Sara Ginaite

Sara Ginaite-Rubinson (17 March 1924 – 2 April 2018) was a Jewish Lithuanian-born Canadian author and academic. During the Second World War she was a resistance fighter during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania, becoming a Jewish partisan in 1942.[1][2]

Sara Ginaite
Born(1924-03-17)17 March 1924
Died2 April 2018(2018-04-02) (aged 94)
Occupations
Academic work
Disciplinepolitics economics

Biography

Born in Kaunas on 17 March 1924, Ginaite was brought up in an affluent family. Her father, Yosef Ginas, was an engineer who had graduated in France while her mother, Rebecca Virovitch, had matriculated from a Polish high-school.[3][4] She was about to complete her secondary school education when Germany invaded Lithuania in 1941. After three of her uncles had been killed in the Kaunas pogrom, she was imprisoned with the surviving members of her family in the Kovno Ghetto. While there, she joined the Anti-Fascist Fighting Organization, a resistance group.[5] Together with Misha Rubinson, whom she married, she escaped in the winter of 1943–44, establishing a partisan military unit "Death to the Occupiers". She twice returned to the ghetto helping others to escape. In 1944, she and her husband participated in the liberation of the ghettos in Vilnius and Kaunas although most of the Jews had been killed. From her own family, the only survivors were her sister and a niece.[1][5]

She became a professor of political economics at Vilnius University. Her husband died in 1977 and in 1983 she moved to Canada, joining her two daughters Anya and Tanya.[1][6][5][2] She became an adjunct professor at York University, and lectured in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Israel on World War II history and social science.[2][7] In 2013 she delivered a lecture entitled “History and Personal Memory: The Beginning of the Holocaust in Lithuania" at a University of Toronto symposium.[8]

Ginaite's award-winning book Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas, 1941–1944 was translated into English and published in Toronto.[2]

She died at her home on April 2, 2018 at the age of 94; her Yahrtzeit date is 17 Nissan.[9][6]

Publications

¨*Ginaite-Rubinson, Sara (2008). Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas 1941–1944. Mosaic Press. ISBN 978-0889628168.

Many books by Ginaite have also been published in Lithuanian.[10]

Awards

Her book Resistance and Survival: The Jewish Community in Kaunas, 1941–1944 won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Holocaust History in 2006.[2]

References
  1. "Sara Ginaite". The Female Soldier. 29 April 2015. Archived from the original on 20 December 2016. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  2. "Sara Ginaite-Rubinson". Canadian Society for Yad Vashem. Archived from the original on 5 November 2018. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  3. Bergen, Doris L. (2016). War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 23–. ISBN 978-1-4422-4229-6. Archived from the original on 19 September 2023. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  4. "Portrait of female partisan, Sara Ginaite at the liberation of Vilna. The photograph was taken by a Jewish, Soviet major who was surprised to see a female, Jewish partisan standing guard". United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Archived from the original on 21 December 2016. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
  5. "Sara Ginaite Lithuanian Jewish Partisan, Witness - BBC World Service". BBC. Archived from the original on 26 August 2017. Retrieved 19 September 2017.
  6. "Sara Ginaite-Rubinson". The Globe and Mail. 9 April 2018. Archived from the original on 19 September 2023. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  7. Ginaite, Sara (1 September 2008). "'Investigating' Jewish Partisans in Lithuania". Jewish Currents. Archived from the original on 29 June 2018. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  8. "Symposium: The Holocaust in Lithuania". Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies. Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Toronto. Archived from the original on 5 November 2018. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  9. "Sara Ginaite". Steeles Memorial Chapel. Archived from the original on 5 November 2018. Retrieved 4 November 2018.
  10. "Sara Ginaite". The European Library. Archived from the original on 5 November 2018. Retrieved 19 December 2016.
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