Rachel Kostanian Explained

Other Names:Rachilė 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

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] The family followed Bundism.[2] 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. At the end of 1944, Kostanian returned to Vilnius. After finishing high school, she studied law at Vilnius University, and earned a degree in law.[3] She could not find work as a lawyer. She went on to work in Kirovakan as an English teacher at a music school.

In 1989, Emanuelis Zingeris offered Kostanian the position of Scientific Secretary for the Museum. 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."[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.[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.

Selected publications

Awards and honors

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

Notes and References

  1. Book: Woolfson, Shivaun . Holocaust Legacy in Post-Soviet Lithuania: People, Places and Objects . 2014-08-28 . Bloomsbury Publishing . 978-1-4725-2705-9 . en. The Memory Bearer: Rachel Kostanian. 139–166.
  2. News: Goldberg . Esther . 7 October 2010 . Nazi crimes have been downgraded in Lithuania . 9 . The Canadian Jewish News. Proquest.
  3. Katz . Dovid . 2017-09-02 . The Extraordinary Recent History of Holocaust Studies in Lithuania . Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust . en . 31 . 3 . 285–295 . 10.1080/23256249.2017.1395530 . 165297779 . 2325-6249.
  4. News: Brook . Daniel . 2015-07-26 . Double Genocide . 2023-06-21 . Slate . en-US . 1091-2339.
  5. News: Schoffman . Stuart . July 19, 1999 . The Best Revenge . The Jerusalem Report ; Jerusalem . 50 . Proquest.
  6. Book: Stanley, Liz . Documents of Life Revisited: Narrative and Biographical Methodology for a 21st Century Critical Humanism . 2016-05-13 . Routledge . 978-1-317-14874-6 . en.
  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. Web site: RACHEL KOSTANIAN WAS AWARDED THE ORDER OF MERIT OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF GERMANY . 2024-01-05 . www.jmuseum.lt . en.
  11. Web site: Bekanntgabe vom 1. Mai 2021 . 2024-01-05 . Der Bundespräsident . de.