Five new stumbling stones were unveiled in Vilnius to commemorate Jewish artists who lived in the city and perished in the Holocaust.
Sculptor Vladas Urbanavičius installed one of the stumbling stones by a building on Žemaitijos Street where the Jewish painter Bencion Michtom lived before his imprisonment in the ghetto. His stone is one of five unveiled in Vilnius on Tuesday at the initiative of the Lithuanian Society of Art Historians.
“So far, 53 stumbling stones have been installed in Lithuania since 2016. But only Kaunas has two for artists,” says Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, the author of the initiative. “They are for Černe Percikovičiūtė and Jokūbas Lipšicas. And we thought that in Vilnius, when it comes to the history of Jewish culture, art plays an important role.”
When selecting the artists to honour with stumbling stones, it was important for the Society of Art Historians to represent different generations, artistic styles and genders.
“The list was as follows: Lisa Daiches, who died at a very young age, and two of her colleagues, Uma Olkienicka and Rachel (Rosa) Suckever. The older generation, Jacob Sher, and the younger generation, the very energetic, temperamental, and still famous Bencion Michtom,” says Jankevičiūtė.
Of these five artists, the two least known to the public so far are Uma Olkienicka – who mostly worked with graphic design and authored the emblem of the Jewish Research Institute YIVO – and Lisa Daiches. She was a Jewish puppet theatre artist who also designed publications and book covers, and is commemorated outside the building where she lived with her parents and sister at Šv Stepono Street 17.
“There is still a lot of memory work to be done, because we do not have enough publications. I could refer you to the third volume of the Dictionary of Lithuanian Artists, probably the biggest, richest source of information we could draw from. We don’t have a complete picture, we don’t have a good enough record of the exhibitions that have taken place here, we don’t have a good enough record of the activities of the societies. [...] We will have many discoveries to make,” says Jankevičiūtė.
The international project Stumbling Stones – or Stolperstein – was started almost three decades ago by the German sculptor Gunter Demnig. More than 75,000 stones have now been installed in a number of European countries and in Argentina, making it the world’s largest memorial to Holocaust victims.
“The initiative in Lithuania came from the Lithuanian Centre for Human Rights for a reason, just as the original initiative in Germany did not come from the Jewish community, but from people who wanted to honour that community. Therefore, it is important for the Jewish community here, but I think it is also important for the community as a whole,” says Lara Lempertienė, head of the Centre for Judaic Studies.
Stumbling stones, she says, make people look at history from more than just today’s perspective.
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