JONAVA
Pre-1940: Jonava (Yiddish: Yanova), town, Kaunas apskritis, Lithuania; 1940–1941: Jonava/Ionava, Kaunas uezd, Lithuanian SSR; 1941–1944: Jonava, Kreis Kauen, Gebiet Kauen-Land, Generalkommissariat Litauen; post-1991: rajonas center, Kaunas apskritis, Republic of Lithuania
Jonava is located 32 kilometers (20 miles) northeast of Kaunas on the banks of the Neris River. After the partition of Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union in September 1939, a number of Jewish refugees arrived in Jonava, including members of the yeshiva in Kleck. The Jewish population in the town in 1940 was 3,000.
German forces captured the town by June 26, 1941. Several hundred Jews fled with the Red Army as it retreated. Of those who fled, several subsequently were forced into the Daugavpils ghetto in Latvia after being overtaken by the rapid German advance.1 A number of houses were destroyed by the German bombardment of Jonava as the Red Army attempted to block the German advance across the Neris. Around 2,500 Jews remained in the town at the start of the German occupation. The destruction forced Jewish families to share the few remaining houses, and some homeless Jews moved into the synagogue and the Bet Midrash. About 150 Jews from Jonava moved to the Jewish village “Der Alter Gostinetz,” 8 kilometers (5 miles) away, where they performed agricultural work.2
Immediately after the occupation, Lithuanian nationalists formed a municipal administration and a militia unit (“partisans”) of around 50 men, under the command of Vladas Kulvicas, which soon began to act against the Jews. On the pretext of looking for weapons, armed Lithuanian partisans would break into Jewish houses and steal the best items for themselves. The partisans drove young and old Jews to perform forced labor, cleaning the streets, during which they beat the Jews brutally. Lithuanian activists also forcibly took some of the remaining Jewish businesses, including a bakery, which now served only non-Jews.3 During the third week of the occupation, the local authorities issued an order that Jews had to wear yellow patches.
According to the account of Efraim Zilberman, a few days later the head of the Lithuanian partisans summoned Rabbi [End Page 1059] Ginsburg and demanded that the Jews pay a large sum of money within three days. If this demand were met, the partisan chief promised that “there would be no shootings of Jews and that a ghetto would be created.”4 The Jews of Jonava, however, soon established that they were unable to pay the ransom, mainly because most of the wealthier Jews had been deported to the east by the Bolsheviks just a few days before the German invasion. When the rabbi told this to the partisan leader, he was taken hostage together with a number of other Jews and severely beaten. Then he was escorted to Kaunas by two Lithuanian partisans to obtain the ransom with the help of the Jews of Kaunas. In this manner, the money was raised and the arrested Jews were then released.5
This respite lasted only a few days. Soon afterwards, the Lithuanian partisans rounded up around 500 young Jewish men, saying they would be taken for forced labor. Instead they were escorted only about 1 kilometer (0.6 mile) outside the town in the direction of Ukmergė, where they were shot in the Giraitė Forest. According to German documentation, a detachment of Einsatzkommando 3, with the participation of Lithuanian partisans, shot 497 Jewish men and 55 Jewish women—altogether 552 victims—in Jonava, on August 14, 1941.6 A few Jewish men managed to escape at the time of the shooting, but all but one of them were subsequently recaptured and killed.7
After this Aktion, the Jewish population in Jonava consisted almost entirely of women, children, and elderly men. Expecting another Aktion, some families went to hide in the forests or with Christians in the surrounding villages. When the partisan chief learned of this, he put up posters warning Christians not to hide Jews and offering a reward of pork or sugar equivalent to the weight of any Jew turned in. On August 23–24, the Jews of Jonava paid a “contribution” to the authorities of 120,000 rubles.8
About two weeks after the first Aktion, the remaining Jews in the town, together with the rabbi, were escorted to the same place in the Giraitė Forest, where large ditches had been prepared. Five Jews from among the 150 or so living in the Jewish village of Alter Gostinetz were also brought to the killing site. According to the report of Einsatzkommando 3, it was responsible (together with Lithuanian auxiliaries) for the shooting of 1,556 Jews (112 men, 1,200 women, and 244 children) near Jonava between August 28 and September 2, 1941.9 Participating in the mass shooting were 16 members of the Lithuanian “selfdefense” squad (as the militia had been renamed) from Jonava, under the command of Jonas Jurevišius, who had replaced Kulvicas.
The remaining Jews living in Alter Gostinetz were spared on this occasion, as their labor was still required to bring in the harvest. In early September, however, they all were transferred to a former barracks in Jonava, where they were kept under close guard by the partisans. At this time the staff of the Lithuanian partisans issued a proclamation that any Jews who returned to the barracks from hiding would not be harmed and informed the remaining Jews that they would soon be transferred to the Kaunas ghetto. As a result, some Jews emerged from hiding or were turned out by Christians, who said they were unable to help them anymore.10 Thus the barracks in Jonava served as a form of “remnant ghetto,” used by the authorities to tempt Jews out of hiding before their transfer to Kaunas.
On October 3, 1941, the Lithuanian guards took away any remaining valuables from the Jews in the barracks and announced that they would be sent to Kaunas the next day. The 180 Jews assembled there spent a sleepless night, still uncertain of their fate. On October 4, they were marched to Kaunas under close guard, arriving just too late to be included in the Aktion conducted against the “small ghetto” in Kaunas on that day, in which 1,845 Jews were shot. Instead, they were put into the Kaunas ghetto. Many of them were murdered, however, in the “large Aktion” conducted by the German police and their Lithuanian auxiliaries on October 28, 1941, when some 10,000 Jews from the Kaunas ghetto deemed “unfit for labor” were shot at Fort IX.11
In 1944, the Germans took about 50 Jewish Police from the Kaunas ghetto to the Giraitė Forest near Jonava and forced them to exhume and burn the corpses from the mass grave there. Afterwards these men, too, were shot.12 Only a few Jews from Jonava in the Kaunas ghetto managed to survive until the end of the war.
SOURCES
Publications regarding the fate of the Jewish community of Jonava during the Holocaust include the following: Shimon Noi, ed., Sefer Yanovah: Le-hantsa hat zikhram shel Yehude ha-ayarah she-ne.herevah ba-Shoah (Tel Aviv: Jonava Society, 1979); Arūnas Bubnys, “The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Province in 1941: The Kaunas District,” in D. Gaunt, P.A. Levine, and L. Palosuo, eds., Collaboration and Resis tance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), pp. 283–312, here pp. 294–299; and Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, The Annihilation of Lithuania Jewry (New York: Judaica Press, 1995), pp. 282–285.
Relevant documentation, including the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses, can be found in the following archives: LCVA (e.g., R 1534-186, p. 11); LYA (e.g., K 1-58-47536/3); MA (D4/711); RGVA (500-1-25); VHF; and YVA (e.g., M-1/E/1345 and 1358; O-22/49; and M-9/15(6)).
NOTES
1. For a description of the flight from Jonava, see Jesaiah Ivensky (Sidney Iwens), “My Years of Agony,” in Noi, Sefer Yanovah, pp. 15–17. See also by the same author, Sidney Iwens, How Dark the Heavens (New York: Shengold, 1990).
2. Efraim Zilberman, “Aufn groysn masnkhever,” in Noi, Sefer Yanovah, p. 373. This article is reproduced from “Joneve,” in Fun letstn khurbn, no. 10 (December 1947): 64–69.
3. Reizl David (Rashkes), “Der anfang fun khurbn,” in Noi, Sefer Yanovah, p. 383.
4. Zilberman, “Aufn groysn masnkhever,” p. 373.
5. Ibid., pp. 373–374.
6. Ibid., p. 374—this source dates the first Aktion in early August. Also see RGVA, 500-1-25, report of Einsatzkommando 3, December 1, 1941.
7. LYA, K 1-58-47536/3, vol. 2, pp. 183ff., testimony of Nachumas Bliumbergas, October 30, 1945, the only survivor from the group of fugitives, as cited by Bubnys, “The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Province,” p. 296.
8. Bubnys, “The Holocaust in the Lithuanian Province,” p. 297.
9. Zilberman, “Aufn groysn masnkhever,” p. 374—this source dates the second Aktion on August 13, 1941. Also see RGVA, 500-1-25, report of Einsatzkommando 3, December 1, 1941.
10. Zilberman, “Aufn groysn masnkhever,” p. 374.
11. Ibid., p. 375; Ivensky, “My Years of Agony,” p. 17; and YVA, M-1/E/1345.
12. Zilberman, “Aufn groysn masnkhever,” p. 375.
