Lithuania -- Jpost story on Jewish Vilnius/Vilna/Vilne

 Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

There are few physical traces of Jewish Vilnius anymore -- tour guides arm themselves with old photographs when they lead groups, to show them what was there, and where today are found plaques, information panels, a monument or two, traces of Yiddish signage, or simply empty space. Moreover, as I wrote on this blog in December, after I served as an expert during a seminar on the future of Jewish heritage in Vilnius, what to do regarding Jewish heritage -- and how to do it -- has been a controversial issue.

The Jerusalem Post runs a travel piece on Jewish Vilnius/Vilna/Vilne by Norma Davidoff Shulman.

There are fascinating traces beyond the faint Yiddish letters on ghetto buildings. Starting with the Middle Ages, Jews arrived here. By the 1700s, their numbers and influence became significant. Before World War II, Jews made up more than a third of the city.

Then the whole country seemed to disappear for 50 years behind the Iron Curtain; it was the first to break away from the USSR, in 1990. By that time most of its Jews were already gone.

Some had made Aliya, like the Litvak families of Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak. Shimon Peres lived 100 kilometers from Vilnius.

Before the war, there were a hundred synagogues and study houses.

Fifteen years ago Chabad opened its doors in an apartment house. The city has but one synagogue building: the Choral Synagogue in the heart of the ghetto. This Moorish-style edifice, with its blue letters in Hebrew, had a congregation with a progressive outlook when it was built in 1894. It allowed music, thus the name “choral.”

Lithuania -- Jewish Library in Vilnius is Opening

After years of fighting, it looks as if Wyman Brent has won the battle to establish a Jewish library in Vilnius. An article in the Baltic Report covers  an inaugural event and says the Library will open this summer.

Brent, a native of San Diego and a Christian, came to Vilnius in 1994 and said he fell in love with the country and with the Jewish history of Vilnius, which stretches back around 700 years. The library currently has no permanent home, but it already has around 5,000 items, which will eventually increase to around 200,000. It is expected to open to the public by late July and will likely be based at Gedimino 24, the building that houses the Vilnius Small Theater.“Jewish culture was and is a part of Lithuania’s past, present and future. I came here and I fell in love, but I did not know for what reason — then when I had the idea for the library, Vilnius was again the Jerusalem of the north. It is the greatest center of Jewish culture in Europe,” Brent said at the opening in the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius.

Read full story HERE

For prior posts on this ambitious project, click HERE

Lithuania -- Report from Vilnius

Plaque recalling the Gaon of Vilna. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

The formal topic of the seminar in Vilnius this week was "Vilnius -- World Heritage Site: Values of Jewish Heritage and its Commemoration."

Vilnius's postcard-perfect historic center is a UNESCO site of world heritage, but almost nothing physical remains to be seen of the rich and important Jewish presence that once stood here. The early 17th-century Great Synagogue and its surrounding buildings were severely damaged in WW2 and the ruins were razed by the Soviet authorities in the 1950s. Almost no traces remain except for some plaques, a few monuments and a couple of faded Yiddish wall signs.

Yiddish signage in Vilnius. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

The issue of what to do with Jewish heritage and memory in Vilnius has been contentious. It is haunted not just by the memory of the 100,000 Jews who before WW2 made up a third of the city's population, but by other factors, including the collaboration of local Lithuanians in the killing of Jews and the local nationalist narrative that associates anti-Nazi activity with support of the Soviet regime.

It has also been haunted by a huge and highly controversial $32 million project to rebuild (rather than restore) the old Jewish quarter in Vilnius, including the  Great Synagogue, which was approved (at least in principle) some years ago but never really got off the ground. See articles about this HERE and HERE and HERE. This project was promoted by MP and activist Emanuelis Zingeris, but was opposed by others in the Jewish community (and elsewhere).

I was one of three outside experts who took part in the seminar -- the others were Philip Carmel, who heads the Lo Tishkach organization that is creating a data base of Jewish cemeteries, and Vladimir Levin of the Center for Jewish Art in Jerusalem. (Magdalena Waligorska, from Poland/Florence was supposed to have come but she got the flu.)

I was impressed by the number of people who showed up for the formal session, on Dec. 7 -- and stayed throughout a long day of presentations from more than a dozen speakers, as well as the number of people who tuned up the following day for a more informal discussion of the issues. This indicates the intererest, at least in certain official spheres. One of the successes of the seminar, someone joked, was that representatives of all or almost all of the stakeholders in the Jewish heritage issue sat together in the same room and even discussed the situation.

The consensus that emerged was that it is totally unrealistic to even think of rebuilding the Great Synagogue. Even Zingeris (who denied to me that he had ever suggested it) now opposes it -- he would, however, like to see the foundations of the synagogue excavated and used as education/exhibition space, as in Frankfurt with the Judengasse and in Vienna with the Judenplatz excavation of the medieval synagogue there.

People at the meeting talked about restoring "fragments" -- uncovering more Yiddish signs, for example. Also making an archeological investigation to discover exactly where the limits of the Great Synagogue are, and then deciding what to do (this apparently has not been carried out).

During the meeting we learned of several initiatives involving Vilnius and Lithuania in general, where the state of Jewish heritage sites is perilous, to say the least.

Besides the collapse, in a hurricane apparently, of the Red Synagogue in Joniskis two years ago, and the fire that damaged the wooden synagogue in Pakruojis earlier this year, the precious wooden synagogue in Seda has also collapsed. And masonry synagogues (and maybe also the wooden synagogue) in Plunge were recently bulldozed. The wooden synagogue in Ziezmariai, which is one of the few to bear in identification plaque, is said to be under threat and there are thoughts that it should be moved to an outdoor architecture park.

(As I noted earlier, we heard from both a representative of Pakruoijis and a culture ministry official that there was a commitment to rebuild the Pakruojis synagogue, and also that funds have been found to begin restoring the structure in Joniskis.)

During the conference, we heard from the researchers who in 2006-2008 directed the compilation of  a catalogue of all the more than 90 extant synagogues in Lithuania. This massive work is nearing completion, and publication of its first volume should take place within weeks. During the seminar, a photographic exhibition of a small fraction of the material compiled was opened, showing the variety of type -- and condition -- of these buildings.

The project was initiated in 2006 by the Vilnius-based Centre for the Studies of the Culture and History of East European Jews, in collaboration with the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts. The Center for Jewish Art joined the project in 2007, and the  Gediminas Technical University in Vilnius also takes part.  


You can see a photo gallery of many synagogues at the web site of the  Center for the Studies of the Cultur and History of East European Jews.


The catalogue began as research on masonry synagogues but soon expanded  to record all synagogues of Lithuania. Students fanned out throug the country to measure buildings,  make diagrams, pinpoint their locaton and gather archival, cartographic, iconographic and other information about particular synagogues.

There have been many lost opportunities regarding Jewish heritage in Lithuania. One of them stems from the rather abortive -- if loudly proclaimed -- attempt to establish a "European Route of Jewish Culture." There was little coordination of this from its headquarters in Luxemburg, but also, on the ground, it was difficult to gain local support, and it remains difficult to convince some local authorities that the Jewish heritage of their towns and villages is part of their own heritage. 

On this note, there appear to be few initiatives such as those in Poland, whereby local Catholics have taken a lead in delving into local (Jewish) history, cleaning cemeteries, and the like -- efforts which each year are honored by the Israeli Embassy. I suggested to culture minister representatives and also to the representative of the Israeli embassy that some sort of similar honor could be organized in Lithuania as encouragement for local involvement. 

Lithuania -- conference and news highlights

By Ruth Ellen Gruber

I've been at an intense, interesting and, I hope, productive seminar in Vilnius about Jewish heritage preservation and promotion. The meeting was supposed to focus on the plan that was floated some time ago to rebuild the destroyed Great Synagogue in Vilnius, but it soon expanded to take in all sorts of issues, from the status of former synagogues, including wooden synagogues, in the provinces, to amplifying signage and awareness in the old Jewish quarter of Vilnius.

The situation presents a number of depressing factors, including vandalism, apathy, lack of coordination and cooperation between stakeholders, and the usual "one Jew building three synagogues on a desert island" syndrome.

But the fact that the seminar took place was positive and I did learn some positive developments.

These included the news that:

-- a grant from Norway through the EU has been obtained to start rebuilding the "red synagogue" in Joniskis whose eastern wall collapsed in a hurricane two years ago.

-- both the Culture Ministry and the municipality of Pakruojis are committed to restoring the wooden synagogue there, which was seriously damaged by arson earlier this year.

Lithuania -- More News about the Vilna Jewish Library

The Jewish Press has run a long article by Rosally Saltsman updating Wyman Brent's ambitious efforts to create a Jewish library in Vilnius. Brent has also issued an appeal for CDs, LPs, tapes and other material to create a Jewish music section of the library.

He's not Jewish, he's not Lithuanian and he's not a librarian, but Wyman Brent, an American from San Diego, is building a Jewish library in Vilna. The library is the melding of Brent's three loves - books, Lithuania and Jewish culture. It's sort of the culmination of an odyssey, which has taken him to various parts of the world and through many periods in history.

Hopefully, the library will open its doors in a couple of months, but its official opening is scheduled for October 1, 2009, to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Vilna Gaon Museum, which is donating the space.

The 46-year-old self-appointed librarian first came to Lithuania in 1994. "I felt at home. It felt like the place where I belonged." He had come to Russia to see the country and had read a book called The Hills of Vilnius (Alfonsas Bieliauskas and M. Ryley). So he came to see the city, which was described so beautifully in the book.

Brent isn't Jewish and to his knowledge, there are no Jews in his centuries-old family tree. What began as a fascination with WWII and the Holocaust led to his traveling to Europe and visiting places of Jewish culture. On a 1993 visit to Prague, he was struck by the contrast between an exhibition of drawings by children from the concentration camps who had been killed, and that of the Jewish cemetery outside where he saw a rabbi walking with his students. And Wyman thought, "It's wonderful that Judaism is still so very much alive."

Read Full Article

Wyman can be reached by email at: vilniusjewishlibrary@yahoo.com, or by phone at 370 5 2625357.

Books can be sent to him at: Wyman Brent, Ausros Vartu 20-15A, Vilnius LT-02100,
Lithuania.

The Vilna Gaon Jewish Museum is located at: Pylimo 4 Vilnius (Vilna) Lithuania.

Lithuania -- Sale of Site in Vilnius Thwarted

Vilnius Ghetto memorial, 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

JTA reports that the sale of the building that housed the World War II Vilnius ghetto Jewish library has been thwarted at the request of the U.S. Embassy:

The library building, which the World Jewish Restitution Organization and Lithuanian Jewish community identify as Jewish community property, housed 450,000 books of Jewish literature in Vilnius under the Nazi occupation between 1941 and 1943.

Herbert Block, an executive vice president with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee and a top official with the restitution group, said the embassy in the Lithuanian capital had informed him by e-mail that the Foreign Ministry had acceded to the embassy's request to cancel the sale, which was to have taken place April 8. [. . . .]

The library is on a list of 438 buildings claimed as Jewish property that were taken over by the Communist government of Lithuania after World War II. The U.S. Embassy in Vilnius argued that the Lithuanian government should not be selling disputed properties.

In fact, the sale was not announced to any Jewish authorities but was uncovered by a local non-Jewish American activist in Vilnius, Wyman Brent, who alerted Jewish groups in the United States.

Read full story

I have posted information about Brent's attempts to form a Jewish library in Vilnius.

The Ghetto Library was an extremely important institution.

It was largely put together by Herman Kruk, an activist in the Jewish Labor Bund in Poland who fled Warsaw in September 1939 after the German invasion and ended up in Vilnius (Vilna in Yiddish), which was under Soviet control until the Germans marched in on June 24, 1941.

Kruk kept a diary, which was translated and published in 2002 -- and makes extraordinary reading. It is The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939-1944
(Edited and introduced by Benjamin Harshav, translated by Barbara Harshav. Yale University Press)

The following is my review of the book that appeared in the London Jewish Chronicle in 2002.

This book is the first English translation of what is considered a classic of Holocaust literature: the detailed, day to day chronicle of life (and death) in the Vilna ghetto and the Estonian labor camps Klooga and Lagedi. It is a monumental work, in all senses of the word: emotionally, culturally and – at more than 700 pages – even physically. And it is a monument not only to the millions of human beings killed in the Holocaust, but to rich, complex world of modern, East European Jewish culture and civilization that was annihilated. [.....]

Kruk was among tens of thousands of Jews herded into the Vilna ghetto on Sept. 6, 1941. Highly active in the ghetto’s political, cultural and social life, he built up a ghetto library that loaned out more than 100,000 books. He was sent to Klooga in September 1943 after the ghetto’s final liquidation and was executed by the Germans on Sept. 18, 1944, just one day before the Red Army arrived to liberate the camps.

Unlike most published first-hand accounts of the Shoah, which were written by survivors through the perspective lens of memory, Kruk’s diary tells the story in vivid, brutal, real time.
He did not know for sure that he was doomed, but he suspected he would not survive and regarded keeping his journal as a mission.“I know I am condemned and awaiting my turn, although deep inside me burrows a hope for a miracle,” he wrote at one point. “Drunk on the pen trembling in my hand, I record everything for future generations.”

Kruk’s eye-witness entries, often several made in the course of a day, include brief notes, longer descriptive reports, observations, personal reflections, poems, polemics and even jokes which weave together to form an immediate, relentlessly unfolding picture of a nightmare world within a world.
It was a world, he wrote, where “normal” took on a meaning of its own; where the unthinkable became commonplace; where people adapted themselves and their behavior to conform to unspeakable conditions. He records Nazi atrocities but also the evolution of an artistic and cultural life within the ghetto; he paints portraits of individuals and chronicles personal and even political clashes within the sealed Jewish universe.

Benjamin Harshav and his wife Barbara have performed a herioc feat in their editing and translation and deciphering of pages that over the years had been scattered to three continents. Harshav, born in Vilna, escaped as the Germans took the city and remembers first hand characters, settings and events.
The Harshavs based their work on the Yiddish version of Kruk’s Vilna ghetto diary, published in 1961. But they fleshed this out with hundreds of newly discovered manuscript pages and fragments, including the scrawled, scarcely legible journal Kruk compiled in the Estonian labor camps.

His last entry, “written with a trembling hand and with a thick pen” was made on Sept, 19, 1944. In it, Kruk records that he is burying his last diaries in the presence of six witnesses. One day later, along with hundreds of other Jews, he and five of those witnesses were shot and burned on a pyre. The only survivor went back, uncovered the loose pages and took them to Vilna.

In 1947, confiscated with other Jewish material by the Soviet authorities, they were slated for destruction as recycled paper. They were somehow saved by an individual Lithuanian, and only came to light again half a century later after the fall of communism.

Vilnius -- Fading Yiddish

My latest photo/comment on the moked.it site regards the faded inscriptions, in Yiddish and Polish, that can be seen on city walls in Vilnius (and also, by the way, in L'viv).

Vilnius 2006. Photo (c) Ruth Ellen Gruber

I muri di una città sono palinsesti urbani. Caminando per un centro storico, si può capire la storia leggendo l'architettura, e specialmente leggendo i cambiamenti eseguiti, strato sopra strato, attraverso i secoli. Gli archi di un portico che sono stati chiusi con dei mattoni, per esempio. O vecchie porte bloccate e nuove finestre aperte in muri antichi… A Vilnius si trova un esempio che colpisce in un modo diverso e anche emozionante. Segni pallidi, in polacco e yiddish, che risalgono al periodo fra le due guerre mondiali. Come fantasmi di un passato sia vicino che remoto, parlano di una rivendita (che era forse nel cortile) dove si comprava cherosene e sale, di qualità superiore.