Abstract
This one- and a half-day colloquium brings together experts from many important fields - Jewish history in eastern Europe, Lithuanian history, the history of World War Two and the Holocaust. The colloquium will also hear from specialists in interethnic violence theory, in order to understand the discrepancy between long centuries of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Lithuanians and the short period of extreme violence during World War Two. We will be discussing various scholarly explanations given for this violence. This investigation will combine an assessment of long-term features of Lithuanian-Jewish coexistence between the late 18th and early 20th centuries with an appraisal of political developments after the establishment of Lithuania as independent state.
The colloquium combines three perspectives: theory of interethnic violence, historical appraisal of the traditions of Jewish-Lithuanian coexistence and the history of occupiedLithuania, 1940-1945. It aims to reconstruct the process of changing Lithuanian-Jewish relations in different historical eras and thereby to to dissect the complex issues which took place between the two groups.