Telšiai, Lithuania

Jews began settling in Telšiai during the fifteenth century. At the end of the nineteenth century, about 3,000 Jews lived in the town, accounting for fifty-one percent of the local population. In 1940, Telšiai had nearly 2,800 Jewish inhabitants, making up forty-eight percent of the population. Most of the Jews earned their livelihood in crafts, commerce, and peddling. Telšiai was renowned for its educational institutions, among them a special school for girls founded in 1865 by the Jewish Enlightenment poet Yehuda Leib Gordon (YaLaG), and the great Yeshiva {100243}, established in 1880, with 400 Yeshiva students. Following the Soviet annexation of Lithuania in 1940, all shops were nationalized and the Jewish educational institutions, including the Yeshiva, were closed. The German army occupied Telšiai on June 26, 1941. In July, a few hundred Jews from Telšiai and Alsėdžiai were rounded up, assigned to forced labor, and then murdered. At the end of August 1941, 500 Jews from Telšiai, predominantly women and children, along with Jews from the nearby towns of Alsėdžiai, Varniai, Žarėnai, Laukuva, Luokė, and Nevarėnai, were interned in the Telšiai ghetto { 4431720}. On December 24-25, 1941, the ghetto was liquidated and its entire population was murdered in Geruliai camp. The Red Army liberated Telšiai in the summer of 1944.