Liubavas Jewish Cemetery

Liubavas (Lyubave in Yiddish) is a village 18 miles southwest of Marijampole, about 1 mile from the modern Polish border. The Jewish community of Liubavas was first established in the second half of the 18th century. According to the 1765, Grand Duchy of Lithuania treasury census, 54 rural Jews lived in four houses in the settlement. In 1923, there were 593 residents in Liubavas of whom 90 (17%) were Jews. Most of them were small scale businessmen. At around the same time, a secular Jewish community was established that was helped a great deal by advice from the Ministry of Jewish Affairs in Kaunas. Over the years, the number of Jews in Liubavas dwindled and before World War II, only a few families remained. In 1941, with the conquest of Lithuania by Nazy Germany, the Jews of Liubavas were murdered, including Rabbi Elchanan Rosenholtz, along with the other Jews of the area.
A native of the town was Ephraim Greenberg, the editor of the daily “Dos Vort” in Kaunas and a member of the Central Socialist Zionist Party in Lithuania.
The Jewish cemetery of Liubavas was established in the 19th century. The cemetery was still in use until the destruction of the Jewish community during the Holocaust. Nothing was built on the cemetery grounds in the Soviet time. In 1999, the cemetery was registered into the Cultural Property Register of the Republic of Lithuania. There is a memorial stone with an inscription in Yiddish and Lithuanian: “The old Jewish cemetery. May their memory be eternal”