CAMERA OBSCURA
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed
Pre-Second World War Lithuanian Jewish Photographs
A Pictorial History Exposed
Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė1
Zina Blumentalienė
THE INVISIBLE GIRLS
Work in progress.
Lina Balk
Bergmann
Born in the small village of Ellernthal in East Prussia on June 20,1888, Lina Balk née Bergmann married the Tauragė-born photographer Leon Balk in Klaipėda on October 26, 1925. Five days after her husband passed away on March 18, 1939, Adolf Hitler visited the city a few hours after it became the last piece of uncontested land grabbed by the Nazis before the outbreak of the Second World War. Thanks to the fact that Leon Balk became a naturalised British citizen in 1906, Lina and the couple's two young children were able to escape to England with the help of Margaret Reid at the British Embassy in Berlin, unlike almost every other member of the Bergmann family, most of whom were murderd between 1941 and 1945.
Zina Blumentalienė
Račkaitė
Born in Žiežmariai in about 1901. Originally a pianist. Owned and operated the famous Zinaida photography studio on the opposite corner of the current Savivaldybė building at Laisvės al. 72, whose clients included the Lithuanian president, Antanas Smetona, the artist and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis’ widow, Sofija Čiurlionienė, and the opera singer, Kipras Petrauskas, of whom the latter two were both coincidentally recognised by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for saving Jewish lives in Kaunas and elsewhere during the Holocaust. According to several different sources, Mrs. Blumentalienė was an outstanding portrait photographer who won several awards for her work at an unnamed photography competition that was held in Berlin in the early 1930s, and she even had her own solo exhibition at the Kaunas Art Gallery in 1933, something almost unheard of at the time. Married to Adolf Blumental, a senior engineer in the Lithuanian Air Force during the interwar period, Zina survived the Holocaust under circumstances that remain unclear, although it’s documented that she spent several years living in Soviet exile in Siberia, and eventually emigrated to Israel in 1960, where she's believed to have passed away in Tel Aviv in 1971. The precise fates of her husband and the couple’s son, Nikolay (also recorded as Kolia Zakharia Blumental), are unknown, although it's understood that Nikolay perished in the Kovno Ghetto in 1943 and Adolf was murdered at Dachau. A copy of one of Mrs. Blumentalienė’s internal passports can be seen here.
Dora Chaitaitė
Khait, Chaitaitė-Šekienė
⛤
Born in Saločiai on January 22, 1908, it’s said that Dora Chaitaitė inherited her brother Icik’s photography business when he moved to neighbouring Pasvalys on an unknown date in about 1930. According to the few surviving photographs that feature her studio stamp on the reverse side, the relatively young photographer, who’s known to have married someone by the name of Icikas Šekas in Biržai on July 27, 1937, doesn’t appear to have run a traditional photography studio, being more inclined to work outdoors, capturing various images of the locals and miscellaneous Catholic ceremonies and events. Accounts differ concerning exactly what happened in Saločiai during the late summer of 1941, and it’s not entirely clear whether Dora was murdered near her home towards the end of June/beginning of July, or along with the rest of the town’s Jews, 25 kilometres to the south in a forest near Pasvalys on August 26. What’s known with some certainty however is that before she was shot, she was stripped naked, doused in petrol and set on fire by a group of Lithuanian men who possibly knew her personally. The precise details concerning the looting of her photographic equipment don’t appear to have been recorded, although it can be said with absolute certainty that it happened, and that her neighbours, if not the very men that murdered her, were behind it. A few of Dora’s surviving photographic prints are held in the archives at several museums in Lithuania, of which some have been digitised and can be seen here. How they got there remains a mystery. The building in which Dora ran her photography business, and where it's thought that she also lived with her husband, still stands in Saločiai's former central marketplace at today's Gedimino a. 6. These days it serves as the town's funeral parlour. See also this map.
Fruma Gurvičienė
Braudaitė
Coming Soon.
Feitska Kaplanskaitė-Taicienė
Faina, Fania, Kaplansky
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Feitska Kaplanskaitė-Taicienė’s achievements as Telšiai's first female photographer have been completely overshadowed by those of her more famous father, Chaim Kaplansky, whose business she took over at around the time of his death in about 1935. A total of 427 original glass plate negatives from the family's photography studio survive in the city's Alka Museum of Samogitian History, having been 'rescued' at the end of June 1941 by the museum's then director, Pranas Genys. Feitska was murdered on an unrecorded date between June 22 and December 31, 1941. See also this map.
Alte Katz
Alte Rahel-Yehudit Katz, Alta, Kac, Kats
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Alte Katz, née Dwilanski, who surviving records suggest was born in 1887, is known to have been actively involved in the photography business in Eišiškės between at least 1926 and 1940. The photography studio that she ran with her husband, Yitzhak, was located somewhere on the town's central marketplace, almost certainly at ul. Rynek 13 (today's Gegužės a.). Mrs. Katz also owned a bakery, was a qualified doctor and was a member of the local Jewish education committee. Murdered on an unrecorded date during the summer of 1941, Alte Katz was one of four Jewish photographers from Eišiškės, all of whom are listed here, who were responsible for taking almost all of the approximately 1,000 photographs that were used for the creation of the permanent Tower of Faces exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. It seems a pity (to say the least) that nobody has ever tried to find out anything about them, including so it seems anyone at the museum.
Annushka Varšavskienė
Sara Matz
⛤
Coming soon.
1 Photographed by Zina Blumentalienė (↑) in 1939, the Lithuanian writer Sofija Kymantaitė-Čiurlionienė was posthumously recognised as Righteous Among the Nations in 1991. More information here.