Ariogola Descendants in Scotland
By Harvey Kaplan
© 2007

 My family appears in the records of Ariogala in the 19^th century. In the 1874 (Jewish) Family List we can find mention of the widow Reyza Kaplan (40) with her four young children: Levik (9), Khaya Gitlya (7), Itsyk (3) and Mikhel (1).  Reyza was my great-great grandmother, born Reyza Fayn.  She is listed as the widow of Elyash Kaplan, who died in 1873 – according to family lore in a horse and cart accident.  

We know that Elyash Kaplan was the son of Avrohom Dovid, and the two of them appear in an 1852 list of Jewish craftsmen in Ariogala. Elyash was 18, and his father Abram David, aged 43, is described as a bricklayer from Krakes, son of Itsko Kaplan. Abram David son of Itsko (Itsyk, Yitzchok or Isaac) appears in Ariogala records as far back as the 1840 Box Tax List, where he is described as “from Grinkiskis”.  Yitzchok appears to have been our earliest-known Kaplan ancestor, born probably around 1790. 

Howard Brodie also has family connections to Ariogala.  His great-great grandparents, David and Eitel Itzickovich, lived in the town with their family.  David appears in the Box Tax Payers list for 1877, and there are a number of other Itzikoviches in the Jewish records over the years.  David Itzickovitch married Eitel Levy (previously Hilvitz). David was a brewer, or kept an inn. He at one time was an overseer of Muller’s estate, and he died in 1902. His father is said to have fought in the Russian army against Napoleon.  Eitel probably left Ariogala after much of it was destroyed in the First World War, and she died in 1925 in the Taurage area.

In September 2005, Howard and Fiona Brodie and I visited ancestral towns in Lithuania, including Ariogala.  As we were travelling from our hotel in Kedainiai (25km away, via Josvainiai), and with no transport of our own, our options were the one bus that day from Kedainiai, leaving at 7am (!) and arriving 90 minutes later in Ariogala, or a taxi. We booked a taxi, which cost 60 litas (including a generous tip), or 12 pounds – or 4 pounds each.  The taxi trip took only half an hour.

In 2004, Agne Globiene, a history teacher in Ariogala, posted on the internet her search for Jews whose families came from Ariogala, appealing for information. (She had previously not known anything about the Jewish community in the town. She started by typing Ariogala Jews into Google, which led her to the online discussion group of Ariogala Jewish descendants).  Agne works with her students on putting together the history of the town’s former Jewish community, and I have been in contact with her ever since.  Agne has interviewed town residents about the war period, and she and other teachers from the area have been on a Holocaust education course at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  She and her students have produced a multimedia CD on the history of the town’s Jewish community, and they have visited sites of former Jewish buildings, the local Jewish cemetery, the former synagogues in Kedainiai and the 9^th Fort museum and Holocaust memorial in Kaunas. Agne was to be our guide for the day on our visit to Ariogala. 

We arrived in Ariogala at 10am, and were met outside the High School (a pink-painted building on the main Vytauto Street, dating back to 1944, and with 700 pupils) by Agne and some fellow teachers.  After initial pleasantries, we were ushered into the presence of around 35 17-18 year olds, who were eagerly awaiting our presentation.  This was to be in English, with only occasional translation of difficult phrases into Lithuanian by the teachers.  English appears now to be the second language in schools (where it was once Russian), and the students appeared reasonably fluent (just as well). 

I started by greeting the students in my carefully-rehearsed Lithuanian: “Labas rytas, Laba  Diena “ (Good morning, Good day) I told the students that until about five years before, I had never even heard of Ariogala. My family said they came from Kedainiai. Now I have evidence from the records that my family once lived in Ariogala. I gave details of my family’s connection with the town, and also of Howard’s family connection, and explained that we were visiting Lithuania to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors. I spoke a little of Jewish history in Lithuania, and about why and when our families emigrated. I emphasised that it was just as well that they left when they did, or they would later have been caught up in the Holocaust, and told the students a little about where they settled – about Glasgow and Scotland.  We showed them photographs of our family, such as Howard’s photo of the Itzikovitch family, actually taken in Ariogala.

I spoke for half an hour, followed by questions, at which point Howard and Fiona joined in to assist me.  The students asked how we liked Lithuania, how we felt about visiting the country, about Scotland, our families, music, sport. They steered clear of any difficult questions, although we thought that might be due to lack of confidence and lack of time.

The teachers then proudly gave us a tour of the school. We visited various classrooms, including the English class, with its posters of Shakespeare, Burns and Graham Greene on the wall, and the music class, where they sang for us their school song. The pupils were amazingly well-mannered, standing up as we entered the room.

After having photos taken inside and outside the school, we crossed over to see the town hall, and the old market square.  This is a tree-lined square which once would have teemed with Jewish activity.  At the back of the square are two non-descript buildings – one a former cinema (now a cultural centre).  Behind these buildings formerly stood two synagogues – the big and small synagogues (they were destroyed during the war).  In the square in front, the market took place every Wednesday – and the market must have been dominated by the Jewish inhabitants.  Howard and I imagined our ancestors (Kaplan and Itzikovitch) in the 1870s, crossing the square on their way to the synagogue.

Much of the town burned down during the Second World War, and very few pre-war buildings survive.  However, further up the main street, on the same side as the town hall, is a one-story wooden house, painted blue. Agne identified this as the pre-war rabbi’s house (over a hundred years old). Opposite, but nearer the school, are two similar wooden houses which once had Jewish occupants, although most of the original pre-war wooden buildings had been destroyed by fire or demolished since then. Evidently most Jews lived in the main street or around the market square.

Next we piled into the school car – a battered old Volkswagen Golf, with 350,000 km on the clock – driven by the school driver – and we were driven out of the town, across the Dubysa river, past landscape very like Scotland (a river, a few gentle hills, fields and trees), past the stone ramparts of the old bridge (destroyed during the war), through fields of potatoes, horses, chickens and goats, until we came to a barbed-wire fence. We negotiated a break in the fence, and were faced with a hill, on top of which is a marker stone. The plaque has a Star of David, and in Yiddish and Lithuanian says “The old Jewish cemetery – sacred is the memory of the dead”.

Behind the marker, on a grassy hill, and in an area beyond covered in trees and vegetation, covering around one and a half hectares, is the Jewish cemetery. Very few stones are visible or clear, and there are the remains of a small brick structure – probably the old tahara house (prayer hall). We could find no stones from our own families.  It was a poignant moment, as our ancestors are likely to haven been buried there.We were taken to the inevitable Holocaust killing site (and perhaps the site of an older Jewish cemetery).  There are two memorial stones, fenced off.  One, an older stone, is in Lithuanian). The more recent stones, with a Star of David, states in Yiddish that here was spilt the blood of 662 Jewish men, women and children in August 1941. They were from Ariogala and the vicinity, and they were murdered by local Lithuanians, between the departure of the Russians and the arrival of the Germans.

After paying our respects at this site, we went to a country pub – the only eating place in the area - for a bar lunch, then headed off to Betygala (see below). After Betygala, we came back to Ariogala for a late afternoon stroll around the town, visiting the local supermarket, walking by the imposing church (built in 1939 on the site of previous buildings). We walked through a park, where the paths are lined with intricate wooden sculptures (similar to those we saw all over the country, but not as religious), towards the playing field.  Whilst youngsters kicked a ball around the stadium, a farmer walked his cows along, then sat down and started milking them! Agne told us that this part was called the “Valley of Song”, because of the music festivals held there. Beyond the stadium, we crossed the precarious “monkey bridge”,  leading to a path to the Jewish cemetery,  then doubled back into town.

Agne told us a little bit about the war years. Many of the locals had helped in killing the Jews (and some were tried post-war by the Soviets), others had looked on passively. The local priest had collaborated with the Nazis, and had sold the possessions of the Jews ( I don’t expect he showed much moral leadership at that time!).

We left Ariogala at around 7pm, by taxi back to Kedainiai.