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Rachel Kostanian

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Rachel Kostanian
Other namesRachilė Kostanian
Rachelė Kostanian
Rachel Kostanian-Danzig

Rachel Kostanian is a Lithuanian Jewish activist, founder and longtime director of a Holocaust museum in Vilnius, and book author. She is a recipient of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Early life

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Kostanian was born Rachel Zivelchinski in Lithuania. Kostanian's father, Yosif Zivelchinski, was a judge in Šiauliai, and her mother Bluma (née Danzig) was a Yiddish teacher.[1]: 142  The family followed Bundism.[2]: 39  Kostanian and her mother escaped the Holocaust in 1941 because they were taken to the Soviet Union together with other families of Soviet officials. They lived in Balachna near Gorky until Kostanian was sent with 200 other Lithuanian, Jewish and non-Jewish children to a children's home in the Urals.[1]: 145  At the end of 1944, Kostanian returned to Vilnius. After finishing high school, she studied law at Vilnius University,[1]: 159  and earned a degree in law.[3] She could not find work as a lawyer.[1]: 159  She went on to work in Kirovakan as an English teacher at a music school.[3]

In 1989, Emanuelis Zingeris offered Kostanian the position of Scientific Secretary for the Museum.[2]: 40  Under her leadership, the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum with exhibits centering on the Holocaust, was established.[4] The museum opened in 1991 in the so-called "Green House", formerly part of the Museum of the October Revolution.[5] Kostanian expanded the museum's inventory of personal narratives[6] by placing advertisements in local and international media asking for "letters, books, photographs, manuscripts, clothing, dishes."[1]: 163 [7]

A first conference on the Holocaust in Lithuania was held in Vilnius in 1993, on the 50th anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto. Zingeris and Kostanian jointly published the proceedings of the conference in 1995.[8] In 2020, she participated in an international conference Remembering for the Future - The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide in Oxford.[2]: 42 [9] From this meeting, she wrote a paper describing the activities of Jews in the ghetto in the fields of health care, culture, art, science, music, sports, and religion.[2]: 42 

Selected publications

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  • Kostanian, Rachilė (2004). Spiritual resistance in the Vilna Ghetto. Vilnius: Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum. ISBN 978-9986-9387-2-9.
  • Kostanian, Rachilė; Atamukas, Solomon (1996-01-01). The Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. The Museum.
  • Kostanian, Rachilė; Biber, Jevgenija. "Vilna ghetto posters : Jewish spiritual resistance : from the collection of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum of Lithuania". search.worldcat.org. Retrieved 2024-01-05.

Awards and honors

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At the age of 91, on February 9, 2021, Kostanian received the Federal Cross of Merit on Ribbon.[10][11]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e Woolfson, Shivaun (2014-08-28). "The Memory Bearer: Rachel Kostanian". Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects. Bloomsbury Publishing. pp. 139–166. ISBN 978-1-4725-2705-9.
  2. ^ a b c d Goldberg, Esther (7 October 2010). "Nazi crimes have been downgraded in Lithuania". The Canadian Jewish News. p. 9 – via Proquest.
  3. ^ a b Katz, Dovid (2017-09-02). "The Extraordinary Recent History of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania". Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust. 31 (3): 285–295. doi:10.1080/23256249.2017.1395530. ISSN 2325-6249. S2CID 165297779.
  4. ^ Brook, Daniel (2015-07-26). "Double Genocide". Slate. ISSN 1091-2339. Retrieved 2023-06-21.
  5. ^ Schoffman, Stuart (July 19, 1999). "The Best Revenge". The Jerusalem Report ; Jerusalem. p. 50 – via Proquest.
  6. ^ Stanley, Liz (2016-05-13). Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-14874-6.
  7. ^ Shivaun Woolfson: The Memory Bearer: Rachel Kostanian, 2014, p. 163; see also Ekaterina Makhotina: Memories of War - War of Memories. Lithuania and the Second World War, 2017, p. 338.
  8. ^ Ekaterina Makhotina: Memories of War - War of Memories. Lithuania and the Second World War. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2017, p. 337; cf. the entry at https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/bib27818
  9. ^ Esther Goldberg: Historian whose task is remembrance of the Holocaust. Rachel Kostanian. 2010, p. B42; cf. John K. Roth, Elisabeth Maxwell, Margot Levy, Wendy Whitworth (eds.): Remembering for the Future - The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide. Palgrave McMillan, Basingstoke 2011, Vol. I, p. 6.
  10. ^ "RACHEL KOSTANIAN WAS AWARDED THE ORDER OF MERIT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY". www.jmuseum.lt. Retrieved 2024-01-05.
  11. ^ "Bekanntgabe vom 1. Mai 2021". Der Bundespräsident (in German). Retrieved 2024-01-05.
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