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 (Suvalkai) 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 "Líta."

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 2,000 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.

The Yiddish adjective ליטוויש Litvish means "Lithuanian": the noun for a Lithuanian Jew is Litvak. The term "Litvak" itself originates from "Litwak", a Polish term denoting "a man from Lithuania", which however went out of use before the 19th century, only to be revived around 1880 in the narrower meaning of "a Lithuanian Jew".

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