Lithuanian Jews

Lithuanian Jews or Litvaks are Jews with roots in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: (present-day Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Latvia and the northeastern Suwałki region of Poland). The term is sometimes used to cover all Orthodox Jews who follow a "Lithuanian" (Ashkenazic and non-Hasidic) style of life and learning, whatever their ethnic background. The area where Lithuanian Jews lived is referred to in Yiddish as "Líte."

Lithuania was historically home to a large and influential Jewish community that was almost entirely eliminated during the Holocaust (see The Holocaust in Lithuania). Before World War II, the Lithuanian Jewish population was some 160,000, about 7% of the total population. Vilnius (then Wilno in the Second Polish Republic) had a Jewish community of nearly 100,000, about 45% of the city's total population. There were over 110 synagogues and 10 yeshivas in Vilnius alone. About 4,000 Jews were counted in Lithuania during the 2005 census.

Quoting the research done by H. G. Adler into Poland during World War II called Theresienstadt 1941–1945, there were '80,000 Jews conscripted into Poland's independent army prior to the German invasion who identified themselves as Lithuanian Jews'. Using different sources Holocaust researchers claim there were between 60,000 and 65,000 Jewish soldiers in Poland's independent army who identified themselves as Lithuanian Jews.

Jews

The Jews (/dʒuːz/;Hebrew: יְהוּדִים ISO 259-3 Yehudim, Israeli pronunciation [jehuˈdim]), also known as the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group originating from the Israelites, or Hebrews, of the Ancient Near East. Jewish ethnicity, nationhood and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation, while its observance varies from strict observance to complete nonobservance.

The Jews trace their ethnogenesis to the part of the Levant known as the Land of Israel. The discovery of the Merneptah Stele confirms the existence of the people of Israel in Canaan as far back as the 13th century BCE. Since then, while maintaining rule over their homeland during certain periods—such as under the Kingdom of Israel, the Kingdom of Judah, the Hasmonean Dynasty, and the Herodian Kingdom—Jews also suffered various exiles and occupations from their homeland—from Ancient Egyptian Occupation of the Levant, to Assyrian Captivity and Exile, to Babylonian Captivity and Exile, to Greek Occupation and Exile, to the Roman Occupation and Exile. These events subjected Jews to slavery, pogroms, cultural assimilation, forced expulsions, genocide, and more, scattering Jews all around the world, in what is known today as the Jewish diaspora.