The leader of Lithuania`s Jewish community Wednesday received a top German award to honour his efforts to reconcile Germans and Lithuanian Jews, who were all but wiped out in the Holocaust.

Germany`s embassy in Vilnius said that Simonas Alperavicius, 80, had received the German Cross of Merit, First Class, which is the only decoration awarded by the German state.

Alperavicius has been a leader of Lithuania`s 4,000-strong Jewish community since 1989, two years before the Baltic state won back its independence from the crumbling Soviet Union.

He was born in Vilnius in 1928 when the city was still part of Poland, but spent much of his childhood in Lithuania`s then capital Kaunas.

The Soviets seized Lithuania in 1940 under a deal with the Nazis.

Germany occupied the country in 1941 when it turned on its erstwhile ally, and Alperavicius and his parents fled deep into the Soviet Union to escape the much-feared Nazi pogroms.

Over the following three years, the Germans and Lithuanian collaborators killed 95 percent of Lithuania`s 220,000-strong Jewish community, the largest proportion to perish in the Holocaust in any Nazi-occupied country.

Alperavicius and his family settled in Vilnius in 1944, after the Nazis were driven out by the Soviet army, and he later trained as a lawyer.

Lithuania was part of the Soviet bloc until 1991 and joined the European Union in 2004.