So Im having a VERY productive/emotional trip in Latvia & Lithuania in which I managed to access and scan my fathers entire KGB files from 1957 (over 500 pages of documents, photos, interrogation protocols, films, negatives etc.) as well as to find photos which Ive never seen before of most of my ancestors from the early 20th century! Ill share photos/stories of all of this when I return to Israel. BUT an unexpected turn happened today... I decided to drive from Latvia, Riga - to the small shtetl (small ex-Jewish village) in Lithuania where my ancestors once lived in the 18th-19th centuries... Its a small frozen in time and remote village. I wasnt really expecting to find anything there and indeed there was not much Jewish related stuff that the locals could show us except for some holocaust memorial plaques, some photos, and some stories. The entire Jewish population (around 800 men, women, and children) there was murdered in July 1941 by the Nazis and their collaborators. So before leaving the place I asked one of the local ladies if theres anything with Hebrew letters that remains in the village and she first said no but then remembered that theres a small Torah fragment that a local found and brought in some 30 years ago and is kept somewhere since... I asked her to show it to me and she was reluctant at first and couldnt really find it and we were about to give up and leave when we spotted this rather large wrapped and rolled paper at the bottom of the back shelf in some storage room with the words toras fragm written on it. I opened it up and to my amazement I found inside the entire old Torah scroll that most likely belonged to the now destroyed synagogue of the perished Jewish community of this town before WWII! To be continued... :)
Posted on: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 18:29:48 +0000
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