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(JTA) — Legend has it that within the early 14th century, the grand duke of Lithuania set out on a looking journey. One evening, he dreamt of an infinite iron wolf, which a priest would later inform him was an indication that he ought to set up a metropolis on the positioning the place he had slept.
Whether or not or not the origin story is true, it’s uncontested that the present-day Lithuanian capital Vilnius was first referred to by its former identify, Vilna, in paperwork and letters in 1323 — making this yr, within the authorities’s eyes, the town’s 700th anniversary.
The town is marking the anniversary yr all through 2023 with numerous festivals, visible artwork exhibitions, lectures and extra. The organizers of Vilnius 700 stress that they’re together with Jewish individuals and themes within the celebrations by means of a spread of programming.
That’s as a result of for a portion of the town’s existence, beginning within the early nineteenth century, Vilnius was additionally probably the most essential Jewish facilities on this planet, often called the Jerusalem of the North. Roughly half of the town was Jewish, and it was a Jewish cultural powerhouse, a deep effectively of Yiddish and Hebrew literature. In 1910, the town had over 100 synagogues, together with Jewish faculties, publications, and charitable and political organizations.
“The Jewish group is an integral a part of Vilnius’ previous and current, taking part in an essential function within the metropolis’s day-to-day life,” Tomas Gulbinas, Vilnius’ deputy mayor, wrote in an e-mail.
But this weekend additionally marks a darker anniversary: 80 years for the reason that ultimate liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto, a Jewish ghetto that noticed nearly all of its over 50,000 Jews die by the hands of the Nazis.
On Saturday, Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonyte joined others in a march from the town’s former Jewish ghetto to Paneriai, the forest web site previously often called Ponary the place the Nazis and their native collaborators murdered 70,000 Jews, largely Lithuanian, over three years through the Holocaust.
The dual anniversaries have introduced into stark reduction tensions over historic reminiscence in Lithuania, the place, as in neighboring Poland and Latvia, officers have downplayed the function of native collaborators in finishing up the Nazis’ murderous plans. Memorials to Lithuanians who fought with the Nazis in opposition to the Soviet Union are plentiful within the metropolis, making that historical past loom each actually and figuratively over the 700th birthday celebration.
Troopers maintain the Vilnius flag throughout an anniversary occasion, Jan. 25, 2023. (Oleg Nikishin/Getty Photographs)
“There’s an unresolvable stress between want to rejoice and this historical past that’s not a lot to rejoice,” mentioned Laimonis Breidis, a Vilnius native whose e-book “Vilnius: Metropolis of Strangers” explores the town’s historical past by means of the insights of vacationers. The most important problem, he mentioned, is that “every part instructed in regards to the metropolis is compartmentalized.”
Virtually the entire few thousand Jews dwelling in Vilnius right this moment have familial ties to individuals who died through the Holocaust, mentioned Faina Kukliansky, chair of the Lithuanian Jewish (Litvak) Neighborhood. She mentioned in an interview earlier this yr that the group was extra decided to commemorate the ghetto anniversary than the town one.
“I promise you, we, the Lithuanian Jewish group, is not going to neglect this date,” she mentioned.
How Lithuania’s Holocaust historical past is remembered turned a problem of excessive drama in 2019, after a Chicago schoolteacher named Sylvia Foti revealed a e-book recounting how her grandfather — Jonas Noreika, a common and previously a nationwide hero — had agreed with the Nazis in regards to the extermination of Jews.
The e-book brought on an uproar. Lithuania’s parliament then voted to take away the top of a nationwide genocide analysis heart, Adas Jakubauskas, after he insisted Noreika had tried to avoid wasting Jews; 17 historians wrote to the middle complaining that Jakubauskas was compromising the standard of their analysis. For his half, Jakubauskas charged that he was being pressured by Israel and Russia to indict Lithuanian members with out proof.
But the nation continues to memorialize the Holocaust with out calling consideration to the function that Lithuanians performed in carrying it out. Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority, mentioned this week in a particular session of the Lithuanian Parliament that the nation “should constantly acknowledge that lots of the Lithuanian Jews massacred within the Holocaust died by the hands of their Lithuanian co-nationals and that Lithuanians additionally took half within the extermination of Jews in neighboring nations.”
Members of a global workforce of archaeologists work to unearth the bimah, the central prayer platform, on the archaeological web site of the Nice Synagogue of Vilnius, July 25, 2018. (Petras Malukas/AFP through Getty Photographs)
Such an acknowledgement just isn’t a centerpiece of the Vilnius 700 programming, partially as a result of its emphasis on celebration is focusing consideration to happier moments in native Jewish historical past.
Gulbinas listed the Jewish-themed tasks the town has undertaken together with its 700th anniversary: metropolis excursions, placed on by Undiscovered Vilnius, that spotlight the town’s Jewish historical past; the town’s involvement within the reconstruction of the Nice Synagogue of Vilnius, which was largely destroyed by the Nazis; the renovation of the grave of the Vilna Gaon, a vastly influential 18th-century rabbi, and the maintenance of Jewish cemeteries; and a graffiti artwork challenge, “Partitions That Keep in mind,” by which artists have painted pictures harkening again to the period when the town’s Jewish group was thriving.
“Concurrently, Vilnius honors the current Jewish customs and traditions, for instance, by celebrating Hanukkah along with the native Jewish group yearly,” Gulbinas wrote.
A pavilion on the Nationwide Museum of Lithuania that’s open till Oct. 15 recreates Vilnius because it stood 200 years in the past — on the daybreak of the town’s Jewish heyday.
In the meantime, the Jewish group has held occasions tied to the ghetto anniversary outdoors of the Vilnius 700 umbrella. Earlier this month, within the courtyard of the previous Jewish Council headquarters within the Jewish Ghetto, Šimonytė attended an exhibition and live performance on the liquidation anniversary.
On Thursday, the town of Vilnius launched a commemorative route — ”Panerių kelias,” or street of Paneriai, named for the positioning of a bloodbath of 100,000 individuals, a lot of whom had been Jewish, throughout World Struggle II — alongside which processions had been organized on that very same day and on the twenty fourth. An extra exhibition, “Therapeutic Soul Wounds,” which, per an official from the town, “reveals the traumatic experiences and dilemmas of younger women, youngsters and girls in an effort to survive the brutal situations of World Struggle II and the Holocaust,” opened final week.
In just a few circumstances, the histories — that of Vilnius and that of the Vilna Ghetto — had been commemorated collectively in official Vilnius 700 occasions. At a live performance outdoors the previous Vilna Ghetto Jewish Council in July, Michael Gordon, the American composer and founding father of the acclaimed Bang on a Can music collective, whose father grew up outdoors of Vilnius, debuted an authentic composition for 9 trombones.
The courtyard was Gordon’s concept. The organizers of the music part of Vilnius 700 reached out to him, he mentioned, and despatched a listing of websites the place he might debut an authentic composition. In his reply, he mentioned, he identified that “there’s a giant and lengthy and illustrious historical past of Jewish tradition, each secular and sacred, in Vilnius, and none of those websites are Jewish websites. Can we think about a Jewish web site? And so they mentioned yeah, nice.”
Gordon selected the courtyard partially due to its connection to Jewish arts: on one aspect of the courtyard stood a Yiddish theater; on one other, a Yiddish conservatory. And the town additionally has a private connection to Gordon, whose father, a Litvak, lived in Vilnius within the Thirties. He referred to as his composition “Resonance.”
Roughly 300 individuals got here to the live performance, mentioned Gordon, who spoke somewhat in regards to the occasion about “the presence of Jewish tradition in Lithuanian historical past.”
“I used to be blissful about that,” he mentioned. “I type of felt it was my duty…I felt, wow, I’ve this chance to go right here and, in a sure sense, honor the Jewish historical past on this place, on this crucial heart of Jewish studying and Jewish arts and tradition.”
That type of consideration was all too uncommon prior to now, in keeping with Laima Lauckaite, the curator of a collaborative exhibition between the Lithuanian Artwork Centre TARTLE and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Analysis in New York Metropolis that’s open now. Lauckaite didn’t develop up absolutely conscious of her metropolis’s Jewish historical past whereas a schoolgirl through the Soviet years close to the place the Nice Synagogue of Vilna as soon as stood. Soviet authorities had razed the synagogue’s ruins and erected a college; underground stays weren’t recognized till 2015.
Jonathan Brent, government director and CEO of YIVO, and Gitanas Nausėda, president of Lithuania, study holdings within the Strashun Uncommon Books Room at YIVO’s New York headquarters, Sept. 18, 2023. The room is called for a Jewish scholar in Vilna (now Vilnius) who collected practically 7,000 volumes of Yiddish and different books earlier than his demise in 1885. (YIVO/ Melanie Einzig)
“I by no means knew about it, that there was the Nice Synagogue,” she mentioned. “I obtained to learn about it solely 30 years after.”
The collaborative exhibit in New York Metropolis shows an exhibition of Vilnius guidebooks that replicate the town’s nineteenth and twentieth century historical past and “its multi-ethnic, multicultural panorama.” Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda visited YIVO final week to pay tribute to the Jews who rescued uncommon books and paperwork from the Vilna Ghetto.
Dovid Katz, former professor of Yiddish Research at Vilnius College, has spent the previous 15 years enhancing Defending Historical past, a web site devoted to combating Holocaust distortion. He has additionally participated in quite a few occasions to mark Vilnius 700.
“Whereas it is extremely good that authorities have included Jewish-themed packages within the yr’s commemorations devoted to the town’s historical past, it’s shameful that they haven’t completely taken down any of the state-sponsored public-space shrines to Holocaust collaborators and perpetrators,” Katz mentioned.
He careworn that the narratives downplaying Lithuanian culpability within the Holocaust emanated from a relative few influential nationalists, not the mass of Lithuanians celebrating Vilnius.
“I really like dwelling right here. The individuals of right this moment’s Lithuania are terrific,” he mentioned. “The issue is with a small ultra-powerful, state-funded ‘historical past fixing unit’ that dominates on these points in politics, museums, media, arts and academia.”
Katz advised, as effectively, that the Jewish group ought to have targeted on a unique anniversary — and that its consideration to the September dates associated to the ghetto’s liquidation reified the nation’s Holocaust reminiscence issues.
“Of the hundreds of Lithuanian Jewish Holocaust survivors we interviewed over greater than three a long time, all felt that the suitable day for commemoration of the Lithuanian Holocaust is June twenty third,” he mentioned. On that day in 1941, “600 years of peace was damaged by the outbreak of barbarity, humiliation, slaughter in a whole lot of cities throughout the land. By the top of 1941, all of the near 250 or so storied shtétlakh (shtetls) had been destroyed, as had been the overwhelming majority of Lithuanian Jews.”
Focusing solely on the liquidation of the ghetto, he mentioned, “displays a state try and deflect from the first narrative through one which focuses solely on the Germans (the ghetto historical past) and never on the hundreds of native members all throughout the land.”
Vilnius 700 occasions are scheduled by means of the top of the yr, making certain that the tensions over historical past and reminiscence within the metropolis proceed to simmer.
However not all see the necessity to carry up the town and Holocaust anniversaries in the identical dialog. David Roskies, chair emeritus in Yiddish literature on the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, wrote in an e-mail: “I don’t see any intersection between the 2 anniversaries. It’s pure happenstance. Who can say with any precision when Vilnius was established?”
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