Rosh Hashanah Road to Eišiškės

Subtitle: The third Valkininkai chapter follows the calendar, from forced labor on Shabbat to the removal of women and children on Rosh Hashanah.

Earlier in this series: Carts, Sacks, and Certificates and There Were No Germans in Town.

The first chapter followed the property. Certificates from the town administration permitted Lithuanian peasants to take cows from Jewish farmers while the owners were still alive. The second followed the authority. Leyzer Goldman identified the Lithuanian administration, police, and armed partisans who regulated, robbed, assembled, and marched the Jews of Valkininkai. This third chapter follows the calendar.

Goldman’s signed 1947 testimony preserves more than the acts and the actors. It preserves the Jewish time in which the acts occurred: Shabbat, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, and the first day of the Jewish New Year. A civil calendar records September 20, 21, and 22. A Jewish calendar records the desecration.[1]

The Holocaust in Lithuania was not only a campaign against Jewish bodies and Jewish property. It invaded Jewish time. Shabbat and the festivals ordered work, worship, family, memory, and obligation. In Valkininkai, the machinery of persecution moved through that sacred calendar with brutal precision.

On Saturday, September 20, 1941, Jews were working at the peat bogs. Saturday was Shabbat, but occupation had already converted rest into forced labor. After midday, the workers were told that work was over and that everyone had to return to Valkininkai. By Saturday evening, the men were back in town. At 5:30 the next morning, Lithuanian partisans woke the chairman of the Jewish committee. All Jewish males above approximately twelve or thirteen were to report to the market square by 7:00.[2]

The civil chronology says Sunday, September 21. The Jewish chronology says the eve of Rosh Hashanah. The men were separated in the morning. At sunset, the Jewish New Year began. The women, children, elderly, and sick remained in town until Monday, September 22, the first........

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