Qualla: Lost Shtetl Museum https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:35 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/b/v/lost-shtetl-museum-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Lost Shtetl Museum https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum Lost Shtetl Museum: Introduction https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum/ Photo credit DautMari, CC BY-SA 4.0. Šeduva is a small town in the middle of Lithuania, the kind of place that has a market square and a church and not much else a passing traveler would notice. Until the summer of 1941, about seven hundred of its residents were Jewish: shopkeepers, tailors, scholars, schoolchildren, the rabbi Mordechai Henkin and his congregation. On August 25 and 26 of that year, in two pits in the Liaudiškės forest a short walk from town, the Nazi occupiers and their local collaborators shot 664 of them, including 159 children. About twenty more, including Rabbi Henkin, had been killed days earlier near the village of Pakutėnai. In September 2025, in a new building shaped like a small village of houses gathered around a synagogue, a museum opened in Šeduva to give those people their lives back. Its name is The Lost Shtetl.

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Image: DautMari | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/b/v/lost-shtetl-museum-wp/u9bv-lost-shtetl-museum-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Lost Shtetl Museum: The Word Itself https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum/ Photo credit DautMari, CC BY-SA 4.0. Shtetl is a Yiddish word for a town with a large Jewish population. It does not have a tidy English equivalent because the thing it described was specific to a particular geography and a particular history: the small market towns of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where J...

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Image: DautMari | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/b/v/lost-shtetl-museum-wp/u9bv-lost-shtetl-museum-the-word-itself.mp3 0:06 2 full Lost Shtetl Museum: A Building That Looks Like a Town https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum/ Photo credit DautMari, CC BY-SA 4.0. The architect Rainer Mahlamäki, working through the Finnish firm Lahdelma & Mahlamäki, designed the museum as a deliberate echo of what was destroyed. The building reads as a small cluster of separate houses with the architectural forms of Jewish vernacular building, and a larger...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/b/v/lost-shtetl-museum-wp/u9bv-lost-shtetl-museum-a-building-that-looks-like-a-town.mp3 0:06 3 full Lost Shtetl Museum: Where to Find the Pits https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum/ Photo credit DautMari, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum is part of a larger memorial complex that includes the cemetery and three monuments at the killing sites in the Liaudiškės and Pakutėnai forests. All three were designed by the Lithuanian sculptor Romualdas Kvintas, who also made a sculpture called The Girl, placed in ...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/b/v/lost-shtetl-museum-wp/u9bv-lost-shtetl-museum-where-to-find-the-pits.mp3 0:06 4 full Lost Shtetl Museum: The Long Project of Remembering https://qualla.com/lost-shtetl-museum/ Photo credit DautMari, CC BY-SA 4.0. The museum has been a long time coming. The Šeduva Jewish Memorial Fund was founded in 2012, and the Lithuanian-born writer and businessman Sergejus Kanovičius led the project for more than a decade as its chief curator and CEO. The cornerstone was laid in spring 2018. In 2018 Ka...

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]]> Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/9/b/v/lost-shtetl-museum-wp/u9bv-lost-shtetl-museum-the-long-project-of-remembering.mp3 0:06 5 full