The Klaipėda Jewish Community invites you to the event
Text based on the City of Klaipėda’s website, translated from Lithuanian
Residents who moved to Klaipėda in the postwar years and those born there still remember the forest of antennas that once stood in the city center. This was a secret radio jamming station that operated during the Soviet era, designed to block radio broadcasts from Western countries. The Soviet authorities sought to limit residents’ ability to listen to programs from “The Voice of America,” the BBC, “Radio Free Europe,” “Radio Liberty,” and Vatican Radio. The facility operated until the very end of 1988, when the jamming of foreign radio broadcasts was finally discontinued by order of the Minister of Communications of the Lithuanian SSR.
However, this area has a much longer and more complex history. Before World War II, this site housed the cemetery and ritual services center of the Klaipėda Jewish community. During the Nazi occupation, the Klaipėda Jewish community was destroyed, and its heritage suffered immense losses. After the war, the Soviet authorities established a secret radio jamming station, “Object No. 61,” on the site of the former cemetery. During the construction of this facility’s infrastructure, tombstones from the dismantled Jewish cemetery were used as building materials, including for the foundations of the antennas. The history of this area has become a telling testament to the legacy of two totalitarian regimes—the Nazi and the Soviet: one destroyed the city’s Jewish community, while the other erased its memory and consigned its past to oblivion for a long time.
On July 30 at 4:00 p.m., the Klaipėda Jewish community invites you to the event “Voices That Have Faded Away” during which the names of the 1,225 people buried in these cemeteries will be read aloud. The event will also feature the unveiling of symbolic matzevot—Jewish tombstones—to commemorate the destroyed cemeteries.
Prof. Dr. Ruth Leiserowitz will present the history of the Klaipėda Jewish cemeteries. Actors from the Klaipėda Jewish Community’s “Šatil” theater will participate in the event.
The past lives on as long as we remember it. The future begins when we carry it forward together.
Project organizer – the Klaipėda Jewish Community.
The project is funded by the Klaipėda City Municipality.
Project partners – the “Jews in East Prussia” Historical and Cultural Society, the Museum of Lithuania Minor, the Klaipėda Center for Ethnic Cultures, and the “Good Will Foundation.”