Zeligo Kalmanovičiaus dienoraščio dalis, rašyta Vilniaus gete 1942-05-16 – 1942-07-19

KALMANOVITCH, ZELIG (1881–1944), Yiddish writer, philologist, and translator. Born in Goldingen, Latvia, in 1929, he settled in Vilna, where he joined the YIVO Institute and became editor of its journal YIVO Bleter. Kalmanovitch published studies on Yiddish philology, the influence of Hebrew on Yiddish syntax (1906, 1907), and on the Yiddish dialect spoken in Courland (1926). He translated into Yiddish Josephus' Jewish Wars (1914), Dubnow's History of the Jews (1909–10), and H.G. Wells' Outline of History (1930). During the Nazi occupation he was forced to select the books to be shipped to Germany. In the Vilna ghetto Kalmanovitch kept a diary in Hebrew. With the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto in September 1943, he was deported to an extermination camp in Estonia where he died the following winter.

After the liquidation of the Vilnius ghetto, the citizens used the documents found in the territory of the ghetto for the furnaces of home stoves. In 1945, the surviving Jews discovered the remains of documents hidden in the Vilnius ghetto, including the Kalmanovičius diary. After the war, most of the diary was sent to YIVO in New York, the rest remained in Lithuania.

1944–1949 The diary was kept in the post-war Vilnius Jewish Museum. After its closure transferred to the Central State Archive of Lithuania (LCVA FR-1390 ap. 1 b. 25). In 1998 returned to the Vilnius Gaon State Jewish Museum.