The Premieres of European Heritage Days in Skalvija
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Traditional European Heritage Days have been organised by the Department of Cultural Heritage Protection for ten years. This year they were dedicated to the Jewish cultural heritage in Lithuania. On that occasion, from 10th to 12th of September the cinema Skalvija will launch premieres of two new documentary films: Care. Jewish Cultural Heritage in Lithuania by Saulius Beržinis and Looking for the Lost Town. Kaunas produced by Inforum, the Information for the Nations in Lithuania Palace.
Saulius Beržinis’s film Care. Jewish Cultural Heritage tells about the intensive life of the Jewish community that flourished in Lithuania for more than six centuries and made Vilnius known all over the world. Skilful craftsmen, legendary doctors and lawyers, patrons and scholars who laid the foundations of Jewish science and education lived here; famous artists started their road to glory in Lithuania. The memory of this continent that has plunged into oblivion is still preserved by the streets and buildings of Vilnius. Do we know that the Lithuanian Jewish community is now housed in the glorious building of the famous Tarbut gymnasium, and the Ministery of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania is located in a Jewish bank; that everyday we pass houses where the great Vasily Kachalov was born and grew up, where Jascha Heifetz touched strings for the first time, where the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzli, was involved in disputes, where studied the globally famous artists Jacques Lipchitz and Chaim Soutin, where worked the prototype of Aibolit doctor Shabat? Do we notice specific details of Jewish architecture, typical Jewish courtyards, rows of shops, the multi-storey complex of charity dormitories, the impressive buildings of a Jewish hospital?
Fewer enlightened Jewish people remain, the inhabitants of pre-war Vilnius who grew up here, communicated and learned from the greatest authorities of the Lithuanian Jerusalem. The authors of the film have invited some of them – Semion Svirski, Faina Broncovskaja, Rachile Margolis, the writer Maša Rolnik – to be guides through the streets of the old town reminding of the lives of Vilnius Jews. The footage of the Independent Holocaust Research Archive will revive the memories of the legendary leader of Lithuanian Jerusalem Elyah Lazar Aaron (1902 – 1993) and others who have left us.
The film represents the care of our state and international community over re-creation and preservation of Vilnius Jewish cultural heritage (directed by Saulius Beržinis, doc.f., 2004, 60 min., 10, 12 September – 7 p.m.)
The film Looking for the Lost Town. Kaunas produced by Inforum, the Information for the Nations in Lithuania Palace, tells about the second largest Lithuanian city that used to be called “the temporary capital”. Pre-war Kaunas is a village that turned into a European capital, “the little Paris”, in two decades. Cafes, cabarets, high society soirees became the attributes of the gallant age that lasted hardly a decade in Lithuania. All this disappeared in a moment in the vortices of the World War II. While collecting meticulously particles of the past the authors of the film attempt to re-create fragments of the mosaic of life in pre-war Kaunas. (doc. f., 2004, 52 min., 11 September – 3 p.m., 12 September – 7 p.m.) Exhibition of photographs by Paulius Račiūnas, The Dead Stetl, is held in the lobby of the cinema centre Skalvija.
