8 years ago, in 2011 we dedicated a memorial in Plunge, a town 200 km from Birzai. It was heralded as the first monument with names in Lithuania, perhaps in Eastern Europe.
Some years before the descendants of the nearby town of Kupiskis, had collected names of murdered victims of their town and had the names displayed in a public building, formerly a Jewish synagogue.
Seeing these names inspired my wife Glenda and I to collect the names of the Plunge victims but not to put them on a wall in a building but on a memorial at the mass graves in the forest, the names at the sight of burial, a tombstone to the men women and children who were brutally killed.
At the dedication of that monument in the Kausenai forest, I addressed the crowd who had gathered like you are gathered here today. My call then as it is now today in Birzai was for more of the two hundred mass graves in Lithuania to have memorials with available names. As a reminder to all that these names in Lithuanian language were the names of Lithuanian citizens who happened to be Jews. Speaker after speaker, politicians and others endorsed my call and praised the effort.
A few months later we received an invitation from the initiator of a project in Kedainiai, mister Rimantas Zirgulis to attend the dedication of the monument, a direct result of a visit we payed to Kedainiai in the restored Synagogue where we told mister Zirgulis director of the museum, of our plans in Plunge.
Other than the names on a few small mass graves no other municipality has led a project of names of victims at the site of the murder and burial until today in Birzai in the Pakamponys forest.
This project came about because Ingrida Vilkiene the person who has built up the Tolerance Education Center network in Lithuania, invited Glenda and me, no not invited but insisted that we come to Birzai to meet two exceptional Lithuanian teachers Vidmantas Jukonis and his son Merunas.
They arranged to us to meet the mayor Irute Varzene who having heard of our efforts in Plunge asked us to do something in Birzai.
And then we met the exceptional Capetown philanthropist Ben Rabinowitz here with us today a Birzh or Birzai descendant who agreed to head an organization to build a memorial and to do more in field of Holocaust education.
Ben Rabinowitz and the designer of this impressive memorial architect dr. Joseph Rabie together with other members of the Birzai society as well as the major financial donors are here with us today.
The ones who all combined to make this possible and to Vidmantas and your son Merunas whom we have worked with during the past four and the half years the descendants of victims of this massacre and the entire Jewish world say Aciu Thank you Toda Raba, A groyse dank.
May we never forget this tragic period in Lithuanian history and Jewish history.
KEIN MOL NISHT VIRGESEN
Birzai, 2019.