יום שבת, 22 במאי 2010
יום שבת, 24 באפריל 2010
Vilna-an article by Stanley Mann
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
Warsaw-Article by Stanley Mann
“AND THEN?...AFTER?”
“THERE IS NO THEN! THERE IS NO AFTER!”
THE JEWS OF WARSAW
If you go on a guided tour through Warsaw today you will in a sense see a city of memorials. Here is the Umschlagplatz where the thousands were herded as they were pushed into the cattle cars on the way to the notorious concentration camp Treblinka, here is a mound with its memorial and this is what is left of the Jewish Ghetto where 400,000 Jews were packed in and starved and diseased to a slow death. Here are the cemeteries, the only memory still intact, and here was the Great Synagogue, little traces of what once was … and someone from the group might ask…”and then...after?”
Warsaw…dreams ago, was warm Winter afternoons, with gentle frosts and snow – not too much frost but just enough to keep the crystal snow from melting. There were horses then and sledges, and bells that rang from the attached harnesses. Large nets covered the horses to protect the riders from the thrown up snow. Wooden cobbles lined the streets, this was the time before asphalt, and it was used to reduce the noise of the horses’ hoofs and the rushing wagons. Warsaw was streaming people rushing like fire to attend to the myriad errands. In one of the few parks of the city, the grand and spacious Krasinski Park, you could see elderly Jews dressed in their traditional black clothes, sitting on the sun drenched benches reading their Yiddish newspapers, solving the unsolvable. If you wanted to get up and walk, you could go onto Tlomackie Street and The Great Synagogue, the most imposing in all of Poland which was always packed on the High Holidays that you could hardly breathe and where “always during Kol Nidre services on Yom Kippur with air hushed before the chants, the small boys would climb the iron supporters to the ceiling, tying themselves tightly around the waist, remaining suspended throughout the services while outside in the courtyard crowds stood.” You felt stifled and hot, but no matter you were all together, lifted in the spirituality and joy. Yes, there were then over 300 synagogues in Warsaw. On Dluga street the one that bordered on Nalewki, the names even sounded musical, was the Jewish section and here was the heart of Jewish life in Warsaw. Here was not only the largest Jewish community in all of Poland, but in all of Europe. It was here in Warsaw, in the “mother-city of Israel” were 400,000 Jews lived, it was here in Warsaw the life of the Jews.
-2-
Warsaw, Warzawa in Polish, Varshe in Yiddish was established in the beginning of the fourteenth century, on a bluff on the west bank of the
Vistula. In the year 1414, there were about 20 Jewish families living there. During the following years, more Jews settled in the city, coming from various parts of the continent, but at the same time there were organized attacks to expulse the Jewish residents from the city. Still the community increased. In 1881, after the pogroms in Russia 150,000 Jews moved to Warsaw and in 1862 all restrictions to Jews in Poland were lifted. From then on – Jews played an imported role in finance and in all sections of commerce. Jews formed 52% of the persons engaged in commerce and banking. Of the 20 bankers in the city, in 1847, 17 were Jews. Yiddish was the mother tongue, and as the writer Yehiel Yeshaia Truni wrote, “In Yiddish I write about my milieu and especially my feelings for nature – Yiddish evokes for me the fragrant fields and orchards.” The population was mostly Hasidim and the main trend of Jews in Warsaw was Orthodoxy. There were great writers and playwrights and Warsaw was the main center of Hebrew literature in the world. The city boasted 50 Jewish libraries. Outstanding theaters with great actors presented the works, plays like the “Dybbuk” the play by S. Ansky 1863-1920, with the transmigration of a sinful soul from one body to another. Its success at the time was universal. And there was the play by Yitzchok Leibush Peretz 1815-1914, the Father of Yiddish Literature, “Bontsche Schveig” that was even later performed in the Ghetto. The city hummed in its aliveness.
There was great learning and great rabbis and scholars and it was here that the sons of the great learned ones of western and southern Europe sent their sons to study in the city’s yeshivas. The great Methibtha Institute headed by Rabbi Solomon Joskowicz had more than 400 students.
But there were forewarnings. A wind of hatred would soon engulf the community. On September 29, 1939 the Germans entered the city and began issuing a series of anti-Jewish measures against the Jewish population. On November 16, 1940 almost a half-million Jews were incarcerated in what was the largest “prison city” in Europe. A wall had been built earlier in the spring. The aim of the Germans was to starve the Jews. Starvation and disease set in. The minimal amount bread allocated was mixed with sawdust and potatoes. Illnesses decimated the population. There were no medicines to fight the typhus that spread. The dreaded disease was carried by lice which were everywhere. Thousands
-3-
of people were homeless. In the winter 718 out of 780 apartments had no heat. The streets were strewn with corpses. Those who were fortunate to
get work, worked ten to twelve hours a day at strenuous labor. Bands of starving children roamed the streets in search of food and began to smuggle from the “Aryan” side of the city. Despite the hardship life went on. Social welfare institutes were set up to combat the hunger and disease. Clandestine prayer services were held. Young Hasidic students continued to learn in their dire cold rooms, with little food, hiding from the Germans as they refused to join the forced work force. On each block of houses a committee of charitable work functioned and engaged in cultural and educational activities. Illegal periodicals appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish. A Jewish military underground was organized. Sophisticated bunkers were built. A Jewish military underground was organized, headed by the young leader Mordecai Anielewicz.
During the first 15 months 60,000 people died of malnutrition and other diseases. On January 1941 the Germans began their deportations to Treblinka, and it was here that most of Warsaw Jews were murdered. By January 1942 there were only 40,000 Jews left in the Ghetto. On the dawn of April 19, 1943 the ghetto was surrounded by the Germans in preparations of the final liquidation. Ninety per-cent of the Jewish population had already been killed. After the initial attack the Jews in the Ghetto fought back and the Germans retreated. After three days, the Germans began to burn the houses block by block. For the next three weeks the Germans burned, bombed, and threw cannisters of poison gas into the bunkers. The bunkers had been highly technically built, two-story buildings beneath the ground, with access to the water systems of the city. It had been called “The subterranean Jewish City.” Many Jews died from the fires and suffocation, and many jumped from the burning buildings. The bunker the Germans wanted most was the one located on Mila Street 18, this was the Command Quarters. On May 8, 1943 the Germans discovered and blocked the exits of the bunker and filled it with poison gas. The leader Mordecai Anielewicz committed suicide rather than die at the hands of the Germans. On May 19, 1943, after fierce fighting and after nearly a month of rebellion Jewish Warsaw was finished. The Great Synagogue in an elaborate ceremony was blown up. In his last letter of April 23, Mordecai Anielewicz wrote, “My life’s dream has come to be. I had the privilege of seeing the Jewish defense of the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.”
-4-
Today there are about 5,000 Jews living in the city, mostly elderly also perhaps 20,000 to 50,000 hiding their Jewishness. Warsaw is now the city of monuments. The cemetery on Okopowa Street is in a sense the Jewish life today, with its carefully preserved 100,000 tombstones. Here
is buried the community that once was in addition to the mass graves of more than 100,000 of those who perished in the ghetto. There is the
memorial called the Umschlagplatz, where the children of the orphanages marched on their way to death. There is also the Warsaw Ghetto Monument which is situated on a mound the same height as the rubble of the ghetto when it was destroyed. The one synagogue that survived destruction, the Nozyk Synagogue, is where services are still held. It was funded by Zalman and Ryvka Nozyk who lived nearby at 9 Prozna Street, a wealthy couple who had no children and wanted to be remembered after their death. It was built in 1898, and in his will in 1902, Nozyk requested that the congregation was to say the prayer on all Yiskors for his wife and himself. Today the synagogue holds 300 men and 300 women. After the ghetto was destroyed, the Germans had used it as their stable for horses.
Eighty-five percent of the city was destroyed by the Germans, when it was liberated by the Russian army on January 17, 1945. Gray tenement buildings were erected and later on memorials. In 1946 and 1950 two hermetically sealed milk containers containing 40,000 pages of the most explicit documentation of life in the Ghetto by the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum who perished in the Holocaust, were uncovered from under the rubble.
This is only a partial tour and as it slowly comes to a close, the same person who at its start had asked, “and then… after?” might ask again, “and then… what happened ..after!” And there will be a space in the air, with just a whisper in the blank trees and if you listen closely enough you may hear a voice answer – “there is no then,.. there is no after.”
Stanley Mann
Copyright © 2003 by Stanley Mann
All rights reserved
“THERE IS NO THEN! THERE IS NO AFTER!”
THE JEWS OF WARSAW
If you go on a guided tour through Warsaw today you will in a sense see a city of memorials. Here is the Umschlagplatz where the thousands were herded as they were pushed into the cattle cars on the way to the notorious concentration camp Treblinka, here is a mound with its memorial and this is what is left of the Jewish Ghetto where 400,000 Jews were packed in and starved and diseased to a slow death. Here are the cemeteries, the only memory still intact, and here was the Great Synagogue, little traces of what once was … and someone from the group might ask…”and then...after?”
Warsaw…dreams ago, was warm Winter afternoons, with gentle frosts and snow – not too much frost but just enough to keep the crystal snow from melting. There were horses then and sledges, and bells that rang from the attached harnesses. Large nets covered the horses to protect the riders from the thrown up snow. Wooden cobbles lined the streets, this was the time before asphalt, and it was used to reduce the noise of the horses’ hoofs and the rushing wagons. Warsaw was streaming people rushing like fire to attend to the myriad errands. In one of the few parks of the city, the grand and spacious Krasinski Park, you could see elderly Jews dressed in their traditional black clothes, sitting on the sun drenched benches reading their Yiddish newspapers, solving the unsolvable. If you wanted to get up and walk, you could go onto Tlomackie Street and The Great Synagogue, the most imposing in all of Poland which was always packed on the High Holidays that you could hardly breathe and where “always during Kol Nidre services on Yom Kippur with air hushed before the chants, the small boys would climb the iron supporters to the ceiling, tying themselves tightly around the waist, remaining suspended throughout the services while outside in the courtyard crowds stood.” You felt stifled and hot, but no matter you were all together, lifted in the spirituality and joy. Yes, there were then over 300 synagogues in Warsaw. On Dluga street the one that bordered on Nalewki, the names even sounded musical, was the Jewish section and here was the heart of Jewish life in Warsaw. Here was not only the largest Jewish community in all of Poland, but in all of Europe. It was here in Warsaw, in the “mother-city of Israel” were 400,000 Jews lived, it was here in Warsaw the life of the Jews.
-2-
Warsaw, Warzawa in Polish, Varshe in Yiddish was established in the beginning of the fourteenth century, on a bluff on the west bank of the
Vistula. In the year 1414, there were about 20 Jewish families living there. During the following years, more Jews settled in the city, coming from various parts of the continent, but at the same time there were organized attacks to expulse the Jewish residents from the city. Still the community increased. In 1881, after the pogroms in Russia 150,000 Jews moved to Warsaw and in 1862 all restrictions to Jews in Poland were lifted. From then on – Jews played an imported role in finance and in all sections of commerce. Jews formed 52% of the persons engaged in commerce and banking. Of the 20 bankers in the city, in 1847, 17 were Jews. Yiddish was the mother tongue, and as the writer Yehiel Yeshaia Truni wrote, “In Yiddish I write about my milieu and especially my feelings for nature – Yiddish evokes for me the fragrant fields and orchards.” The population was mostly Hasidim and the main trend of Jews in Warsaw was Orthodoxy. There were great writers and playwrights and Warsaw was the main center of Hebrew literature in the world. The city boasted 50 Jewish libraries. Outstanding theaters with great actors presented the works, plays like the “Dybbuk” the play by S. Ansky 1863-1920, with the transmigration of a sinful soul from one body to another. Its success at the time was universal. And there was the play by Yitzchok Leibush Peretz 1815-1914, the Father of Yiddish Literature, “Bontsche Schveig” that was even later performed in the Ghetto. The city hummed in its aliveness.
There was great learning and great rabbis and scholars and it was here that the sons of the great learned ones of western and southern Europe sent their sons to study in the city’s yeshivas. The great Methibtha Institute headed by Rabbi Solomon Joskowicz had more than 400 students.
But there were forewarnings. A wind of hatred would soon engulf the community. On September 29, 1939 the Germans entered the city and began issuing a series of anti-Jewish measures against the Jewish population. On November 16, 1940 almost a half-million Jews were incarcerated in what was the largest “prison city” in Europe. A wall had been built earlier in the spring. The aim of the Germans was to starve the Jews. Starvation and disease set in. The minimal amount bread allocated was mixed with sawdust and potatoes. Illnesses decimated the population. There were no medicines to fight the typhus that spread. The dreaded disease was carried by lice which were everywhere. Thousands
-3-
of people were homeless. In the winter 718 out of 780 apartments had no heat. The streets were strewn with corpses. Those who were fortunate to
get work, worked ten to twelve hours a day at strenuous labor. Bands of starving children roamed the streets in search of food and began to smuggle from the “Aryan” side of the city. Despite the hardship life went on. Social welfare institutes were set up to combat the hunger and disease. Clandestine prayer services were held. Young Hasidic students continued to learn in their dire cold rooms, with little food, hiding from the Germans as they refused to join the forced work force. On each block of houses a committee of charitable work functioned and engaged in cultural and educational activities. Illegal periodicals appeared in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish. A Jewish military underground was organized. Sophisticated bunkers were built. A Jewish military underground was organized, headed by the young leader Mordecai Anielewicz.
During the first 15 months 60,000 people died of malnutrition and other diseases. On January 1941 the Germans began their deportations to Treblinka, and it was here that most of Warsaw Jews were murdered. By January 1942 there were only 40,000 Jews left in the Ghetto. On the dawn of April 19, 1943 the ghetto was surrounded by the Germans in preparations of the final liquidation. Ninety per-cent of the Jewish population had already been killed. After the initial attack the Jews in the Ghetto fought back and the Germans retreated. After three days, the Germans began to burn the houses block by block. For the next three weeks the Germans burned, bombed, and threw cannisters of poison gas into the bunkers. The bunkers had been highly technically built, two-story buildings beneath the ground, with access to the water systems of the city. It had been called “The subterranean Jewish City.” Many Jews died from the fires and suffocation, and many jumped from the burning buildings. The bunker the Germans wanted most was the one located on Mila Street 18, this was the Command Quarters. On May 8, 1943 the Germans discovered and blocked the exits of the bunker and filled it with poison gas. The leader Mordecai Anielewicz committed suicide rather than die at the hands of the Germans. On May 19, 1943, after fierce fighting and after nearly a month of rebellion Jewish Warsaw was finished. The Great Synagogue in an elaborate ceremony was blown up. In his last letter of April 23, Mordecai Anielewicz wrote, “My life’s dream has come to be. I had the privilege of seeing the Jewish defense of the ghetto in all its greatness and glory.”
-4-
Today there are about 5,000 Jews living in the city, mostly elderly also perhaps 20,000 to 50,000 hiding their Jewishness. Warsaw is now the city of monuments. The cemetery on Okopowa Street is in a sense the Jewish life today, with its carefully preserved 100,000 tombstones. Here
is buried the community that once was in addition to the mass graves of more than 100,000 of those who perished in the ghetto. There is the
memorial called the Umschlagplatz, where the children of the orphanages marched on their way to death. There is also the Warsaw Ghetto Monument which is situated on a mound the same height as the rubble of the ghetto when it was destroyed. The one synagogue that survived destruction, the Nozyk Synagogue, is where services are still held. It was funded by Zalman and Ryvka Nozyk who lived nearby at 9 Prozna Street, a wealthy couple who had no children and wanted to be remembered after their death. It was built in 1898, and in his will in 1902, Nozyk requested that the congregation was to say the prayer on all Yiskors for his wife and himself. Today the synagogue holds 300 men and 300 women. After the ghetto was destroyed, the Germans had used it as their stable for horses.
Eighty-five percent of the city was destroyed by the Germans, when it was liberated by the Russian army on January 17, 1945. Gray tenement buildings were erected and later on memorials. In 1946 and 1950 two hermetically sealed milk containers containing 40,000 pages of the most explicit documentation of life in the Ghetto by the historian Emmanuel Ringelblum who perished in the Holocaust, were uncovered from under the rubble.
This is only a partial tour and as it slowly comes to a close, the same person who at its start had asked, “and then… after?” might ask again, “and then… what happened ..after!” And there will be a space in the air, with just a whisper in the blank trees and if you listen closely enough you may hear a voice answer – “there is no then,.. there is no after.”
Stanley Mann
Copyright © 2003 by Stanley Mann
All rights reserved
What's new
A Trip to Poland & Lithuania
June 30-July 7, 2010
We are planning a trip following the large Jewish Centers of Pre-war II era
in Poland and Lithuania
On June 30- till July 7, 2010
We will visit Vilna, Kovna- Slobodka, Ponivezh, Warsaw, Cracow, Lublin, Gur, Kotzk,
Lezhaisk, Tykocin and more.
Glatt Kosher meals
Academic guidance: Rav Dr. Shlomo Tikochinski
Tracing your Roots
We can arrange for you a private tour to your roots.
For information and registration please contact
Dvora Mann: 054-2000297
or email: mdvora@013.net
יום ראשון, 7 ביוני 2009
A Trip to Belarus-Lithuania
Belarus-Lithuania
August 23-30, 2009
Day 1. Arrival – Minsk
· Arrival to the airport
· Visit Khatyn – an impressive memorial for hundreds of villages burnt in Belarus in WWII
· Check-in in the hotel
· Sightseeing of Jewish and general sites in Minsk
· Dinner at Minsk Synagogue
Day 2. Minsk – Volozhin – Radin - Lida - Minsk
· Visit the site of famous Yeshiva of Volozhin
· The old cemetery of Volozhin and the grave of R’ Chaim Volozhiner
· Drive to Radin
· Former Yeshiva and Synagogue building
· The grave of Chafetz Chaim and other prominent rabbis
· Tribute to the Jewish community of Lida
· On the way back to Minsk visit Ivieh an example of a former shtetl
· Dinner at Minsk Synagogue
Day 3. Minsk – Mir – Slonim – Grodno - Druskenik
· Morning drive to Mir
· Visit the famous Mir Yeshiva and the prayer houses around
· Visit the Jewish cemetery in Mir with the grave of the famous mashgiah R’ Yerucham Levovich
· The palace and the fortress of the princes Radziwill in Mir
· Drive to Slonim to visit the abandoned but still beautiful Siynagogue
· Drive to Grodno
· The Great Synagogue of Grodno
· The area of the Ghetto in Grodno
· Transfer to Lithuania; health resort Druskenik
Day 4. Druskenik – Alytus – Kovna
· Morning for relax in a beautiful neighborhood
· Jack Lipshitz the famous sculptor from Druskenik
· Visit Alytus with its impressive memorial for the Jews perished during the Shoah
Drive to Kaunas (Kovna) second large city of Lithuania
General sightseeing of Kaunas
Avraham Mapu, Ludvig Zammenhof and Leah Goldberg in Kovna
Visit the only Synagogue in Kovna and the Children’s Memorial in its court
Laisves aleja – the main pedestrian street in Kovna
Day 5. Kovna – Keidan – Ponivezh - Vilna
Slobodka - Jewish suburb of the city
Kovna Ghetto area
Ninth Fort - death site of European Jewry
Drive to Keidan - a citadel of Radziwil family
Vilna Gaon and Keidan
Three Synagogues in Keidan
· Visit Ponivezh to see the building of the Yeshiva founded by R’ Kahaneman
Arrival to Vilna and check-in the hotel
Day 6. Vilna
· General sightseeing of Vilnius
The President's Palace
Old Vilnius University
· Visit to the Jewish State museum of Lithuania
· The Jewish Cemeteries of Vilna
· The grave of the Gaon of Vilna and other prominent personalities
· Visit the "Cheap Houses" built by baron Hirsch for poor Jewish people
· Building of the world famous printing house "Widow and Brothers Romm"
· Kabbalat Shabbat with the members of the local Jewish community
· Dinner at Beit Chabad
Day 7. Vilna (walking)
Visit to the only Synagogue in Vilna “Taharat Ha’kodesh”
· Tour of the Old town
The Old Jewish quarter
The Great Vilna Synagogue; the shulhoyf
Vilna Gaon - the Great Jewish scholar
Mordechay Antokolsky – famous Jewish sculptor from Vilna
Large Ghetto, Abba Kovner, Itzik Vittenberg
· Dinner at Beit Chabad
Day 8. Vilna – Ponar – Trakai - departure
Visit to Ponar Memorial
Drive to Trakai with its insular medieval castle
Karaite museum, Kenesa and the old Karaite cemetery
Trakai National Park
Drive to the airport
August 23-30, 2009
Day 1. Arrival – Minsk
· Arrival to the airport
· Visit Khatyn – an impressive memorial for hundreds of villages burnt in Belarus in WWII
· Check-in in the hotel
· Sightseeing of Jewish and general sites in Minsk
· Dinner at Minsk Synagogue
Day 2. Minsk – Volozhin – Radin - Lida - Minsk
· Visit the site of famous Yeshiva of Volozhin
· The old cemetery of Volozhin and the grave of R’ Chaim Volozhiner
· Drive to Radin
· Former Yeshiva and Synagogue building
· The grave of Chafetz Chaim and other prominent rabbis
· Tribute to the Jewish community of Lida
· On the way back to Minsk visit Ivieh an example of a former shtetl
· Dinner at Minsk Synagogue
Day 3. Minsk – Mir – Slonim – Grodno - Druskenik
· Morning drive to Mir
· Visit the famous Mir Yeshiva and the prayer houses around
· Visit the Jewish cemetery in Mir with the grave of the famous mashgiah R’ Yerucham Levovich
· The palace and the fortress of the princes Radziwill in Mir
· Drive to Slonim to visit the abandoned but still beautiful Siynagogue
· Drive to Grodno
· The Great Synagogue of Grodno
· The area of the Ghetto in Grodno
· Transfer to Lithuania; health resort Druskenik
Day 4. Druskenik – Alytus – Kovna
· Morning for relax in a beautiful neighborhood
· Jack Lipshitz the famous sculptor from Druskenik
· Visit Alytus with its impressive memorial for the Jews perished during the Shoah
Drive to Kaunas (Kovna) second large city of Lithuania
General sightseeing of Kaunas
Avraham Mapu, Ludvig Zammenhof and Leah Goldberg in Kovna
Visit the only Synagogue in Kovna and the Children’s Memorial in its court
Laisves aleja – the main pedestrian street in Kovna
Day 5. Kovna – Keidan – Ponivezh - Vilna
Slobodka - Jewish suburb of the city
Kovna Ghetto area
Ninth Fort - death site of European Jewry
Drive to Keidan - a citadel of Radziwil family
Vilna Gaon and Keidan
Three Synagogues in Keidan
· Visit Ponivezh to see the building of the Yeshiva founded by R’ Kahaneman
Arrival to Vilna and check-in the hotel
Day 6. Vilna
· General sightseeing of Vilnius
The President's Palace
Old Vilnius University
· Visit to the Jewish State museum of Lithuania
· The Jewish Cemeteries of Vilna
· The grave of the Gaon of Vilna and other prominent personalities
· Visit the "Cheap Houses" built by baron Hirsch for poor Jewish people
· Building of the world famous printing house "Widow and Brothers Romm"
· Kabbalat Shabbat with the members of the local Jewish community
· Dinner at Beit Chabad
Day 7. Vilna (walking)
Visit to the only Synagogue in Vilna “Taharat Ha’kodesh”
· Tour of the Old town
The Old Jewish quarter
The Great Vilna Synagogue; the shulhoyf
Vilna Gaon - the Great Jewish scholar
Mordechay Antokolsky – famous Jewish sculptor from Vilna
Large Ghetto, Abba Kovner, Itzik Vittenberg
· Dinner at Beit Chabad
Day 8. Vilna – Ponar – Trakai - departure
Visit to Ponar Memorial
Drive to Trakai with its insular medieval castle
Karaite museum, Kenesa and the old Karaite cemetery
Trakai National Park
Drive to the airport
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