News archive

The winter edition of the Baltic Heritage Network quarterly newsletter is now available. In these pages you will find information about our past and future events, new publications, and what is happening across the globe within the diaspora research and archive communities.

Followers of VEMU may have already noticed through social media and via other channels that our public image has been recently refreshed. In collaboration with Estonian design firm Velvet, we underwent an exciting rebranding process throughout 2021; this was an important stepping stone towards realizing VEMU’s new home. We are preparing for a stronger and rejuvenated fundraising campaign for this purpose and in order to do that, an in depth look at who we are, what we would like to achieve and how we want to appear to the world was necessary.

If there was a collection of documents that were surrounded by intrigue, the Gylys collection fits the bill. That is how a virtual exhibition „Long Journey Home: Great Discovery” by the Lithuanian Museum-Archives of Canada (LMAC) starts.

The Archive has served the Estonian community for 70 years by being the repository for the history of Estonian activity and achievement in Australia. It hosts visitors from all states of Australia and from overseas. The number of both local and overseas enquiries grows each year as descendants of the postwar immigrants research their family histories.

Congratulations to the President of Baltic Heritage Network and VEMU chief archivist Piret Noorhani, awarded the Order of the White Star IV Class by the President of the Republic of Estonia Alar Karis on Estonian Independence Day! The award was also presented to several individuals who helped keep Estonian culture alive in diaspora communities, among them Mart Nurk, who advocated for the preservation of the Estonian House in Stockholm for decades; long-time member of the board of the New York Estonian Educational Society Peeter Teedla; president of the Estonian Students’ Fund in USA MariAnne Teedla; and Tõnu Loorpärg, who acted in the name of preserving Estonian culture in New Zealand and was a longtime honorary consul.

As the world struggles with the new variant of COVID-19, Omicron, the Estonian Museum Canada (VEMU) opened it’s 2022 cultural program online, this being the current norm due to the pandemic.

The world is in a state of restlessness and despair. For two years we’ve been working and acting in accordance with Covid restrictions, we’ve lost friends and family and have been worried about their wellbeing. Just when hopes were high that the pandemic may be coming to an end, Russia created the current political crisis, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the end of the Cold War. It has now escalated to a full-fledged war, an attempt to take over Ukraine during which Putin has shown his true ruthless nature, targeting not only the Ukrainian forces but also innocent civilians. The atrocities that we are shown in the news daily from Ukraine are incomprehensible, but it is all real and happening right now in the heart of Europe. President Putin is no longer stopping at his wish to rewrite history; he now took forceful strides towards changing state borders, towards shaking the order of the world to the core, and to destroying democratic values.

On the upcoming occasion of the 100th anniversary of the University of Lithuania, the Lithuanian World University Symposium will take place at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas on 27-29 October 2022. The organizers invite the Lithuanian and global Lithuanian science and art community to discuss the significance of the tradition of the University of Lithuania for our country and the Lithuanian diaspora. The symposium will also discuss how university studies, science and art have been affected by the recent global pandemic and what the response to it in Lithuania and the world could be.

The Estonian Museum Canada (VEMU) of Toronto, in collaboration with the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu, organized a campaign to collect the school lore of the Estonian diaspora community in Canada throughout 2021. Submissions for the campaign were welcomed from both current students as well as individuals who had either worked in education or previously attended an educational institution. The campaign honoured the memory of the former director of the Estonian Supplementary Schools in Toronto, Edgar Marten, who passed away in 2020.

People who emigrated after the 1990s and have higher education are bringing back to Lithuania the democratic and civic values of the western world. High culture of professional communication, intolerance of corruption, sensitivity to the marginalized, tolerance of sexual minorities, and a more favourable attitude towards refugees—these are the changes that they bring to their closest circles. This had been the conclusion of a qualitative study conducted by researchers from Vytautas Magnus University (VMU) and the Institute for Social Innovation, together with colleagues in Croatia, Poland and the United Kingdom. The main topic of the study was “social remittances”: knowledge, experiences, social skills, norms, values, social capital and other social and cultural resources that have an impact on the growth of well-being in societies of (re) migrants.