Prague Journal

Monday, May 23, 2005.

Vicki had asked me to give a presentation to the staff at her company at 8:30 this morning, so we went to her office early to get everything set up. It was a pleasure meeting so many of her employees, and engaging them in conversation. From their comments, it seems to me that there are many similarities between the attitudes of Lithuanians and Czechs, largely due to their history under Nazi terror and Soviet domination, and recent emergence into the EU.
Rick and I were on the road back to Vilnius shortly after 10:00, to see some of the remnants of the former Jewish areas of town. You wouldn’t necessarily know it by walking the streets today, but Vilnius was once one of the cultural centers of the Jewish world. Known before World War II as the Jerusalem of the North, Vilnius was home to more than 60,000 Jews, most of whom spoke Yiddish. Vilnius was considered the capital of Yiddish culture and learning and was home to the famed Yiddish Institute of Higher Learning (YIVO) and the Strashum Library. The first Jews came to Lithuania in the 14th century, lured to the area by tolerant Lithuanian regimes. On the eve of the war, some 240,000 Jews lived in Lithuania—virtually all of whom were killed during the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944. Today, there are few reminders of Vilnius’s Jewish past, save for Hebrew letters on a few signs and buildings. Before WWII, there were 100 synagogues in Vilnius. Now there is only one, built in 1905, the Romanesque-Moorish Choral Synagogue. This building claims to have one of the most beautiful altars in the entire Jewish world. The synagogue is undergoing repairs, so we were not able to see inside. But perhaps the real reason we could not go in is that a bitter conflict has been going on since last fall between the Jewish community and the extremist sect “Chabad Lubavitch” led by Solom Ber Krinsky, that is trying to take over and dominate the Jewish community. Rabbi Krinsky and his followers have been using slander, violence and intimidation in order to impose their will upon the community. http://www.litjews.org/index.asp?DL=E&TopicID=51
We went to the monument where Jewish Street—or Zydu gravde in Lithuanian—cuts through the heart of old town Vilnius. But there’s not much overtly Jewish about it anymore. The Great Synagogue, which once stood at the end of Jewish Street, was dynamited by the Nazis and then later bulldozed by the Soviets; there’s now a Soviet-built kindergarten and basketball court where the synagogue used to stand.
We met a Lithuanian man who claimed to have lived in one of the houses on this square when he was three years old. He was with an Israeli couple, he from Denmark, she from South Africa. In our short conversation, the Danish (now Israeli) gentleman revealed that the only reason he was on earth is that the Danes, alone among all the countries of Europe, protected their Jews. His parents had fled to Sweden on the morning when virtually all Danish Jews were instructed by the Danish authorities to escape the Nazi putsch.
The fact that this conversation was conducted in a trashy neighborhood around a modest street plaque which was the only evidence of the magnificent main Schul of prewar Vilnus, emphasized to both of us how tragically and completely the Nazi monsters had succeeded. There simply is no significant Jewish presence in modern Lithuania, and precious little evidence of the past glories remain. The Jewish ghetto was encircled by barbed wire and transformed into a prison camp for the city’s 60,000 Jews, nearly all of whom were later marched to the Paneriai forest eight kilometers away and executed. Across Lithuania as a whole, some 200,000 Lithuanian Jews, or over 90 percent of the pre-war Jewish community, perished. The guidebook says there are some 6000 Jews in Lithuania today, most of whom immigrated here from Russia during the Soviet era; there are fewer than 200 Holocaust survivors left in the country. Vilnius’s Jewish past still draws tens of thousands of Jewish visitors a year from the United States, Israel Argentina and also South Africa, where as many as 80 percent of the nation’s 90,000 Jews descend from Lithuanian Jews, or litvaks.
There is a plaque on the wall of a building on the corner at Zydu (Jewish) Street commemorating The Great Vilna Gaon -- Elijahu ben Solomon Zalman (1720-1797). The Gaon was the greatest luminary not only among the many Talmudical scholars of the 17th and 18th centuries (and five centuries before that), but also for many generations to come. It is said that his unsurpassed intellectuality and spirituality gave him an unchallenged supremacy as an exponent of the Torah and the Talmud, to the study of which he devoted his life. This made him spiritual head of the whole of the Lithuanian and Russian Jewry and later that of all the Jewish communities in Eastern and Central Europe. He introduced innovative methods of Talmud study and attempted to restore Jewish law to its original rational meaning with the help of critical commentaries. He applied these critical methods to research and improve the texts of both Talmuds—the Babylonian and the Jerusalem, and to all rabbinic literature. In addition to his knowledge of Jewish law, he also was a learned student of history and geography, and particularly of mathematics, astronomy and anatomy. He insisted that it was necessary to study secular sciences, because the Torah and science were linked together. The Gaon fought Hasidism as dangerous to traditional Judaism and also issued an excommunication to several Hassids. He fostered the creation of schools and yeshivot for the acquisition of Talmudic knowledge and was the forefather of the dissemination of secular knowledge among the Jews. The Gaon embodied the results of his study, research and reflection in a great number of works (approximately 70) embracing a big variety of topics. They were published after his death. He has been described as a “genius of the first order” and as “the last great theologian of classical Rabbinism.” He is considered a symbol of the 700 years of Jewish presence in Lithuania.
A Jewish museum has been established in Vilnius three times. The first one opened in 1913. The greater part of its collection of Jewish folklore, art, music, published and unpublished materials, perished during the World War I. On the eve of the World War II, the museum had accumulated more than 6 000 books, thousands of historical and ethnographic works and documents, publications, periodicals in 11 languages, and a rich folklore collection. There were ancient coins, including Jewish ones. There were 3 000 art works. The unique contents of this first Jewish museum were nearly all destroyed during the World War II. The second museum was organized in 1944, after the Soviet liberation, by survivors of the Nazi occupation. This second museum had a very short life. The Soviet authorities, in their campaign against Cosmopolitanism and Zionism, closed the museum on June 10, 1949. Its collection was scattered amongst other Lithuanian museums and archives. Forty years after the second one was closed down, the Soviet Lithuanian authorities permitted the opening of the third museum in Vilnius, from October 1, 1989 under the Ministry of Culture and Education.
We had a hard time finding the Jewish Museum, because it is housed in an out-of-the-way rundown building and is closed for reconstruction. We read that among the objects in the State Jewish Museum in Vilnius are ritual items salvaged from the Great Synagogue that was destroyed by the Soviets, including parts of the original ark and reader’s desk. Nor were we able to find the Museum of Genocide Victims, which is located in what was the much-feared KGB headquarters until 1991. The guidebook says that you can tour actual cells where prisoners were held and tortured, and that on a recent trip, President Adamkus found the entry for him in the KGB log book, from when he was a prisoner in the building.
We did find the Holocaust Museum, eight rooms of displays located in a small green house at the top of a driveway. Although tiny in comparison with the Holocaust museums in Jerusalem and Washington DC, it is a haunting collection of writings, artifacts and photographs chronicling what really happened in Lithuania during WWII. The museum also contains a display focusing on the major figures in Lithuanian Jewish history.
On our way back to Kaunas, we stopped at the remains of a huge Jewish cemetery, wrecked by Nazis and still in a state of haunting disrepair. There were a few locals sitting on some of the stones drinking beer and having lunch. We also drove to the location of the crumbling remains of two other synagogues, in a residential section on a hillside outside the city center.

posted by JWinn @ 11:10 PM