As a key partner in the “Echoes of Memory” project, the Jewish (Litvak) Community of Lithuania (JCL) plays a role spanning ethical oversight, foundational development, national outreach, and final project dissemination. Given the project’s focus on Holocaust survivor narratives, the JCL’s direct link to the Litvak community memory and live stories.
The JCL is coordinating a major public-facing component of the project by organizing the National Holocaust Remembrance Day event in Lithuania 2025. This event serves as the primary mechanism for disseminating project outcomes and fostering awareness at the national level. The JCL will manage the event’s full scope, including hosting commemorative ceremonies with speeches by Holocaust survivors and historians, and organizing open discussion panels to facilitate broader community engagement.
Lithuania officially observes the Day of Commemoration of the Victims of the Genocide of Lithuanian Jews on September 23rd every year. This date was officially designated by the Lithuanian Parliament in 1994 to commemorate the historical fact of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto in 1943, a symbolic and painful event that marked the near-total destruction of the Jewish community, the “Litvaks,” in Lithuania. The day honors the memory of the estimated 195,000 to 200,000 Jewish people—over 90% of the pre-war population—who were murdered in Lithuania during the Holocaust (1941–1944) by Nazi occupiers and local collaborators.
A primary responsibility for the JCL is within the project’s Quality and Impact Assessment and ethical governance framework. JCL is specifically contributed with developing the project’s Gender Registration Monitoring tool. This is a task ensuring the AI chatbot narratives and educational materials are gathered and presented in a culturally responsive and gender-sensitive manner, upholding the ethical standards vital when working with Holocaust testimonies.
Finally, the JCL is responsible for managing the project’s capstone dissemination activity – implementation of the Final Conference in Lithuania. This event will showcase the completed project results, including the AI chatbot learning pathways and the ethical Governance Framework, to a broad transnational audience, ensuring the project’s findings serve as a blueprint for future remembrance initiatives across Europe.
