User:Elinruby/The Holocaust in Lithuania (from no-wiki)

Trans fr Holocaust in Lithuania in Norwegian

Background

See also: History of Lithuania Poland-Lithuania

Lithuania had had Jewish residents since the Middle Ages. In 1566, Jews were required to wear special clothing, including a yellow headdress.

from Yellow badge:1566: King Sigismund II passes a law that required Lithuanian Jews to wear yellow hats and head coverings. The law was abolished twenty years later.

^[1]

The uprising of the Zaporizhia Cossacks under Bohdan Khmelnytsky in 1648 resulted in a pogrom that destroyed many Jewish institutions in Poland-Lithuania and it went particularly hard beyond Vilnius. At that time there were about 30,000 Jewish residents in Lithuania.^[2] Jews with a background in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are often referred to as Litvaks. In Israel, "Litvak" is also used for Orthodox Jews who follow a "Lithuanian" (Ashkenazi and non- Hasidic) teaching and lifestyle. [3]^[2]

Litvak were Jews with historical connections to Lithuania, Latvia, Białystok and Suwałki as well as parts of Belarus within Poland-Lithuania and later the tsar's kingdom. In the 17th-18th centuries, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania stretched eastwards and included Vitebsk, Minsk, Mogilev and Polotsk. [4] ^[2] Most Jews in Lithuania were poor. ^[2]

Lithuania under the Tsar

Lithuania was incorporated into the Tsarist Russian Empire in 1795 as the Lithuanian Gubernia. In 1801 it was divided into two: Vilnius and Grodno, and in 1842 Kaunas (Kovno) was separated out as its own administrative area. At that time, citizens were required to have family names. [1]^{[clarification needed]} Under the Tsar, Lithuanian language and culture were suppressed; for example, it was forbidden to write Lithuanian in Latin letters. Lithuania and Lithuania's historical territory were multi-ethnic, where the Lithuania, Polish, Yiddish and Belarusian languages ​​were used. In 1897, the majority of the inhabitants of Vilnius Province spoke Belarusian. [2] [5]

In the Jewish settlement area, the Jews made up a total of 11 percent of the population in the 19th century, but constituted the majority in several Lithuanian and Belarusian cities, including Vilnius. Most of these Jews were poor, some of them lived in very poor conditions. Vilnius (Polish: Wilna, Yiddish : Vilne/Vilna) was regarded by Jews as the center of Jewish cultural, intellectual and religious life in Eastern Europe - referred to as "Jerusalem of the North" [2] [5] or "Jerusalem of Lithuania". [6] Congress Poland had different laws than the rest of the Russian Empire. After the Polish uprising in 1863, Jews in Poland received significantly greater freedom and rights than in Russia itself, which was followed by extensive Jewish emigration to Poland.

[7] [8] [9]

Alexander II of Russia died in 1881 after an assassination attempt by the group "People's Will", one of whose members was Jewish. There was then a rumor that "the Jews had killed the Tsar" and the authorities encouraged brutal persecution of the Jews.^{[citation needed]}