Word: vilna
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Image presents a candid mosaic of Jewish life in Poland. What emerges from the film's patchwork is a coherent portrait of a flourishing culture. Aspiring writers flock to Warsaw to study under Y.L. Peretz, the dean of Yiddish literature. In the town of Vilna, the Jewish community establishes schools for the mentally retarded and for orphans. In the shtetls, the townfold engage in lively commerce and conform to the letter of well-rooted traditions. The Jews are politically animated. The heirs of the Enlightenment try to balance universal values with continuing Jewish particularism (the "problem" of minority separatism...
...Israel, the group toured Yad Vashem, Jerusalem's graphic memorial to the Holocaust. Passing the photographic murals of atrocities and victims, Professor Yaffa Eliach of Brooklyn College kept remembering the cries of her infant brother as they hid in Vilna until at last he was smothered by adults who feared that he might give them away. "There is an unbridgeable difference between those who went to the camps in the '40s and ourselves today," she insisted. "We have round-trip tickets. They didn't. It is impossible to fully recall the horror...
...break the spirit of the two other dissidents tried last week. Viktoras Pektus, who has served 16 years in prisons and camps for his religious convictions, was arrested after helping to organize a Lithuanian Helsinki Watch Committee last year. He was put on trial in the Lithuanian capital of Vilna on charges of anti-Soviet agitation, homosexuality, corruption of minors and drunkenness. Outraged by the accusations, Pektus lay down in the witness box, closed his eyes and refused to take part in the proceedings. The verdict: ten years' imprisonment and five years of Siberian exile...
...UNIVERSAL REDEMPTION Shortly after the October Revolution, a Russian Jew, businessman and poet named Alexander Klausner fled from Odessa to Vilna. He was one of the early Zionists who believed wholeheartedly that the time had come for the Jews to return to the land of their ancestors. In his poems, he described the renaissance of the Jews in that beloved land of eternal sunshine, where streets are paved with emeralds and where there is an angel at every street corner and where God Himself, old but fit, strolls the streets of Jerusalem with his walking stick in the evening like...
...European, uncivilized and even somewhat Asiatic. Alas, the Poles and Lithuanians turned out to be almost as bad as the Bolsheviks. "Go to Palestine, you sickness of Europe," they told him. And so, he finally settled in Jerusalem, while his elder son went on lecturing on comparative literature at Vilna University, until the Nazis came and slaughtered him and his family. In Jerusalem Alexander Klausner went on writing his Russian poems about the beauty of the emeralds with which the streets of Jerusalem were not paved...