In late June, I travelled to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to participate in the biennial meetings of the Community of Democracies, an inter-governmental association begun in the year 2000 to encourage the growth and strengthening of democracies around the world. The Rabbi invited me to offer some observations about my experience, which seem particularly relevant on this Shabbat of Consolation.
The conference I attended marked the termination of Lithuania’s two-year term chairing the Community. The Lithuanians have justifiably received high marks for helping to resuscitate what was previously little more than a talking shop, and in the process have effectively showcased their own young democracy as they celebrate their twentieth year of independence from Soviet rule.
A medieval city founded in the 14th century, for much of its history Vilnius was linked to the union of Poland and Lithuania, then czarist Russia, and Poland again after World War I before being transferred to Lithuania by the Soviets after their pact with Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War. Since the time Lithuania declared its independence in 1991, the city has been rapidly transformed, and a visitor cannot help but be impressed by its emergence as an attractive and modern European city. Many of its older buildings have been renovated, and a business and commercial area is being developed.
Vilnius, of course, also has a deep connection to Jewish history. Jews began to migrate to the city (known in several languages as Vilna) in the 15th century, and by the year 1440 already had a place where they prayed and studied. The historian Lucy Dawidowicz notes that “their history was marked by a recurrent pattern in which a period of Christian tolerance gave way to an eruption of animosity and violence.”
In 1663, the Polish king gave Jews permission to build a synagogue, which according to the same ecclesiastical regulations that applied throughout Europe could not be built higher than any of the town’s numerous churches. The Great Synagogue of Vilna met these requirements by having its floor level well below street level such that a building with a modest exterior could accommodate as many as 5,000 worshippers on the High Holidays. When Napoleon saw this grand building 200 years ago, he dubbed Vilna the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.”
Beginning in the 18th century, Vilna became renowned among European Jews as a place that attracted famous Rabbinical scholars, none more revered than Eliyahu ben Shlomo Zalmen, known simply as the Vilna Gaon (“genius”), legendary even in his own day. Believing that scientific knowledge could enhance one’s understanding of Torah and Talmud, the Gaon supplemented his mastery of sacred texts by studying astronomy, geography, algebra, and geometry. His influence was widespread, and much of it grew not only from his prodigious scholarship but also from his leadership of the Mitnagdim (“opponents”), those rationalists who fought the growing Hasidic movement in Poland. Why? For one thing, that movement argued that one could achieve holiness through piety alone without Torah study. Even more heretical and problematic was what the Mitnagdim regarded as Hasidism’s dangerous messianic character.
Thus, Lithuanian Jewry came to be identified with a rationalist approach to Judaism, which paved the way not only to advanced Rabbinical scholarship but also to the Haskalah, the movement to modernize the Jewish community through secular education. Vilna not only flourished as a center of religious study, but also became one of the great international centers of Jewish intellectual and cultural life.
By the early 20th century, Vilna had experienced a Jewish renaissance. There were over 100 synagogues and prayer houses, six daily Jewish newspapers, Yeshivot, libraries, publishing houses, theatres, museums, and medical facilities. Vilna was also a center of Yiddish writing and education, and the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) was established there in 1925 to advance scholarship in this rich literary language.
In July 1941, the Jewish Daily Forward published an item from the German-controlled radio in Warsaw that Germany’s “expert on the Jewish question,” a man named Eichman, was being sent from Warsaw to Vilna and Kovno “to solve the Jewish question.” By September two ghettos were sealed, the smaller of which lasted only six weeks, during which 10,000 men, women and children were rounded up and taken to a wooded area ten kilometers outside of the city called Paneriai, where they were murdered. By the time of the liquidation of the second ghetto in September 1944, as many as 70,000 more had met a similar fate. The remaining 8,000 or so were herded off to death camps in Poland and concentration camps in Estonia and Latvia.
Today, one functioning synagogue, Torat Hakodesh, also known as the Choral Synagogue, remains, perhaps because the Nazis chose to use it as a medical store rather than destroy it. Built in 1903, it is rather grand in style with an inscription over the door that reads in Hebrew “A house of prayer is a holy place for all peoples.” I attended services there on a Shabbat morning in early July with some 25 other adults, almost all of them men between the ages of 50 and 80.
The synagogue had been converted into a metal shop during the Soviet period, and today, it is dark and its pews are in disrepair. Still, one cannot help but be struck upon entry by the high vaulted ceiling and an imposing Moorish-style Ark. The Shabbat morning service I attended was the standard Ashkenazi Orthodox service with prayers added that day to honor the new month of Tammuz. The one variation was that just before the Torah reading, the leader chanted the Eil Moleh Rachamin, the haunting prayer that is recited at funerals and unveilings and to conclude services of remembrance but which I had heard only one other time during a regular Shabbat service, when I attended the Alt Neu Shul in Prague a couple of years ago.
We are reminded in this morning’s parsha V’etchanan, as we were during the Tisha B’Av service earlier this week, that our history has been filled with calamity and sorrow. For example, this morning we read in Deuteronomy 4:26:
“I appoint heaven and earth this day to bear witness against you that you will surely perish quickly from the Land to which you are crossing the Jordan to possess; you shall not have lengthy days upon it, for you will be destroyed.”
Still, it is hard to fathom the catastrophe that beset the Jews of Vilna and throughout the country. Over 90 percent of the quarter million Jewish population of Lithuania was eliminated, the highest proportion in any country during the Holocaust.
Later, on Shabbat afternoon, I took a three hour personally guided walking tour, most of it spent in what remains of the old Jewish neighborhoods, located in Vilnius’ Old Town. My guide was a young woman whose father is active in Vilnius’ small Jewish community of several thousand, most of whom emigrated from other parts of the former Soviet Union. She recently returned from spending over a decade in Israel and now represents an Israeli company that sells security equipment to law enforcement agencies.
Walking through its winding cobblestone streets, I felt the joys and sadness of a once vibrant community. I stood on the site of the Great Synagogue, now occupied by a Soviet-style kindergarten; passed through the courtyard near Gaon Street that is graced by an impressive bronze statue of its namesake; stood below the birthplace of the 19th century sculptor Mark Antikolski, whose work was much admired both in czarist Russia and Western Europe; passed by the one-time concert hall where the great violin virtuoso Jascha Heifetz performed his first recital at the age of six; and was shown the building that once housed the Judenrat, the governing body of the ghetto that still stands, much as it did when the excruciating decisions were made about who would live and who would not.
Today standing near the entrance to the ghetto is a luxury hotel just outside of which, on a cool summer day, I couldn’t help notice a group of diners enjoying a late afternoon snack. My guide explained to me that the street where the hotel is located once housed a number of glassblowing shops, a profession I had never associated with Jews. I couldn’t help but wonder how many of those diners and other passers-by had any inkling that they were sitting within meters of where so many unspeakable crimes had taken place, many of them with the collaboration of their countrymen of an earlier era, some no doubt still alive.
For its part, the Lithuanian government has made an effort to preserve the memory of the great institutions that once thrived in the Jewish community. Excavation has begun on the site of the Great Synagogue, which had been demolished in the 1950s by the Soviets. The Lithuanian Seimas (Parliament) has declared the year 2011 the Year of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust in Lithuania, and just a week before I arrived, it passed a bill providing limited restitution to the Jewish community for properties confiscated by the Nazis and the Soviets. The chairman of the Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs is the son of Holocaust survivors.
On the other hand, anti-Semitism remains a feature of everyday life in Lithuania, with ugly stereotypes of Jews and Holocaust denial appearing even in mainstream publications. I was struck by the fact that when I asked in my hotel to see the Holocaust Museum (a small such one does exist), I was directed to the Museum of Genocide, a major tourist site that is dedicated exclusively to the crimes of the Soviet period.
Upon leaving the ghetto, I paused to gather stones to place on top of a simple monument to the memory of a once great community and to those who were its last members. While standing before the monument, and trying my best to compose myself, I recalled the Eil Moleh Rachamin prayer that had been recited that morning in the only Jewish house of worship that remains:
“Exalted, compassionate G-d, grant perfect peace among the holy and the pure, in Your sheltering Presence, to the souls of all our beloved who have gone to their eternal home. May their memory endure as inspiration for deeds of charity and goodness in our lives. May their souls thus be bound up in the bond of life. May they rest in peace.
And let us say: Amen.”
David Lowe
Congregation B’nai Tzedek
Shabbat Nechamu
August 13, 2011