My name is Johnathan Orlianski. My family name was once spelled Orliansky, before it was changed after my family arrived in Israel in the 1970s.

I live in Israel. I am the great-grandson of Rabbi Zalman Orliansky, author of Machaze Abraham, and of Rachel Hirshovitz Orliansky, who was murdered at Kaušėnai, Lithuania, in July 1941.

I knew the names. I did not know the story. Until I watched J’Accuse! and read Silvia Foti’s Storm in the Land of Rain, I did not understand what had happened to my family in Plungė.

Silvia Foti, Grant Gochin, and Michael Kretzmer forced me to look at the place where my family was not only murdered, but erased. Foti is the granddaughter of Jonas Noreika. Gochin filed the litigation. Kretzmer made the film.

My great-grandparents lived at Vaižganto 9, on the corner of Sinagogų gatvė — Synagogue Street — in Plungė. Zalman Orliansky was a prodigy from Ragala and Telz. He emigrated to Mexico in the 1920s and died there in 1928. His widow Rachel remained in the family home with the unmarried children: the store downstairs, the living quarters upstairs, and a chess table custom-made by craftsmen for serious play.

They were Litvaks. They were a rabbi’s household. They were the kind of Jewish family Plungė was full of before July 1941: a town where Jews were not an abstraction, but neighbors, shopkeepers, students, rabbis, children, chess players, mothers, fathers, and cousins.

In July 1941 Rachel Orliansky was murdered at Kaušėnai. Her daughter Rosa was murdered there with her husband Aharon Lipman and their two children, Shulamit and Zalman. Her daughter Doba was murdered there too. Her son Leib-Arie’s first wife, Sosele, was murdered there with her mother and four younger sisters.

Leib-Arie escaped. My grandfather Berel escaped. Five siblings had emigrated before the war: Minna, Sarah, and Haya to Palestine, Yitzhak to Mexico, and Ebert to South Africa. Two of them, Ebert and Yitzhak, died abroad before the war began.

Of the household at Vaižganto 9 in July 1941, seven were murdered. The chess table stayed in the house. It later ended up in the Noreika family’s possession.

In July 1941 Jonas Noreika and his family moved into my great-grandmother’s........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)