Before World War II, Vilna 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 here where as a Jew you could exist knowing the Yiddish language.
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 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. 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 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 consistently conducted a stubborn and incessant struggle, decade after decade, again the Municipal Council for the right to dwell in other parts of the city. It had its Yiddish theatre, the Vilna Troupe, famed for its repertory.
Vilna was a preeminent center for rabbinical studies. Among the scholars born in Vilna was Joshua Hoeschel ben Joseph and Shabbetai 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. Here in Vilna was the most stimulating religious and spiritual center which had a profound influence on Judaism in the sphere of both halakhah and Kabbalah. Among the scholars of Vilna in the second half of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century were R. Moses, called Kremer, a forefather of Elijah Gaon; his son-in-law Joseph, author of Rosh Yosef, halakhic and aggadic novellae (Berlin 1716); R. Baruch Kahana, known as Baruch Harif,; the grammarian Azriel and his two sons Nisan and Elijah; and Zevi Hirsch Kaidanover (Kaidany).
Here was the Great Synagogue built in 1573 and the Kloyzn, the smaller prayer houses, as they were called. The gravediggers, who had formed a society in 1667, had their own prayer house, as did t6he bookbinders, glaziers, housepainters, shoemakers, bakers, wagoners and tinsmiths.
There were the cemeteries, the old cemetery, beyond the River Vilna, a couple of miles from the city, where the Vilna Gaon, his mother and 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.
There is the modern cemetery opened in 1843, where are the graves of famous writers as well as the graves of the victims of various riots. There is also the New Cemetery, purchased in the 1950's located in the city outskirts.
Vilna was built as a fortress city around the year 1322. The River Vilia flowed through it and it was called Vilna, and it was that this small town would become 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 later one from the west mainly Germany.
The Jews enjoyed a considerable degree of tolerance on the part of the rulers, largely due to the comparatively late date at which Christianity was introduced into the country. As the nobles felt it was derogatory to their dignity to engage in any form of work or trade the Jews were employed by the nobles on their estates as estate managers, superintendents of mills and distilleries, and innkeepers. The lands were cultivated by the peasants.
However, the Jews still experienced hostility, and it was the burghers who were the middle class, who were the most persistent antagonists of the Jews in Lithuania. They looked upon the Jews as competitors and adversaries in their fields of trade and handicrafts. The burghers vented their wrath against the Jews in mob attacks upon the synagogues 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."
However, for fifty years there was almost an incessant struggle by the Jews of Vilna to secure their rights. The burghers continued to commit acts of violence against the Jews. But it was the Cossack massacres, which raged through the greater part of Poland and Lithuania for a whole decade, from 1648, which swept the Jews out of Vilna altogether for a period of six years.
Unspeakable barbarities were perpetrated on the Jewish community, sparing neither the young nor 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 fro 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 people 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, and 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 Arukh, 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 the interest on its 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: 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' 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 Tehillim (Psalms) reciters in 1642. At the time of its building, church rulings throughout 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. As a consequence, the outside of 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.
The Interior of The Great Synagogue:
The interior of the Synagogue 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. It was built in the second half of the eighteenth century by Rabbi Judah Ben Eliezer, the famous scribe and judge (Sofer veDayyan). Known as YeSoD(from the initials of the three words of 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 Kahl elder who advanced the money and when the Kahal was unable to return the 14,000 guilden due, he made a present of the structure.
The synagogue was designed to serve as a stronghold within which the Jews could take refuge in time 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) to 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 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 gable porch, but within it was rich individual features. On the southern wall was a wooden tablet with the 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 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 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 70,000 Jews from Vilna and vicinity murdered by the Nazis and their helpers in the years 1941 to 1944."
Today there are about 3,000 Jews living in Vilna, a few are the original survivors. The Khorshul (Choral Synagogue) built in Morrish 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. At the outbreak of World War II, many refugees poured into Vilna from divided Poland - the German-occupied part and the Soviet-occupied one. Ammong the refugees were many rabbis (and Hasidic rabbis), scholars and community leaders. In June 24, 1941 the Germans entered Vilna and were welcomed by the Lithuanian population. Prior to the establishment of the ghetto about 35,000 Jews were murdered in Ponary, a wooded area 10 mi. from Vilna. Among them were leaders of the Jewish community and members of the first Judenrat.
On September 6, 1941 the Jews were driven into two Ghettos, starved and beaten. The smaller one was liquidated 46 days later. In the ghetto religious life, yeshivot, and synagogues continued functioning underground. On September 23, 1943 the Jews were ordered to prepare for the final deportation, which would liquidate the ghetto. The surviving men were sent to Estonia, the young women to Latvia and the old, children and sick to the concentration camp Majdanek.
After the liquidation of the ghetto approximately 3,000 Jews were left to work in the factories. On July 22-3 1944, they were all taken to Ponary and murdered there.
Today many visitors from all over the world come to visit the gravesite of the Vilna Gaon. They also come 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 daily minyans at the Khorshul Synagogue with a rabbi provided by Chabad. The Shalom Aleichem State School has some 200 students and the Chabad community in Vilna runs a private religious school. A lot of what is left is memories, memories of Vilna and memories of its famous Jewish Community.
Copyright © 2004 by Stanley Mann
Michlalah Jerusalem College All Rights Reserved