The Jewish Community of Kovno, Lithuania
The first Jews came to Kovno in the late 14th century, and between the two world wars some 25,000 Jews lived there. The city was a hub of political activity generated by multifarious parties and a center of renowned yeshivot (Talmudic colleges), home to both modern and orthodox Jews. With the annexation of Lithuania by the Soviet Union in 1940, there were some 37,000 Jewish residents in Kovno, some of whom were refugees who reached the city after the outbreak of World War II.
The Germans occupied Kovno on 24 June 1941, and within a few days, Lithuanian and German nationalists had murdered close to 1,000 Jews. After the massacre, the Jews continued to suffer abuse at the hands of the Germans and Lithuanians, and thousands were murdered at the Seventh Fort and other sites. Close to 30,000 Jews were incarcerated in the Kovno ghetto on 15 August 1941. Over the next three years, Jews who did not succeed in proving their productivity and significance to the German war effort were executed at the Ninth Fort, and some were deported to their deaths in Auschwitz-Birkenau. On 15 September 1943 the ghetto became a labor camp, from which some of the Jews were deported to labor camps in Estonia.
The camp in Kovno was liquidated on 8 July 1944, by which time some 6,000 Jews remained there. Most were deported to German concentration camps. Approximately 1,500 Jews who attempted to hide were murdered on the spot. Of the prewar Jewish population of Kovno, only a few thousand survived the war, and several hundred more survived in hiding or fighting in the ranks of the partisans.
The Grinburg Family
Ephraim and Ruchama Grinburg lived in Kovno, Lithuania and had two daughters, Aliza and Ilana. Ephraim was a Hebrew teacher and editor of the daily Yiddish newspaper, "Das Vort"; Ruchama was a housewife. The Grinburgs were ardent Zionists and maintained a secular lifestyle. When the Germans invaded the USSR in June 1941, Ruchama's father heard the dire rumors and traveled from Sauliai to Kovno on Shabbat in order to warn the family, despite being an observant Jew. Ephraim and Ruchama debated the pros and cons of living under Soviet or German rule, and decided to flee. They left with a picnic basket used for Sunday outings, equipped with tableware, food and medical supplies, and entrusted their front door key to their cleaning lady, Martha.
They boarded a train at the Kovno railway station and traveled eastward for several hours on different trains. Crossing the border, they reached the village of Kulebyaki in the Gorki region, where they lived with Russian farmers, leaving for Stalingrad two months later. They slept on a bench in the port for a while, and then continued eastward to Salinabad (today Dushanbe, capital of Tajikistan), sick and starving. Ephraim found work as a factory gatekeeper. In the fall of 1941, baby Ilana died of diphtheria and was buried in a mass grave. A short time later, Ephraim was drafted to the army as a Russian citizen. He was demobilized for health reasons, and died in September 1942 while undergoing a surgical procedure. Ruchama and Aliza stayed in Salinabad until the war's end and immigrated to Israel in 1949.
![The "Maccabi" Jewish football team in Kovno, Lithuania, prewar](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/188GO8_.jpg "The "Maccabi" Jewish football team in Kovno, Lithuania, prewar")
![The teaching staff at the Real ("Reali") Gymnasium in Kovno](https://www.yadvashem.org/sites/default/files/13474_3.jpg "The teaching staff at the Real ("Reali") Gymnasium in Kovno")
