The monuments commemorate the numerous Jewish residents of the Samogitia region of Lithuania who were shot by members of the SS and their local helpers between June and December 1941. The memorial stones were erected at the beginning of the 1990s on three sites of mass shootings around Telšiai. They are located in the forest of Rainiai and next to the villages of Geruliai and Viešvėnai.
The town of Telšiai had a Jewish community as early as the 15th century. Between 1918 and 1940, it was home to one of the most important centres of Jewish learning and culture in the Republic of Lithuania, the great yeshiva. Its 400 students came from all over the world. After the Soviet occupation of Lithuania in 1940, the authorities severely restricted Jewish life in Telšiai. Around 2,800 Jews lived in Telšiai when it was occupied by the German Wehrmacht at the end of June 1941. Shortly afterwards, the SS ordered the Jewish residents to leave their homes. All the men as well as several women were interned in a camp close to Rainiai and had to perform forced labour before being shot. Most of the Jewish women and children were relocated into a newly established ghetto in Telšiai. In the forest of Rainiai, five kilometres outside of town, members of the SS-Einsatzgruppe (mobile killing squad) A and Lithuanian helpers shot 840 Jews on 30 July 1941. Close to the village of Geruliai, ten kilometres away from Telšiai, 1,580 Jewish children, women and men were murdered between 1 and 15 September 1941. Forty families perished close to Viešvenai. In the summer of 1941, 200 people were murdered and their bodies burned, north of the railway line from Telšiai to Plungė.
Between June 1941 and 1944, German and Lithuanian members of the SS murdered close to 12,000 Jews from the region of Telšiai, for the most part in mass shootings. Many women and children died of starvation and exhaustion in the ghetto of Telšiai. Around sixty women and eight children survived, having been able to flee.
Several simple memorials of natural stone set up in the 1990s in the vicinity of Telšiai commemorate the Jewish victims of mass shootings.
- Name
- Žydų žudynių vieta Telšių apskrityje
- Open
- The monuments are accessible at all times.