\n<\/span>
\n\u201cHe and his team [Freund and company] have made very important contributions to the discovery and preservation of Jewish cultural heritage in Lithuania, from the discovery of the escape tunnel in Paneriai [Ponar] to determining the site of Matilda Olkin, who was a young Jewish Lithuanian poet, where she was executed, he\u2019s uncovered details about Lithuania\u2019s history are initiating really important conservations, healing old wounds and bringing communities together. It\u2019s a real service and really good work that he\u2019s doing here,\u201d Micheli said.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur embassy has supported Dr. Freund\u2019s work since 2017. I\u2019ll give a few examples of this. These include a survey of the Ninth Fort in Kaunas, the work excavating the Great Synagogue of Vilna, the study of burial sites in Roki\u0161kis with ground-penetrating radar and most recently the research he and his team are doing on Rum\u0161i\u0161k\u0117s where they are collecting video and surveying a submerged village, which is really actually quite fascinating. His work has been really critical in preserving Lithuania\u2019s rich Jewish cultural heritage. Moreover, his discoveries have assisted Lithuanian and Jewish citizens around the world to reconnect to their past by recovering a lost history, the history of thousands of lives which were lost during the Holocaust. Dr. Freund, thank you very much for your support of the Jewish community here in Lithuania and you and your team\u2019s contributions to the cultural legacy of Lithuania. All of us at the embassy look forward to further cooperation. We look forward also to reading and hearing more about your fascinating discoveries,\u201d Marcus Micheli said.<\/p>\n
Vilnius Jewish Public Library director \u017dilvinas Bielauskas was introduced as the moderator and invited spoke about the trouble he had taking delivery of 22 copies of Freund\u2019s book from the post office. He then introduced Paul Bauman, the chief geophysicist of the project who lives in Calgary, Alberta, to the microphone. Bauman explained some of the non-invasive techniques used to locate the escape tunnel at Ponar and the mapping of the results. He also spoke about the Sobibor extermination camp in eastern Poland where a high-resolution metal detector and electrical resistance tomography were used to define the actual camp and subsequently to locate posts initially thought to be stilts on top of which the gas chamber there sat, but which later turned out to be part of a fence separating different parts of the camp. Dr. Bauman concluded his presentation with a quote which initially sounded like the testimony of a Holocaust survivor, but which he then attributed to a woman who survived mass murder at the hands of Islamic militants in northern Iraq.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s why we do this type of work, to develop new techniques, a consistent methodology to map these sites, to understand these sites, and part of it is to send a warning that, no matter what efforts someone might take to carry out these atrocities, even decades later they can be unmasked and mapped out,\u201d Bauman said.<\/p>\n
\u201cNothing can be hidden in the earth and sooner or later it will be discovered,\u201d moderator Bielauskas commented.<\/p>\n
Harry Jol, a physical geographer originally from Canada and now at University of Wisconsin, then gave a concise, detailed and somewhat technical explanation of non-invasive archaeological techniques, including the use of side-scanning sonar at the underwater shtetl of Rum\u0161i\u0161k\u0117s (Rumshishok) and comparisons with Luftwaffe aerial reconnaissance photography and using ground-penetrating radar at Market Square in \u0160eduva to discover the location of one of the synagogues there.<\/p>\n
Professor Philip Reeder of Duquesne University spoke further about mapping. He presented a multi-layered map of the Great Synagogue site in Vilnius and discussed finding graves of Holocaust victims near Roki\u0161kis (Rokishok) using German aerial photographs and non-invasive techniques. Reeder also talked about investigating a Soviet mass murder atrocity at the Pravieni\u0161k\u0117s prison in Lithuania.<\/p>\n
Dr. Richard Freund spoke passionately for just under an hour about archaeology, Vilnius and the 2,300-year-old Jewish community on the island of Rhodes in Greece. \u201cWe have done 36 Holocaust-era sites. Normally that would be ten lifetimes for an archaeologist,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cArchaeology is the most destructive science on earth. It\u2019s labor intensive. At one site in Israel we brought 10,000 workers, students, over the past 30 years, and we have done 2 acres. It\u2019s destructive, it\u2019s labor intensive, it\u2019s expensive,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s pretty ineffective by itself,\u201d he continued, \u201cwe are losing daily those people who are providing reasonable testimonies about this work. So if it looks like we are in a rush to do lots of sites, we are in a rush to do lots of sites. These people we have to really thank, because without them we would be spinning our wheels. What is really there, how do we know?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI am a proud Litvak Jew. My great-grandparents came from Lithuania, went to the United States, and but for the grace of God\u2026 I wouldn\u2019t be able to do this. But I owe a deep measure of really who I am to this country. To be a Litvak, a Lithuanian Jew, is an extremely special thing,\u201d Richard Freund said, adding: \u201cOver the years the same group of people\u2013we\u2019re not just doing Holocaust sites. We have done 60 sites world-wide. We\u2019ve done 25 sites in Israel. In fact when I\u2019m finished here, we\u2019re excavating the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth using the same techniques we\u2019re using in Holocaust archaeology. This is a revolution that needs to be done and one of the reasons we\u2019re coming here is to find people to work with. That is the key, to find people, the municipalities, the Jewish community, to find the US embassy in each country to help us out sometimes with logistics\u2026 So part of this whole story is we are in a race against time for the destruction of all these sites and the people who can provide the testimonies about these sites.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dr. Freund echoed earlier speakers, saying: \u201cWe are hoping that when people know that you can never get away with genocide, it will be a deterrent to other people. Seventy years, 75 years after a mass murder, we will still find the evidence. It doesn\u2019t look it\u2019s there, but we can find it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Freund also spoke about work on Rhodes, which, like Vilnius, was a major Jewish cultural center, once called \u201cChika Yerushalayim\u201d or Little Jerusalem, contrasting it with Vilnius\u2019s appellation Yerushalayim d\u2019Lita, the Jerusalem of Lithuania. The Rhodes community dates back around 2,300 years and Freund and his team did work there similar to that which they performed in Vilnius, finding the contours of a now-lost synagogue. He noted a seeming anomaly in the newer synagogue there: two central bimahs with a door between them leading back into some sort of chamber. Dr. Freund said there\u2019s an explanation, but citing a lack of time recommended audience members read about it in his book. He also thanked the many partners in the work in Lithuania, including the US embassy, the Lithuanian Jewish Community and the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America\u2019s Heritage Abroad.<\/p>\n
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<\/p>\n
Text written by\u00a0Geoff Vasil.<\/p>\n
Great Vilna Synagogue archaeological research was partially financed by the Good Will Foundation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Lithuanian Jewish Community hosted a presentation of Dr. Richard Freund\u2019s book \u201cThe Archaeology of the Holocaust. Vilna, Rhodes and Escape Tunnels\u201d Tuesday evening with slide-show presentations by Harry Jol, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1513,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1512"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1514,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1512\/revisions\/1514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1513"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1512"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1512"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gvf.lt\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1512"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}