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2008-01-17
Middlebury College students visit the VYI

On 14 and 15 of January a group of twenty students from Middlebury College in Vermont visited the Vilnius Yiddish Institute. Led by Prof. Michael Katz and Rabbi Ira Schiffer the students participated in a series of lectures and seminars on various aspects of Jewish life and the Holocaust in Vilnius and Lithuania. These were all provided by Vilnius Yiddish Institute staff and faculty members. Dr. Egle Bendikaite spoke on the political life of the Jewish community with special focus on  the attitude of Jewish political groups toward “the Vilna Question” in 1920. The VYI librarian Mrs. Fania Brantsovsky, herself a survivor of the Vilna Ghetto and former partisan in the forests outside Vilna, guided students through the streets of the Vilna Ghetto, with constant reference to life on these streets before the war when they consituted the city’s Jewish Quarter. VYI Assistant director Ruta Puisyte gave a lecture on the Holocaust in Lithuania and its echoes in present-day Lithuanian society.