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Catching up with dear Roza Bieliauskienė...
It happens everywhere, but is perhaps more striking in smaller minority cultures, that the unique achievements and legacy of an individual are underrecognized because they happen to have a humble, unassuming, non-selfpromotional personality.
In the post-Soviet history of modern Jewish Vilnius/Vilna (in Yiddish forever Vílne), Roza Bieliauskienė, born here after the war, has played a unique cultural role.
A de facto cofounder of the city’s State Jewish Museum (nowadays: Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History), she served as Chief Curator for seventeen years, from the museum’s inception to 2007.
Thereafter she taught Jewish history and culture at Vilnius’s Sholem Aleichem School (from 2007 to 2017).
And now, she is hard at work on an inspiring new project to raise from thousands of pages of (thankfully now digitized!) interwar Kaunas (Kovno/Kóvne) Yiddish newspapers the work and life of forgotten Lithuanian Jewish artists.
In this 22 April 2022 interview in Vilnius, Roza tells us about her life, starting with parents and grandparents and leading us to the present day.
In its final moments, she tells us about one of the artists whose work and life she is recovering for posterity: Sholem Zelmanovich, who studied art in Kaunas’s interwar Art Academy, and was known for illustrating a famous Yiddish book on the Ger Tzedek (the ‘righteous proselyte’ Count Valentin Pototzky, burned at the stake here in 1749). Sholem Zelmanovich (1898 – ±1941) perished in the Holocaust. Roza is proud, as she is throughout the interview, to credit her mentors and teachers, in this case the eminent Lithuanian art historian and museologist Osvaldas Daugelis (1955-1920), and her current research colleague in the new project, Vilma Gradinskaitė.
Lithuanian Jewish art is not Roza’s only lifetime passion. Another is Yiddish language, culture, and literature, dating from her childhood in a postwar Vilnius courtyard where the main language was — obstinately — still Yiddish, her brief time in the Jewish kindergarten before it was shut down by the Stalin regime, and the opportunities for study opened up by Lithuania’s independence over the last three decades.
Hopefully Roza and her partners in the new project to recover the heritage of interwar Lithuanian Jewish artists will find support for the publication of her planned book on the subject.
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Part of the Lithuanian Jewish Video Archive (LYVA) at:
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