Memorial book: the Ritavas Community; A Tribute to the Memory of our Town

Memorial book: the Ritavas Community;
A Tribute to the Memory of our Town
(Rietavas, Lithuania)

55°44' / 21°56'

Capetown, South Africa 2000

Acknowledgments

Our sincere appreciation to Prof. Milton Shain and Romi Kaplan of the Kaplan-Kushlick Foundation
for permission to place this material on the JewishGen web site.

Our sincere thanks to Seth Morgulas who scanned and edited the text,
and to Helen Rosenstein Wolf for editing a considerable proportion of the scans,
this enabling us to facilitate the addition of all the text to this project.

This is the: Memorial book: the Ritavas Community; A Tribute to the Memory of our Town,
Edited by Dr Dina Porat and Ronib Stauber,
and published in 2000 in Cape Town, South Africa, by The Kaplan-Kushlick Foundation.

Purchase details for a printed copy of this translation can be found at http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/ybip/YBIP_Rietavas.html

This material is made available by JewishGen, Inc. and the Yizkor Book Project for the purpose of
fulfilling our mission of disseminating information about the Holocaust and destroyed Jewish communities.
This material may not be copied, sold or bartered without JewishGen, Inc.'s permission. Rights may be reserved by the copyright holder.

JewishGen, Inc. makes no representations regarding the accuracy of the translation. The reader may wish to refer to the original material for verification.
JewishGen is not responsible for inaccuracies or omissions in the original work and cannot rewrite or edit the text to correct inaccuracies and/or omissions.
Our mission is to produce a translation of the original work and we cannot verify the accuracy of statements or alter facts cited.

Chapter	Title	Author	Page
	Foreword (Riteve - A Jewish Shtetl In Lithuania)	Dina Porat	8

1	A Background to the Story of Riteve	Mendel Kaplan	12
	Part One: Lithuania and its Jewish Community		12
	Part Two: Riteve and Its Jewish Community		19
	Part Three: What Makes a Litvak a Litvak		22

2	The Jewish Shtetl in Lithuania	Dina Porat	26

3	The Jews of Lithuania in the Inter–War Period	Roni Stauber	29

4	History of Riteve	Townsfolk	35

5	Memoirs From Riteve	Townsfolk	57

6	Personalities in Riteve	Townsfolk	90

7	Public and Zionist Institutions	Townsfolk	115

8	The Jewish Sabbath and Holidays	Townsfolk	128

9	The Holocaust in Riteve	Dina Porat	143
	The Holocaust of Lithuanian Jewry	Roni Stauber	143
	The destruction of the Riteve community	Roni Stauber	149
	Testimonies		154
	Yizkor: List of Victims		165

10	A South African Returns to the Lithuanian Shtetl	Mendel Kaplan	168

	Appendix 1		184
	Ha–Melitz, No. 128, June 24, 1900. (A list of names of about 100 donors from Riteve, who collected 26.20 roubles for a fund for the hungry in Bessarabia.)

	Appendlx 2
	They Died For Israel – Some Obituaries

	Glossary of Jewish Terms		189
	Footnotes on the Chapters		192
	Index		200

Yizkor Book Project JewishGen Home Page Ritavas, at Kehilalinks

Yizkor Book Director, Lance Ackerfeld
Emerita Yizkor Book Project Manager, Joyce Field z”l
This web page created by Lance Ackerfeld