Bits and Pieces - Vilna
The City That Could Not Be Vanquished
Sometimes when you are looking for a street, a house, you keep going up and down the street until you find it – What if you look and there is no street left, no house, no home where you lived as a child – no synagogue? It’s like a dream – and when after that dream you wake up and see a new world – a world not yours and maybe there you’ll see a wall of that synagogue – or just a stone, a remnant, or you’ll notice something about that light of the sun that glances on a corner alley and you see its not a dream and slowly you pick up these pieces and like in a puzzle you put them together – and from these remains you recreate a past and out of it may come your home city – a city maybe like the city of Vilna.
Vilna was a Yiddish speaking city, even though there lived many Poles, Lithuanians, Germans and Russians. You could hear it spoken everywhere. It was a unique city of Jewish life and learning. There were great rabbis, particularly Rabbi Elijah, the famed Gaon of Vilna, (1720-1797). It was a city rich in literature and poetry, libraries and held the largest Jewish publishing firm in the world. Here the YIVO Research Institute for Yiddish language and culture was founded in 1924.
The hilliness of Vilna earned it the reputation of being a Lithuanian Switzerland. Beyond the city, fields stretched spotted with lakes and dark forests of pines and fir. Before the Second World War it had more than 200 hundred synagogues and Napoleon named it the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” It was a provincial city of 200,000 out of which the Jewish population of the city was 70,000. It was a city of cobblestones and archways in cool summer shades and half-hinged shutters and narrow paths and rectangle shaped windows. It was a city where you could exist just knowing the Yiddish language. It had the Great Synagogue that was built in 1573. It had the Strashun library, donated by Matthias Strashun (1817-1885) to the Vilna Jewish Community which became one of Jewish Vilna’s famous landmarks.
The rhythm of the city was relaxed and leisurely. Even the Jewish quarter lacked the frenetic energy and bustle of the Warsaw Jewish neighborhood. Here was the famous Yiddish saying, “If I don’t show up today, I’ll come tomorrow.”
Vilna was a preeminent center for rabbinical studies. Among the scholars born in Vilna were Joshua Hoeschel ben Joseph and Shabbetai
-2-
Ha-Kohen, who served as dayyan of the community. The Rabbi of Vilna in the middle of the 17th century was Moses B. Isaac Judah Lima. From the second half of the 18th century Eliyahu ben Solomon Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna, who attracted numerous disciples, had a lasting impact on Vilna Jewry.
The Jews constituted half of all the people in trade and commerce in Vilna and their shops were everywhere – on the finest streets and also in the poorest.
It was a city that never in its history until World War II had a ghetto in that the Jews never allowed themselves to be confined within designated cramped areas. They conducted a stubborn and an incessant struggle, decade after decade, against the Municipal Council for the right to dwell in other parts of the city. It was a city that had its own acting group, the Vilna Troupe once the most illustrious name in the history of Yiddish theatre.
Here were the kloyzn, the smaller prayerhouses, as they were called. The gravediggers, who had formed a society in 1667, had their own, so did the bookbinders, glaziers, housepainters, shoemakers, bakers, wagoners and tinsmiths.
There were the cemeteries, the old cemetery, beyond the River Vilia, a couple of miles from the city, which had not been in use for more than 150 years, where the Vilna Gaon, his mother and where the great rabbis had been buried. Here also was the grave of the “righteous proselyte,” Count Valentin Potocki, the Polish nobleman who was burnt at the stake in 1749 for his conversion to Judaism. Then there is the modern cemetery opened in 1843, extending over a vast area, and intersected with fine long avenues lined with trees. Here are the epitaphs in Hebrew Yiddish and Russian. Here are the graves of famous writers and other luminaries as well as the graves of the victims of various riots.
And here is the New Cemetery, purchased in the 1950’s in the city outskirts.
It is said that Gedymin, who ruled over the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the earlier half of the fourteenth century in 1322, began to build a city with a fortress, which, owing to the River Vilia flowing through it, was
-3-
called Vilna and made this small town, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Jews had already settled in the neighboring town of Troiki in 1388, and individual Jews may have begun to settle in Vilna in the course of the fourteenth century. During the reign of Sigismund I (1506-1548), who was distinguished for his liberal outlook, Jews probably began to settle in Vilna in appreciable numbers. By 1568 there must have been a properly organized Jewish community, but it was not till 1573 that the first synagogue was built. The Jews were thought to have come in two different times of immigration, one through the immigration of southern Russia from the east, and a later one from the west, mainly Germany.
The Jews enjoyed a considerable degree of tolerance and even goodwill on the part of the rulers, largely owing to the comparatively late date at which Christianity was introduced into the country. The nobles regarded it as derogatory to their dignity to engage in any form or work or trade. Their lands were cultivated by peasants, but they needed stewards or bailiffs for their estates who would see to it that their estates were properly managed. It was in such positions – as estate managers, superintendents of mills and distilleries, and innkeepers – that Jews were largely employed by the nobles. Consequently the Jews were protected from the hostility of the clergy and especially from attacks by the burghers.
It was the burghers who were the principal and most persistent antagonists of the Jews in Lithuania. They were the middle class who were mainly engaged in trade and handicrafts and looked upon the Jews as competitors and adversaries. The burghers vented their wrath against the Jews in mob attacks upon the synagogue and shops and dwellings.
The Jews appealed to the king, Sigismund III (1587-1632) to legalize their residence in Vilna and on June 3, 1593 received the charter which granted Jews the right to rent and to buy from the nobles houses in the capital of Vilna, and to “ dwell without restriction in our city of Vilna and to pray according to their customs of their religion and to engage in trades like our other subjects who dwell in the cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”
Still from time to time the burghers continued to commit acts of violence against the Jews. For fifty years there was an almost incessant struggle by the Jews of Vilna to secure their rights of dwellings, working and trade in the city. However, it was the Cossack massacres, which raged through the greater part of Poland and Lithuania for a whole decade, from 1648,
-4-
which swept the Jews out of Vilna altogether for a period of six years. Unspeakable barbarities were perpetrated on the community, sparing neither the young or the old. The Jews fled to Germany and other parts of central Europe. The 20th of Sivan, which hitherto had been observed as a fast-day from the Crusades, was now to be observed as a fast-day by all of the community. The Va-ad (Council) of the Union of Jewish Communities of Lithuania decreed as a memorial to the martyrs that any clothes made of silk, velvet, or brocade was forbidden to be worn by Jews for three years.
On August 8, 1655 the city of Vilna was again occupied, this time by Muscovite and Cossack troops. The greater part of the Jewish population again fled. The city was set on fire, and the flames raged for seventeen days, consuming the Jewish quarter. Rabbi Moses Rivkes, a famous scholar who succeeded in reaching Amsterdam wrote. “ On Wednesday, the 24th of Tammuz, 5415, almost the whole Jewish community ran for their lives like one man. I went forth with my stick in my right hand, after seizing my bag of phylacteries, and with my left hand I grasped a book on the calendar. I left my house full of good things, a house full of books and tractates which I had worked on and annotated, and went whithersoever we could and the earth was rent with the cries and wailing for the fugitives and set out faces towards Amsterdam, where the Sephardic scholars and rich men had pity upon us . I remained there, for the chief rabbi and scholar, Saul Halevi Morteira and the chief rabbi, the saintly Issac Aboab, befriended me most generously.” It was while he was in Amsterdam that Rabbi Moses Rivkes was asked to supervise the publication of an edition of the Shulhan Aruk, and he returned to Vilna, where he died in 1671.
Following was a period of famine, plagues and the Jewish Community was so poor that it was unable to pay even the interest on it debts. Following 1706 and for the next forty-three years, there were series of fires in the city in which the Jews were among the principal sufferers. In 1737, the disaster was so great as to be called the Great Fire, it surrounded the whole Jewish quarter, and the Great Synagogue was almost entirely burned down.
The Great Synagogue which is no more was so magnificent and impressive that according to legend it was Napoleon who stood on the threshold of this temple and gazed at the interior, and was speechless with admiration. The Great Synagogue had two entrances. One, at street level, consisted of a pair of iron gates which, had been donated by a tailors’
-5-
society in 1640. The other entrance, a bit more imposing, was an elevated gabled portal with wrought-iron posts. There was a heavy iron door with an original Hebrew inscription indicating it was a gift of a society of Psalm reciters in 1642. At the time of its building ecclesiastical regulations all through Europe specified that a synagogue could not be built higher than a church. To obey the law, and yet create the necessary interior height, it was customary to dig a foundation deep enough for the synagogue’s floor level to be well below that of the street. Outside, the synagogue looked to be about three stories tall, but inside it soared to over five stories. Its interior could simply take a persons breath away.
It had the overwhelming grandeur of an edifice in the style of the Italian Renaissance and an awe-inspiring atmosphere. Four massive, equidistant columns supported the vast stone-floored pile, and within them was the ornate, rococo Almemar, with a beautiful cupola, supported by eight small columns was built in the second half of the eighteenth century by Rabbi Judah ben Eliezer, the famous scribe and judge (Sofer veDayyan), commonly known as YeSoD (from the initials of the three words Yehudah Sofer ve-Dayyan). The Ark was intricately carved and was approached by a twofold flight of steps, with iron balustrades, ascending from the right and the left.
Formerly there was an imposing seven-branched brass candelabrum in front of the Ark, but on the eve of the German invasion of the city during the Great War of 1914-18, it was sent off to Moscow. There also once was a “Chair of Elijah,” in the northwest corner on which the rite of circumcision was performed. A gallery was added for women along the north side, consisting of two floors built by Noah Feibusch Bloch, a Kahal elder who advanced the money and when the Kahal was unable to return the 14,000 gulden due, he made a present of the structure. The synagogue was designed on a substantial and massive scale, for it was also intended to serve as a stronghold within which the Jews could take refuge in times of danger. On the High Holy Days before World War II the synagogue held 5,000 worshippers.
In the Schulhof (courtyard) was the Bet ha-Midrash (House of Study) on the left of the Great Synagogue. It was commonly called “the Old Klaus,” a term derived from the medieval Latin clusa or cloister, was applied to a room or house primarily used for the study of rabbinic writings and was also used as a house of prayer. These Klausen were a characteristic feature of Jewish life in Eastern and Central Europe. There
-6-
was an inscription over the door dating back to 1440, and its interior had an Ark which had copper doors embellished with simple designs.
The most sacred of all the shrines was the synagogue on the site on which the great rabbinical luminary the Gaon Elijah once lived. (The title of “Gaon,” which means “eminence,” was first given to the heads of the talmudical academies in Babylon after the sixth century, and was afterwards applied to great rabbis most distinguished for their learning.) It was erected by the Kahal in 1800 as a memorial to the sage. Outwardly its only distinguishing characteristic was a gabled porch, but within it was rich with individual features. On the southern wall was a wooden tablet with an inscription in memory of the Gaon, extolling his wisdom, his rabbinical erudition, his worldly knowledge, and his spiritual grandeur. Below the tablet was the large chest to prevent any person from sitting in that holy place. On another wall, within a large frame, was a number of clock-faces, with hands pointing to the times at which different prayers were said on weekdays and Sabbaths; and nearby were sixteen charity boxes, arranged in four rows, each labeled with its special purpose, one for providing for bridal dowries, one for repairing the synagogue, another for keeping the Scrolls for the Torah in good condition. On a third wall was a printed calendar in Hebrew; indicating the dates of the major and minor fasts of all the festivals, with a special prayer appropriate to each occasion. There was a small staircase leading to an attic, where there was a plain table with a couple of candles reputed to be where the Gaon studied and reflected in solitude. When asked how could this be, as the synagogue was built three years after the death of the Gaon, it was answered, “People here believe it, and you must not analyze their faith too closely.”
The heart of the Jewish quarter was the Schulhof or synagogue courtyard. Here was the Great synagogue, and many other houses of prayer. It was the focus of all the activities of the community. Here was the slaughterhouse, the baths, the offices of the Kahal, the courthouse of Bet Din where the judges deliberated, here was the well where Jews from the adjacent area used to obtain water, the Schulhof was thus the busiest place in the Jewish quarter. Here rabbis, scholars, poets, philosophers could be seen walking. Here merchants came and told what was happening in the outside world. Here the greats came to visit who had heard of its fame.
All of this was, and is no more. There is now a Monument at Ponar, donated by Yeshayahu Epstein a Holocaust survivor, “in memory of the
-7-
70,000 Jews from Vilna and vicinity murdered by the Nazis and their helpers in the years 1941 to 1944.” Today there are 3,000 Jews living in Vilna, a few are the original survivors. The Khorshul, (Choral Synagogue) built in Moorish style in September 1903 is the only surviving synagogue from the hundreds that are no more. In all of Lithuania over 90 percent of the Jews perished during the Holocaust In Vilna the Jews were driven into Ghettos, starved and beaten. Nearly all of the city’s 60,000 were later marched to Paneriai forest eight kilometers from the city where they had to dig their own graves and were executed by the Nazis and their henchmen.
Today many visitors come from the United States, Israel, Argentina and South Africa to visit the gravesite of the Vilna Gaon, to see the museums; the Genocide Museum, which is just outside the village of Paneriai, The Jewish Gaon State Museum, founded in 1989, which has a permanent exhibition on the Holocaust. There are cultural institutions and organizations, and daily minyans at the Khorshul Synagogue with a rabbi provided by Chabad. There is a senior citizens club, Abi men zet zich, a children and youth club. There are Jewish schools in Vilna: The Shalom Aleichem State School has some 200 students. Its curriculum includes in addition to the general subjects the study of the Hebrew language, the Bible, and the history of the Jewish people. The Chabad community in Vilna runs a private religious school.
And on this day maybe there will be a survivor who will find a piece of a photo in the dust on the ground or a stone from the Great Synagogue the one that had previously survived all barrages of hatred, but finally could not withstand that final one. Maybe that survivor who came back to reclaim a part of the beauty of Vilna looks up at the sky and may hear birds screeching in fury as they did in her memories when as a slave prisoner in burning Germany, away from her hometown of Vilna, heard those selfsame birds as they fled the oncoming British bombers . And she may smile as she did then, and looking around will now see this time not in a dream but a memory, the Great Synagogue, her people on the streets, and hear the laughter and will know that the real Jewish Vilna was not really vanquished.
Stanley Mann
The City That Could Not Be Vanquished
Sometimes when you are looking for a street, a house, you keep going up and down the street until you find it – What if you look and there is no street left, no house, no home where you lived as a child – no synagogue? It’s like a dream – and when after that dream you wake up and see a new world – a world not yours and maybe there you’ll see a wall of that synagogue – or just a stone, a remnant, or you’ll notice something about that light of the sun that glances on a corner alley and you see its not a dream and slowly you pick up these pieces and like in a puzzle you put them together – and from these remains you recreate a past and out of it may come your home city – a city maybe like the city of Vilna.
Vilna was a Yiddish speaking city, even though there lived many Poles, Lithuanians, Germans and Russians. You could hear it spoken everywhere. It was a unique city of Jewish life and learning. There were great rabbis, particularly Rabbi Elijah, the famed Gaon of Vilna, (1720-1797). It was a city rich in literature and poetry, libraries and held the largest Jewish publishing firm in the world. Here the YIVO Research Institute for Yiddish language and culture was founded in 1924.
The hilliness of Vilna earned it the reputation of being a Lithuanian Switzerland. Beyond the city, fields stretched spotted with lakes and dark forests of pines and fir. Before the Second World War it had more than 200 hundred synagogues and Napoleon named it the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” It was a provincial city of 200,000 out of which the Jewish population of the city was 70,000. It was a city of cobblestones and archways in cool summer shades and half-hinged shutters and narrow paths and rectangle shaped windows. It was a city where you could exist just knowing the Yiddish language. It had the Great Synagogue that was built in 1573. It had the Strashun library, donated by Matthias Strashun (1817-1885) to the Vilna Jewish Community which became one of Jewish Vilna’s famous landmarks.
The rhythm of the city was relaxed and leisurely. Even the Jewish quarter lacked the frenetic energy and bustle of the Warsaw Jewish neighborhood. Here was the famous Yiddish saying, “If I don’t show up today, I’ll come tomorrow.”
Vilna was a preeminent center for rabbinical studies. Among the scholars born in Vilna were Joshua Hoeschel ben Joseph and Shabbetai
-2-
Ha-Kohen, who served as dayyan of the community. The Rabbi of Vilna in the middle of the 17th century was Moses B. Isaac Judah Lima. From the second half of the 18th century Eliyahu ben Solomon Zalman, the Gaon of Vilna, who attracted numerous disciples, had a lasting impact on Vilna Jewry.
The Jews constituted half of all the people in trade and commerce in Vilna and their shops were everywhere – on the finest streets and also in the poorest.
It was a city that never in its history until World War II had a ghetto in that the Jews never allowed themselves to be confined within designated cramped areas. They conducted a stubborn and an incessant struggle, decade after decade, against the Municipal Council for the right to dwell in other parts of the city. It was a city that had its own acting group, the Vilna Troupe once the most illustrious name in the history of Yiddish theatre.
Here were the kloyzn, the smaller prayerhouses, as they were called. The gravediggers, who had formed a society in 1667, had their own, so did the bookbinders, glaziers, housepainters, shoemakers, bakers, wagoners and tinsmiths.
There were the cemeteries, the old cemetery, beyond the River Vilia, a couple of miles from the city, which had not been in use for more than 150 years, where the Vilna Gaon, his mother and where the great rabbis had been buried. Here also was the grave of the “righteous proselyte,” Count Valentin Potocki, the Polish nobleman who was burnt at the stake in 1749 for his conversion to Judaism. Then there is the modern cemetery opened in 1843, extending over a vast area, and intersected with fine long avenues lined with trees. Here are the epitaphs in Hebrew Yiddish and Russian. Here are the graves of famous writers and other luminaries as well as the graves of the victims of various riots.
And here is the New Cemetery, purchased in the 1950’s in the city outskirts.
It is said that Gedymin, who ruled over the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the earlier half of the fourteenth century in 1322, began to build a city with a fortress, which, owing to the River Vilia flowing through it, was
-3-
called Vilna and made this small town, the capital of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Jews had already settled in the neighboring town of Troiki in 1388, and individual Jews may have begun to settle in Vilna in the course of the fourteenth century. During the reign of Sigismund I (1506-1548), who was distinguished for his liberal outlook, Jews probably began to settle in Vilna in appreciable numbers. By 1568 there must have been a properly organized Jewish community, but it was not till 1573 that the first synagogue was built. The Jews were thought to have come in two different times of immigration, one through the immigration of southern Russia from the east, and a later one from the west, mainly Germany.
The Jews enjoyed a considerable degree of tolerance and even goodwill on the part of the rulers, largely owing to the comparatively late date at which Christianity was introduced into the country. The nobles regarded it as derogatory to their dignity to engage in any form or work or trade. Their lands were cultivated by peasants, but they needed stewards or bailiffs for their estates who would see to it that their estates were properly managed. It was in such positions – as estate managers, superintendents of mills and distilleries, and innkeepers – that Jews were largely employed by the nobles. Consequently the Jews were protected from the hostility of the clergy and especially from attacks by the burghers.
It was the burghers who were the principal and most persistent antagonists of the Jews in Lithuania. They were the middle class who were mainly engaged in trade and handicrafts and looked upon the Jews as competitors and adversaries. The burghers vented their wrath against the Jews in mob attacks upon the synagogue and shops and dwellings.
The Jews appealed to the king, Sigismund III (1587-1632) to legalize their residence in Vilna and on June 3, 1593 received the charter which granted Jews the right to rent and to buy from the nobles houses in the capital of Vilna, and to “ dwell without restriction in our city of Vilna and to pray according to their customs of their religion and to engage in trades like our other subjects who dwell in the cities of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.”
Still from time to time the burghers continued to commit acts of violence against the Jews. For fifty years there was an almost incessant struggle by the Jews of Vilna to secure their rights of dwellings, working and trade in the city. However, it was the Cossack massacres, which raged through the greater part of Poland and Lithuania for a whole decade, from 1648,
-4-
which swept the Jews out of Vilna altogether for a period of six years. Unspeakable barbarities were perpetrated on the community, sparing neither the young or the old. The Jews fled to Germany and other parts of central Europe. The 20th of Sivan, which hitherto had been observed as a fast-day from the Crusades, was now to be observed as a fast-day by all of the community. The Va-ad (Council) of the Union of Jewish Communities of Lithuania decreed as a memorial to the martyrs that any clothes made of silk, velvet, or brocade was forbidden to be worn by Jews for three years.
On August 8, 1655 the city of Vilna was again occupied, this time by Muscovite and Cossack troops. The greater part of the Jewish population again fled. The city was set on fire, and the flames raged for seventeen days, consuming the Jewish quarter. Rabbi Moses Rivkes, a famous scholar who succeeded in reaching Amsterdam wrote. “ On Wednesday, the 24th of Tammuz, 5415, almost the whole Jewish community ran for their lives like one man. I went forth with my stick in my right hand, after seizing my bag of phylacteries, and with my left hand I grasped a book on the calendar. I left my house full of good things, a house full of books and tractates which I had worked on and annotated, and went whithersoever we could and the earth was rent with the cries and wailing for the fugitives and set out faces towards Amsterdam, where the Sephardic scholars and rich men had pity upon us . I remained there, for the chief rabbi and scholar, Saul Halevi Morteira and the chief rabbi, the saintly Issac Aboab, befriended me most generously.” It was while he was in Amsterdam that Rabbi Moses Rivkes was asked to supervise the publication of an edition of the Shulhan Aruk, and he returned to Vilna, where he died in 1671.
Following was a period of famine, plagues and the Jewish Community was so poor that it was unable to pay even the interest on it debts. Following 1706 and for the next forty-three years, there were series of fires in the city in which the Jews were among the principal sufferers. In 1737, the disaster was so great as to be called the Great Fire, it surrounded the whole Jewish quarter, and the Great Synagogue was almost entirely burned down.
The Great Synagogue which is no more was so magnificent and impressive that according to legend it was Napoleon who stood on the threshold of this temple and gazed at the interior, and was speechless with admiration. The Great Synagogue had two entrances. One, at street level, consisted of a pair of iron gates which, had been donated by a tailors’
-5-
society in 1640. The other entrance, a bit more imposing, was an elevated gabled portal with wrought-iron posts. There was a heavy iron door with an original Hebrew inscription indicating it was a gift of a society of Psalm reciters in 1642. At the time of its building ecclesiastical regulations all through Europe specified that a synagogue could not be built higher than a church. To obey the law, and yet create the necessary interior height, it was customary to dig a foundation deep enough for the synagogue’s floor level to be well below that of the street. Outside, the synagogue looked to be about three stories tall, but inside it soared to over five stories. Its interior could simply take a persons breath away.
It had the overwhelming grandeur of an edifice in the style of the Italian Renaissance and an awe-inspiring atmosphere. Four massive, equidistant columns supported the vast stone-floored pile, and within them was the ornate, rococo Almemar, with a beautiful cupola, supported by eight small columns was built in the second half of the eighteenth century by Rabbi Judah ben Eliezer, the famous scribe and judge (Sofer veDayyan), commonly known as YeSoD (from the initials of the three words Yehudah Sofer ve-Dayyan). The Ark was intricately carved and was approached by a twofold flight of steps, with iron balustrades, ascending from the right and the left.
Formerly there was an imposing seven-branched brass candelabrum in front of the Ark, but on the eve of the German invasion of the city during the Great War of 1914-18, it was sent off to Moscow. There also once was a “Chair of Elijah,” in the northwest corner on which the rite of circumcision was performed. A gallery was added for women along the north side, consisting of two floors built by Noah Feibusch Bloch, a Kahal elder who advanced the money and when the Kahal was unable to return the 14,000 gulden due, he made a present of the structure. The synagogue was designed on a substantial and massive scale, for it was also intended to serve as a stronghold within which the Jews could take refuge in times of danger. On the High Holy Days before World War II the synagogue held 5,000 worshippers.
In the Schulhof (courtyard) was the Bet ha-Midrash (House of Study) on the left of the Great Synagogue. It was commonly called “the Old Klaus,” a term derived from the medieval Latin clusa or cloister, was applied to a room or house primarily used for the study of rabbinic writings and was also used as a house of prayer. These Klausen were a characteristic feature of Jewish life in Eastern and Central Europe. There
-6-
was an inscription over the door dating back to 1440, and its interior had an Ark which had copper doors embellished with simple designs.
The most sacred of all the shrines was the synagogue on the site on which the great rabbinical luminary the Gaon Elijah once lived. (The title of “Gaon,” which means “eminence,” was first given to the heads of the talmudical academies in Babylon after the sixth century, and was afterwards applied to great rabbis most distinguished for their learning.) It was erected by the Kahal in 1800 as a memorial to the sage. Outwardly its only distinguishing characteristic was a gabled porch, but within it was rich with individual features. On the southern wall was a wooden tablet with an inscription in memory of the Gaon, extolling his wisdom, his rabbinical erudition, his worldly knowledge, and his spiritual grandeur. Below the tablet was the large chest to prevent any person from sitting in that holy place. On another wall, within a large frame, was a number of clock-faces, with hands pointing to the times at which different prayers were said on weekdays and Sabbaths; and nearby were sixteen charity boxes, arranged in four rows, each labeled with its special purpose, one for providing for bridal dowries, one for repairing the synagogue, another for keeping the Scrolls for the Torah in good condition. On a third wall was a printed calendar in Hebrew; indicating the dates of the major and minor fasts of all the festivals, with a special prayer appropriate to each occasion. There was a small staircase leading to an attic, where there was a plain table with a couple of candles reputed to be where the Gaon studied and reflected in solitude. When asked how could this be, as the synagogue was built three years after the death of the Gaon, it was answered, “People here believe it, and you must not analyze their faith too closely.”
The heart of the Jewish quarter was the Schulhof or synagogue courtyard. Here was the Great synagogue, and many other houses of prayer. It was the focus of all the activities of the community. Here was the slaughterhouse, the baths, the offices of the Kahal, the courthouse of Bet Din where the judges deliberated, here was the well where Jews from the adjacent area used to obtain water, the Schulhof was thus the busiest place in the Jewish quarter. Here rabbis, scholars, poets, philosophers could be seen walking. Here merchants came and told what was happening in the outside world. Here the greats came to visit who had heard of its fame.
All of this was, and is no more. There is now a Monument at Ponar, donated by Yeshayahu Epstein a Holocaust survivor, “in memory of the
-7-
70,000 Jews from Vilna and vicinity murdered by the Nazis and their helpers in the years 1941 to 1944.” Today there are 3,000 Jews living in Vilna, a few are the original survivors. The Khorshul, (Choral Synagogue) built in Moorish style in September 1903 is the only surviving synagogue from the hundreds that are no more. In all of Lithuania over 90 percent of the Jews perished during the Holocaust In Vilna the Jews were driven into Ghettos, starved and beaten. Nearly all of the city’s 60,000 were later marched to Paneriai forest eight kilometers from the city where they had to dig their own graves and were executed by the Nazis and their henchmen.
Today many visitors come from the United States, Israel, Argentina and South Africa to visit the gravesite of the Vilna Gaon, to see the museums; the Genocide Museum, which is just outside the village of Paneriai, The Jewish Gaon State Museum, founded in 1989, which has a permanent exhibition on the Holocaust. There are cultural institutions and organizations, and daily minyans at the Khorshul Synagogue with a rabbi provided by Chabad. There is a senior citizens club, Abi men zet zich, a children and youth club. There are Jewish schools in Vilna: The Shalom Aleichem State School has some 200 students. Its curriculum includes in addition to the general subjects the study of the Hebrew language, the Bible, and the history of the Jewish people. The Chabad community in Vilna runs a private religious school.
And on this day maybe there will be a survivor who will find a piece of a photo in the dust on the ground or a stone from the Great Synagogue the one that had previously survived all barrages of hatred, but finally could not withstand that final one. Maybe that survivor who came back to reclaim a part of the beauty of Vilna looks up at the sky and may hear birds screeching in fury as they did in her memories when as a slave prisoner in burning Germany, away from her hometown of Vilna, heard those selfsame birds as they fled the oncoming British bombers . And she may smile as she did then, and looking around will now see this time not in a dream but a memory, the Great Synagogue, her people on the streets, and hear the laughter and will know that the real Jewish Vilna was not really vanquished.
Stanley Mann
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