News

At a solemn ceremony in Paris on 27 June, Lithuanian Ambassador to France Jolanta Balčiūnienė conferred the Cross of Officer of the Order for Merits to Lithuania on journalist, writer and specialist in East European Jewish culture and history Henri Minczeles. In her congratulatory speech, the Ambassador thanked Henri Minczeles for his long-term activity in promoting the cultural and historical heritage of Litvaks in France and stressed the great scholarly and moral value of the book “Vilna, Wilno, Vilnius: The Jerusalem of Lithuania”.

The Ambassador voiced hope that this research would be continued, contributing to a better knowledge of the history and culture of Litvaks – the Lithuanian Jews.

Henri Minczeles was born in 1926 in Paris, into a Polish Jewish family. During the Second World War, his father was arrested and deported by the Nazis to a concentration and extermination camp in Auschwitz, where he died. The writer graduated from a School of Social Sciences, where he obtained a doctorate in history, then worked in the Yiddish Library.

Henri Minczeles is a journalist, broadcaster and a pillar of society. In 1991, he received the Jacob Buchman Prize for fostering the remembrance of the Holocaust. The award was established in the framework of the Jewish France Foundation.

The book “Lithuanian Jews between 1918 and 1940. The Echo of the Lost World” by Henri Minczeles was also translated into the Lithuanian language.

On 3 February, President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaitė awarded the writer with the Cross of Officer of the Order for Merits to Lithuania.