Jewish History

Area where we think the Jewish community would have lived

Jews first settled in Židikai in the 17th Century and its wooden synagogue was built in 1780 and was one of the first of its kind in Lithuania.

At the end of the 19th Century there were 914 Jews in Židikai, 73% of the general population. In March 1881 Alexander II of Russia was assassinated by revolutionaries and the government blamed the Jews. This resulted in rioting, pogroms, rape and murder of Jewish communities and in1882 the May Laws were introduced. These laws meant that Jews were forbidden to settle outside a Shtetl, deeds of sale of real estate in the names of Jews outside Shtetls were nulled and Jews were prohibited from trading on Sundays and Christian holidays.

In 1915, during World War I, Jews were exiled into the interior of Russia and not all of them returned after the end of the war. In 1921 there were only 366 Jews in Židikai. General poverty and isolation made the community resistant to new ideas and poverty induced emigration to the US, South Africa, England and Ireland.

Židikai had a prayer house, a synagogue and a number of ‘Hadarim’. During the period of Lithaunia’s independence there existed also a Hebrew school of the ‘Tarbuth’ network. The community had an unbroken line of officiating Rabbis, with Rabbi Eliahu Lotzki the last one.

The Rabbis that served in Židikai included: Rabbi Zvi-Hirsch; Dov bar Zvi Dimand (formerly of Tavrig; later went to Pilten); Rabbi Moshe-Shlomo bar Yosef Levinberg (served as Rabbi for 38 years; he died in 5656/1896); Rabbi Haim bar Avraham Natansohn; Rabbi Avraham-Zeev Heller (later Mariampole); Rabbi Yitzhak Begun (later in Radvilishuk) and the last Rabbi Eliahu Lotzki.

The Jews, we think, lived and congregated around a few small lanes to the right of the town, which is now farmland. The synagogue is now a pile of stone rubble and it was there that the butchers, bakers and shops were based. There are just some sandy lanes now and nothing remains of the wooden structures. Across from a small natural swimming pool originally formed by the drainage water from several tanneries was where most of the Jews lived and worked.

The Jews of Židikai make a living from small trade and peddling. Some worked in the local tannery and a few families were farmers. The local flour mill belonged to a Jew. The Jewish bank had 87 members in 1929.

The Holocaust Period

After the outbreak of World War II, and the conquest of Poland by the German, Lithuania came under Soviet rule and at the end of Summer 1940, was annexed by the Soviet Union.

At the start of World War II there were between 150-200 Jews in Židikai – approximately 30 families.

Three days after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Germans entered Židikai. Local nationalistic Lithuanians took over the town and harassed the Jewish community. They looted and vandalised their belongings and there were cases of murder.

The Lithuanian ‘activists’ took over immediately afterwards and the lives of the Jews became precarious. The raiders did not merely loot and rob, but used any means to murder Jews. Many Lithuanians used this time to settle ‘accounts’.

Here is a typical example: a Zhidik Lithuanian was unhappy about the grocer Y. N. Neiman. They both had shops and were competitors. At the outbreak of war, Neiman was staying with his daughter, who lived across the border, in Latvia. The Lithuanian found out and traveled to the daughter’s house, got Neiman out by force, brought him to the Jewish graveyard and told him to dig a grave for himself. The Lithuanian waited until Neiman finished digging and then grabbed the spade and started beating him until he fell dying into the grave. The Lithuanian covered the body with soil, burying his victim while still alive.

After a short time, the Germans published an edict ordering the Jews to assemble in the prayer house. There they were kept for a week without food or water. During that time the Lithuanians robbed them of their belongings. From the prayer house the Jews were taken to another assembly point, in Luse near the local river, a few kilometres from Židikai. The Jews from the town of Pikelai were also brought there. After a week they were made to walk the 15km to a quarry, stripped naked and marched to Mažeikiai.

There they were murdered together with Mažeikiai Jews. On August 4th 1941 the women and children were also brought to the mass graves and murdered with the women and children from Mažeikiai and its environs.

Two girls from Židikai managed to hide for two years with local peasants. Eventually the Lithuanians had enough or perhaps they became afraid to continue to hide Jews, so they went to the German police and gave the girls away. The German commander was so amazed that the girls managed to hide for such a long time, that he was going to leave them be. However, he then changed his mind and offered cigarettes to any of the Lithuanian auxiliary policemen who would kill them. There were many competitors for these cigarettes.

A few Jews who tried to escape to the Soviet Union succeeded in getting there. Most perished en route. A few got stuck at the eve of the war in Kovno and shared the fate of the Jews of the Kovno ghetto.

That was the end of the Jewish community of Židikai.

After the war a memorial was erected on the site of the mass grave in Mažeikiai.

"Most of our people were either tailors, shoemakers, builders…..the Jewish population I’m speaking of wasn’t more than 1000.....each one had a cow....God forbid if anybody hadn’t a cow he was a very poor man. They had a cow and they had chickens and all, they cultivated their own plot of land ....they were dependent more or less on the sons and daughters.... " (Grandpa Speak to me in Russian, Louis Lentin from the memoirs of Philip Baigel; born in the Shtetl of Sh’aakov 1894)

"... they left ‘the old country’ in their thousands. Many barely out of Cheder (Jewish Sunday school)... between 1868 and 1898 over 50,000 Jews fled, most to America - the Goldene Medina, others to South Africa, Canada, Britain. By 1914 over 2 million had departed. Amongst them, in the early 1890’s my mother’s father, Louis." (Grandpa Speak to me in Russian, Louis Lentin)

"Also in the site there is a grave that was split down the middle with the names of two Rabbis on it. Very strange that two men were buried together or it may have just been a memorial stone, but it was newer than the other stones – dark, marble and polished.

"She led us to a lane where the Shul, or one of the Shuls was and where the various shops were, such as the Butcher, Bakery, Blacksmiths etc… and where the Jewish school was.

"One our way back to Mažeikiai we shoot a beautiful sunset and some other houses which were also amazingly old. We then go down to the mass graves at Mažeikiai. They reckon that there are seven mass graves in this site next to the very old Jewish cemetery of Mažeikiai where they found the two mass graves. One of the graves that they excavated contained clothing, so they know that they weren’t Jews, as they didn’t get Communists to strip naked. But the other grave had no clothing, which meant that the Jews were stripped in the nearby quarry, brought up the hill and shot into the mass grave. When the Jews were shot their remaining possessions were auctioned.

"Supposedly in Western Lithuania there were fewer mass graves in areas where Jews were located as they tended to bring local populations together to be killed. However, in the East each small Shtetl had a mass grave as there was less resistance in the East. To add insult to injury their possessions were used for the war effort or auctioned! Some people were told to just lye on top of the dead bodies and they were shot that way. The killing was so methodical, so done by rote, so precise and thought out." (Thoughts on Židikai, Miki Lentin, November 2005)