Lithuania: In Search of the Hidden Holocaust Monument of Vilnius

 Vilnius, Lithuania. Flame of Hope. Photo from Foundation for the Arts

Cross posted from Defending History.com

The Hidden Monument of Vilnius
11 February 2012

 

In response to several requests from the United States, DefendingHistory.com this week asked three separate Westerners who found themselves in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, to try to see the “Flame of Hope” monument, by sculptor Leonardo Nierman, in memory of the victims of the Lithuanian Holocaust, located in the heart of the Old Town, in a yard that was in the Vilna Ghetto between September 1941 and the ghetto’s liquidation three years later.

The story of the monument got underway nearly thirty years ago when the idea first came to the person who made it happen, Shelly Rybak Pearson of Florida, USA, who contributed a DH.com comment piece on the subject last December.

The seemingly interminable saga has been the subject of a number of American media outlets, including a feature article in the Palm Beach Post and a television interview for the Miami Herald. For many years, the Lithuanian Embassy in Washington DC and the American Embassy in Vilnius have participated in the conversation concerning the monument. Discussions in different periods have dealt with agreeing a text for the inscription (see box at the end of this article), the venue for the monument, and above all — accessibility of the monument to the general public, Lithuanians and foreign visitors alike.

What is agreed by all sides is that the monument is located in the courtyard of the building that housed one of interwar Vilna’s prime Jewish educational institutions, the Yídishe reál-gimnàzye. During the Holocaust, the building tragically became the headquarters of the Nazi-established Judenrat, or “Jewish authority” within the ghetto. Like the other ghettos in major Lithuanian cities, the Vilna Ghetto continued to incarcerate the shrinking remnant of Lithuanian Jewry for several years after the majority were shot in the summer and fall of 1941, mostly by local perpetrators volunteering to kill the civilian Jewish population for the Nazis, at hundreds of mass grave sites across Lithuania.

Read the entire post here

Lithuania: Vilnius Middle School has Walls Made of Broken Matzevot

Vilnius, Lithuania. Uzupis cemetery in 2000. Photos: Samuel D. Gruber (2000)

Vilnius, Lithuania. Uzupis cemetery in 2000. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber (2000)

Lithuania: Vilnius Middle School has Walls Made of Broken Matzevot

Eleven years ago I visited the Uzupis Jewish Cemetery in Vilnius (Vilna), Lithuania, or rather what remained of it. In the dark light of winter I climbed the hill of the cemetery to look for traces of gravestones and walls. Where there were approximately 70,000 burials from 1830 through 1948, only a few hundred stones were visible. These were the ones embedded in the hillside. The cemetery had been "liquidated" in the 1960s, when Vilnius was under Society rule. No marker told the story of the site, or the history of the dead.

Over the next few years I worked with the U.S. Commission for the Preservation of America's Heritage Abroad, of which I was Research Director, to tell that story. Commission Members Harriet Rotter and Steven Some, led the Commission’s contributions to the project. The result was a wall and a monument dedicated in November 2004.

Vilnius, Lithuania. Uzupis Cemetery. Monument under construction and complete. Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber

Vilnius, Lithuania. Uzupis Cemetery. Monument under construction and complete. Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber

Vilnius, Lithuania. Uzupis Cemetery. Monument under construction and complete. Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber

Over the years I wondered where all the stones had gone. The site was only cleared by the Soviets in the 1960s, but all anyone would say was that the matzevot have been removed for building material.

Now we know where some of the stones ended up.

Dovid Katz's writes on the website defendinghistory.com that thousands of fragments of Uzupis Cemetery gravestones are were used to construct walls on the grounds of the Lazdynai Middle School in Vilnius, built in the early 1970s. He and visited the school last week, and photographer Richard Schofield took pictures, and posted a report.

Sounds of Stone Speak: Jewish Gravestones in the Walls of a Middle School in Vilnius

Vilnius, Lithuania. Gravestone fragment in wall at Lazdynai Middle School. Photo: Robert Schofield

Katz writes in part "The school grounds’ outside walls comprised of the pilfered Jewish gravestones have nothing to do with the structure of the school’s building and removing the stones and finding a culturally respectful home for them would not touch the school building with so much as a hair. Moreover, the walls made from the stones extend well beyond the school’s grounds to surrounding parts of Lazdynai, where a large supply of Jewish gravestones were brought from the cemetery site after the city’s Soviet-era administration destroyed the cemetery."

You can see more of Richard Schofield's photography here.

Lithuania: Former Anykščiai Synagogue Demolished

Anykščiai, Lithuania. Demolition of former synagogue. Photo from Nyksciai.lt informacija

Lithuania: Former Anykščiai Synagogue Demolished

(ISJM) One line and a few pictures in a Lithuanian online news service reported the demolition of the former community synagogue in the northern Lithuanian town of Anykščiai (Aniksht in Yiddish). The reason given for the demolition of the building on Saltupio Steet, which had been used as a bakery, was a "state of emergency." A new building to house a social services center is planned for the site. In the one picture posted of the standing building it does not appear to have had any surviving identifying or distinctive exterior features, though it looked to be in relatively good condition.

You can read about the Jewish history of the town here.

Conference: First Report from Vilnius Jewish Heritage Workshop

Vilnius, Lithuania. Sign on the Baron de Hirsch Houses, site of subsidized Jewish housing, and then a Nazi-established concentration/work camp, and then a murder and mass grave site for hundreds of Jews. Photo: Samuel D. Gruber

Conference: First Report from Vilnius Jewish Heritage Workshop

Ruth Ellen Gruber has posted a brief report from the 2-day workshop on Jewish heritage in Lithuania that was held earlier this week in Vilnius. I was invited, but could not attend. We will see in time how much was accomplished, and how much was just. Despite a quick start in recognizing Jewish heritage sites - especially cemeteries and mas murder and grave sites - early in the 1990s, Lithuania has since lagged behind other countries in developing a coherent and effective policy to maintain and protect most of its historic Jewish sites.

According to Ruth, the workshop presented

"a number of depressing factors, including vandalism, apathy, lack of coordination and cooperation between stakeholders, and the usual "one Jew building three synagogues on a desert island" syndrome. But the fact that the seminar took place was positive and I [Ruth] did learn some positive developments.

These included the news that:

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

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

Joniskis, Lithuania. The "Red Synagogue," one of two synagogues in this historic complex (before storm damage). Photos: ISJM archive

Lithuania: Update on Pakruojis Wooden Synagogue

Lithuania: Update on Pakruojis Wooden Synagogue

Ruth Ellen Gruber has posted an update on the condition of the wooden synagogue in Pakruojis, upon which I have previously reported on this blog. You can see new pictures and read a description here:

Lithuania -- update on fire damaged Pakruojis wooden synagogue.

So far, no good plans have been put forward to save the former synagogue, but there has been talk. As usual the issues are responsibility and jurisdiction, long term care and use, and of course, money.

Lithuania: Time to Save Jewish Partisan Fort in Rundninkai Forest
by Samuel D. Gruber

All photos courtesy of Adalbert Wagner

(ISJM) In the Rundninkai Forest about 25 miles (40 kms) southwest Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and only a few miles (5 kms.) from the village of Senieji Maceliai, is the only vestige of the heroic resistance of Jewish survivors of the Vilna Ghetto. The drive takes about forty minutes to an hour, and in that time one is transported into a different place, and also a different time. Today, one member of that Jewish Resistance group, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, is still alive, and she has made it her cause to tell the story of the Jewish Partisans in Lithuania, and to remember their hidden place of refuge. According Dovid Katz of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, at Vilnius university, where Fania Brantsovsky is librarian, in all, “about a hundred escapees from the Vilna Ghetto, lived (literally) under the ground during the period they fought with the anti-Nazi partisans, in alliance with the Allies, during the final period of the Holocaust in Lithuania.”

The 87-year old Brantsovsky, still takes visitors to the site to where she escaped when she fled the Vilna Ghetto on 23 September 1943. The history of the Jewish Partisan struggle is told by historian Dov Levin in his book Fighting Back. Lithuanian Jewry’s armed resistance to the Nazis, 1941-1945. (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1997). Levin recounts the complex history of the partisan units whose size, location and access to arms ebbed and flowed depending on the demands and pressures of the larger more organized Partisan forces - those directed by the Soviets, and those more nationalist groups. Both groups - whether of the left or right - had little love or repect for Jewish partisans - who needs were often sacrificed for the benefit of the non-Jewish groups (this was not unique to Lithuania). The Jews, of course, with no where else to go but the forest, had little recourse. Still, according to Levin, at least four substantial Jeiwsh fighting groups were created in the Rundninkai Forest, totalling about 400 men. There were Jewish families there, too. Any preservation of the site must make sense of the conflicting claims of the different partisan groups and recognize that the political and ideological complexities the past still continue in many ways today.

The “accommodations” at the surviving anti-Nazi Partisan fort were primitive, but the historical significance of the remaining simple dug-out structures and the paths that join them is tremendous. Not only do they represent an important aspect of the anti-Nazi fight in Lithuania – something all Lithuanians should acknowledge – but they also record a momentous movement in Jewish history, comparable to the Uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, when oppressed Jews chose to fight (sometimes to their death) in the face of overwhelming odds. It is this tradition - an training -of the Holocaust, as much as the suffering and death of Camps (of which Barack Obama has recently spoken), that gave life to the State of Israel in 1948 and afterward.

Adalbert Wagner, a volunteer at the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum/The Green House has documented the forest site (and has graciously provided pictures for this report). For more photos click here.




As an historian, preservationist and a Jew I think it is essential that these remains be protected and preserved. It is not a preposterous goal. Already large sums are being allocated for the preservation of sites of the “Forest Brothers” (many of whom were ex-fascist collaborators and “Jew-shooters” who fled into the forests in 1944 to escape the Soviet advance). This fact should encourage the preservation of this site, too, but in fact the possibility of preserving this site, and teaching its history, aggravates and even enrages those in Lithuania who continue to celebrate the pro-Nazi participants and policies of the war years. Today’s government, while in no way complicit, would rather the whole thing go away. Most likely, like an insurance provider facing a malpractice suit, there are many who are just sitting back and waiting for Faina Brantsovksy to pass away, and her memories to follow.

It would be so much better to celebrate Fania’s life, struggle, survival and accomplishments and protect and preserve the Rundninkai Forest fort in her honor, and in the memory of those who lived and fought from there. I call on the Lithuanian government, which has done so much to preserve the memory of Ghetto Jews at the memorials at Panerai (Ponary) and Kaunus’s Ninth Fort, to step forward to protect this simple site, too. I call on the international community, which has done much to assist in the conservation of Auschwitz and the building of memorials at Mauthausen, Belzec, Rumbula, and most recently the Labor Camps of Estonia, and so many other places, to step forward to assist this effort, too.

The International Survey of Jewish Monuments is ready to act as facilitator for this project, in the right circumstances. If funds are available, ISJM will assist in putting together an international conservation and interpretation team to work with local professionals and authorities for the long-term protection and preservation of the Rundninkai Forest fort.

Publication: New Book in Lithuania about Jewish "Traces."

Publication: New Book in Lithuania about Jewish "Traces."

A new book about the lost Jewish heritage has been published in Lithuania.

Sounds of silence: traces of Jewish life in Lithuania: album by Raimondas Paknys (photos), Dovid Katz (preface author and consultant), and Isaac Zibuts (project) is a memorial album dedicated to the annihilated Lithuanian Jewish communities of Lithuania. The book includes photographs of cemeteries, prayer houses, and other buildings and sites connected to Jewish life, "or more precisely, images of what remains many years after the golden age of Jewish Lithuania."

Sounds of silence [2009, 201 pages, hard cover] is published by R. Paknio leidykla. [ISBN: 9789955736271].

Lithuania: Fire Destroys Much of Pakruojis Wooden Synagogue

Pakruojis synagogue before the fire. Photo: Ruth Ellen Gruber (2006)

Lithuania: Fire Destroys Much of Pakruojis Wooden Synagogue
by Samuel D. Gruber

(ISJM) News sources in Lithuania report that a fire this weekend destroyed at least half of the historic wooden synagogue of Pakruojis. In September I wrote and posted photos of the deteriorating condition of the building, located near the center of the town. We await full details of the situation.

The cause of the blaze is still to be determined, but police suspect arson. Whether the fire was an anti-Semitic act or merely the burning (accidental or intentional) of a long-abandoned building is unknown. Colleagues in Lithuania report that Anti-Semitism in the country is reaching a "fever pitch" with many repeated articles claiming that Jews (especially George Soros) are wrecking the Lithuanian economy. There is also the "widespread belief that Jews and America prevent the prosecuting of 'Jewish Partisan war criminals.'" Whether any of these beleifs - hardly new - played a role in the fire remains to be seen.

Lithuania: Sale of Vilna Ghetto Library Building Halted

Lithuania: Sale of Vilna Ghetto Library Building Halted

The Jewish Telegraphic agency has reported that the contested sale of a former Jewish property that once was the site of library in the Vilna Ghetto has been halted. Getting claims settled on properties like this one - one of hundreds stalled in the lengthy and complex restitution legal (and political) process is sometimes like getting blood from a stone. And these stones - and those nearby - certainly witnessed their share of blood.

Sale of Jewish property in Lithuania thwarted

March 30, 2009

PRAGUE (JTA) -- A Lithuanian plan to sell a building that once housed the Vilna Ghetto Jewish library was halted by the U.S. Embassy, JTA has learned.

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

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

Lithuania is among the few countries in Europe that has yet to come up with a restitution or compensation plan for Jewish communal property.

''For eight years the Lithuanian government has been promising to come up with a plan, but so far nothing has come of it,'' Block told JTA Monday.

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

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

The restitution organization and the Lithuanian Jewish community recently rejected a $41 million compensation package for property, saying the sum, and how it was to be paid out over 10 years only if it was feasible for the government, was insufficient.

With numerous delays by previous governments and now the current government, the restitution process remains stalled, said Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

Baker also was informed by the embassy of the library sale cancellation. ''It seems it was only blocked by a last-minute intercession,'' he said.

Lithuania: Pakruojis Wooden Synagogue Continues to Deteriorate. How Much Time is Left?

Lithuania: Pakruojis Wooden Synagogue Continues to Deteriorate. How Much Time is Left?

The former synagogue of Pakruojis, Lithuania, was perhaps the most impressive of that country’s surviving wooden synagogues. What remains of the early 19th century building continues to suffer from neglect and vandalism. Dora Boom of the Netherlands recently informed me that wooden planking from one side of the synagogue was being removed (see photos) – presumably to be reused or burned as firewood. Photos by Ruth Ellen Gruber show the damage in 2006.

I contacted Sergey Kravtsov of the Center for Jewish Art, who has documented the synagogue and prepared a graphic restoration of its former interior design. The “good news” from Sergey is that the wood that has been removed is not original, but was added in 1954, when the synagogue was reconstructed as a cinema. Initially, there was no siding (see photo by Chackelis Lemchenas, 1938). Sergey writes. “there are other severe problems, mainly the danger of fire, since the structure is abandoned, and is being frequently visited by homeless.”

Several projects for the restoration of the synagogue have been floated, but none have been funded. With all the worldwide interest in wooden synagogues, I hope there are donors who might be interested in saving at least this one – probably most important architecturally of those preserved, and one still intact enough to save. But intact for how long? The other wooden synagogues are also in perilous condition. Each Lithuanian winter threatens them with collapse.

Photos of what the interior of Pakruojis looked like before the Holocaust

I thank Dora, Sergey and Ruth for monitoring the condition of this important building, and for supplying photos.

Sergey’s virtual reconstruction of the synagogue can be seen by entering the CJA website at http://cja.huji.ac.il/ (be patient).