak descent; offering a broad spectrum of projects and initiatives (such as the annual publications, public-affairs advocacy, Lithuanian Yiddish programs, literary conferences, heritage tours and Holocaust survivor assistance); and countering the re-emergence of anti-Semitic trends in the region (as manifested, in particular, in Holocaust revisionism and the theory of “Double Genocide”)—the essential animating idea lying at the heart of it is not terribly complicated and can be summed up in rather clear-cut terms: revitalizing, reinvigorating the Jewish life in the onetime Jerusalem of Lithuania, Vilnius (Vilna, a place of profound significance to many generations of Jews in all corners of the world) as a means to restoring and preserving the full measure of basic historic fairness with regards to the Litvak heritage.

Jews have lived in Lithuania for more six centuries. This exceptionally vibrant community had provided an invaluable contribution to the development of modern-day Jewish culture and thought—before being almost completely annihilated during the Holocaust. Yet there are those in the influential nationalist circles at the top of the country’s current power structure—those intent on conducting the difficult process of post-Soviet Lithuania’s national revival on the lopsided platform of extreme right-wing nationalism—whose minds are dead-set on airbrushing the traces of Jewish presence in the Litvak lands from their sanitized version of the Lithuanian history, thereby effectively writing the Litvaks out of the history textbooks of their ideological imaginings. The new Litvak Studies Institute, in turn, sees its mission in resisting and countervailing all such efforts. Without resorting to lofty rhetoric, we would like to state unequivocally: the Litvaks will not be pushed off the pages of their own history. We invite everyone with whom the history and culture of the Litvaks resonate with meaning to join the LSI in this noble, vitally urgent endeavor.

—Mikhail Iossel