Luokė ( Samogitian: ''Loukė'') is a town in Telšiai County,

Lithuania Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, P ...

. According to the 2011 census, the town has a population of 629 people. The Church of All Saints is located in the town. Luoke had a Jewish community for approximately 400 years.
Encyclopaedia of Jewish Communities, Lithuania - Luoke
Yad Vashem (1996)
Times of Israel
Grant Gochin, "The slaughter of the Jews of Luoke", Times of Israel (19 Oct 2022) In the 16th century,

Jews Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

settled in the town, and called it Luknik (לוקניק in Yiddish). By the middle of the 19th century, there were 798 Jews, representing half the total population. After an 1887 fire, and an 1888 blood libel and near-

pogrom A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of Massacre, massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century Anti-Jewis ...

, many Jews left. In 1940, the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

nationalised the factories and shops of the remaining 300 Jews, closed the Hebrew school, and banned

Zionist Zionism is an Ethnic nationalism, ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in History of Europe#From revolution to imperialism (1789–1914), Europe in the late 19th century that aimed to establish and maintain a national home for the ...

organisations. In June 1941, after

Nazi Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...

takeover, locals humiliated the town's Jews, tortured the rabbi and cut off his beard, took hostages to extract a 50,000 rouble "fine" from the community (at a time when an unskilled worker might earn 1,000 roubles per annum), and turned the town's Jews over to the Nazi-controlled Lithuanian Auxiliary Police, at whose hands many experienced rape and forced labour. In July 1942, the police (under Nazi supervision) stole the Jews' possessions and murdered them; 120 men were murdered and buried in a mass grave at nearby Gudiškė, while the women and children were murdered and buried at Geruliai, together with the women and children from nearby towns: see, e.g., The Holocaust in Telšiai. Rabbi Chaim Rabinowitz, who became head of the Telshe Yeshiva in Telšiai, was born in Luoke in 1856.

References

Towns in Lithuania Towns in Telšiai County Telšiai District Municipality Shavelsky Uyezd {{TelšiaiCounty-geo-stub