27/10/09                                                                              Berlin. Germany
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung

BUILDING FROM THE ASHES: 
RECLAIMING THE JEWISH
NARRATIVE IN LITHUANIA TODAY
Markas Zingeris

Colleagues and Guests of Conference, 
Kollegen und Kollegin
,
In the frames of this talk I’l try to offer you some insights into a rather complicated landscape of Jewish patrimony in Lithuania. 
This is not so much a problem of compensations and restitutions, as it was viewed by the International Media for a number of years in the context of Compensations for the victims of Holocaust*, as it is, at present
a problem of re-instating the Jewish Narrative into the common understanding among the people of Lithuania and to reclaim the rightfull place of Jewish Heritage in Lithuania’s General History. 
This is happening, by the way. 
Textbooks are introducing related sources, the cultural and humanitarian elite of Lithuanian society widens its view on the past, shifting the focus from ethnocentrism to all-embracing Lithuanian identity. 
However, huge challenges still are are in the way. 
It is not possible to talk of the state-of- art in this field today without delving, albeit randomly, into the past, and without accentuating some cross -cultural and political issues. While doing this I can't avoid, also, my very personal experience, as a good deal of this subject is for me a part of my family history, 
So, I can’t avoid mentioning  here the passionate initiatives of my brother who was the proto-chairman of the embryonic Jewish Community of Lithuania called the Ethnographic society in the time of Perestroika and the first Lithuania's Jewish Museum director during and after the split from USSR,  
The subject can be put this way: 
What happened with the remains of the Lithuanian Jewish civilization in the aftermath of the WWII and during the years of Communist rule? 
And,
how can we, the modern generation, to use the remnants of  Jewish history  in Lithuania  for the benefit of the society as a whole, for the Jews in Lithuania and the worldwide Jewish community, and European and global visitors too?  
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*A Law of Compensation, known as a God Will Compensation, granted, mainly, for the continuity of Jewish Culture in Lithuania, has been passed by Lithuanian Parliament two years ago. 
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The statistics, demography and composition of the urban population in Lithuania went in the mid-XX century through dramatic changes. As it is known, 92 to 94 percent of the Jewish community of Lithuania was annihilated during the Holocaust by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators. So, the generation of the current century is mostly ignorant of  how the Lithuanian urban centers looked like before the WWII, This is not only because the provinces of Lithuania were left after the Holocaust, factually Judenrein, as  Nazi murderers envisioned it, but also due to subsequent cultural politics of the Soviet Regime and neglect for the artifacts of Jewish Heritage after the war. It is established that the population in shtetlach, as the towns and townships are called in Yiddish, was 27 to 70 –percent Jewish before the WWII**. During the war this multifaceted culture, which could be called civilization indeed, has just dissapeared in two or three years leaving behind the art, artifacts, documents, iconography, property -- anything civilization could produce -- scattered-in Lithuania and in a wider world as well . 
Yes, this was just remains and ruins, so what?
All the more it was in need of special care, it is natural to assume, after the Holocaust.
Not exactly so. 
We can understand the unfathomable ways of history and individual human fate by which Lithuanian Jewish heritage at the end of XX century could be find stucked under the bed of a poet in Tel Aviv, or in a cellar of living apartments in New York or, also in a cellar, in Paris***, but what about the country of origin where both the flourishing of this culture and its annihilation took place? 
So, what were the reasons for this neglect of the Jewish heritage after the war? 
Why did it take so much pains for us to restore what we're able to find?
Let's look at the core of the problem. It was not clear at all -- as it is clear by now -- what Lithuania has lost and why. The sites of mass –killings of Lithuanian Jewry were mostly unmarked during the II half of the last century and those marked did not show why the Jews in particular were selected for murder. At most, it was the „Soviet citizens“ or „civilian population“ – that was the approved name for the victims of  Nazi genocide. And there was no possibility of Holocaust education in a society, where free public discourse was a taboo.
For the same reason it was not possible to fully discuss Jewish culture too.* * * *
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** See  the map of the Jewish Lithuania before the WWII, drawn up by Vilnius U-ty Geography Dept. for the International History Commission of Lithuania (its title in full: Presidential International Commission for the Investigation of Crimes of the Nazi and Communist Regimes in Lithuania). Vilnius, 2013
***The situations with Lithuanian Jewish heritage, collected and left for the posterity by late Abraham Suckever(Israel), Leizer Ran(USA) -- both of the pre-War Young Vilne movement of artists and writers. And, as I was told by the leaders of ORT of London, a stack of  photographs  of ORT activity in a pre-War Lithuania was accidentally found in a basement in Paris at the end of the last century  by the French historian Serge Klarsfeld.
* * * * Identical observation of how the Communist totalitarianism in Poland (after the WWII) was detrimental to Polish-Jewish relations due to the impossibility of free discourse on the subject during the most of II-nd half of XX century was shared by Polish movie producer Dariusz Jablonski in an interview with the Tablet weekly on the occassion of the opening of his production "Poklosie" ("Aftermath", dir. Wladislaw Pasikowski) in USA.
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And what in this respect can be said about the Lithuanians to the West of the Iron Curtain?
I need to note that there was a stubborn unwillingness on the part of Lithuanian emigrees in the free world to go into the issues of Lithuanian collaboration with the Nazis in the annihilation of Lithuanian Jews, mainly, because, as I see it, it would harm the prevailing notion of martirology of Lithuanians themselves as the victim –and- martyr nation of foreign occupiers."Lithuanians are still in denial of this, -- wrote Vytas Stoskus in the Canadian weekly "Cristian Courier" in 1999, -- claiming they saw people rounded up, but had no idea what was happening. They tend to lay the blame on the invading Nazis."
There were, of course, exceptions among emmigree Lithuanian intelectuals, such as the poet and professor at Yale Tomas Venclova, and his notable articles on the issue of Lithuanian-Jewish relations in the nineties,  and the historian Saulius Sužiedėlis, who was employed by Lithuania's aforementioned Commission at the end of the last century to research the crimes under Nazis in  Lithuania, and some others from liberal "Santara" organization of Lithuanian emigrees in USA, Their views and research have shaped oppinions of some fellow intelectuals and the younger generation of educated Lithuanians, though this, as they say in Russian, doesn't change the wheather.
What was needed is a sustainable effort, a political will and new forms of mass -education.. 
Under the Communist rule it was simply impossible..
The abandoned Jewish cemetaries across the country  were  vandalized and from time to time had even served as a source of building material. I just can't avoid mentioning here that the Soviets have  used the  Jewish tombstones to built a granite steps for a rather steep hill in downtown Vilnius leading to the Palace of Trade Unions which was a symbolic structure of the „Socialist Paradise“.  Also, in 1955  a Lithuanian Jewish Member of Israel‘s Parliament together with a former director of the post-War Jewish museum in Vilnius Mr Gutkovitch wrote to the Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of Lithuania Comrade Paleckis about the ancient Jewish cemetary in Vilnius being vandalized and asking to help to transfer the remnants of a prominent Jewish scholar called the Vilna Gaon to Israel.
Of no effect whatsoever.
That may sound like a metaphor, but this is a fact that, in the center of Vilnius, thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people stepped on the Jewish names, still visible then on the stone, during the second half of XX century, and nobody did care, at least no one did rise a voice publicly till the very end of the century. Like so many things under the Soviets, I believe, this destruction of remnants of Jewish Heritage was going on not because of some evil attitude and vicious anti-Semitism (though we had a portion of that too), but more likely due to pragmatic or beaurocratic decision-making on various levels, pure chance and indifference. By the way, in the port city of Klaipeda (or Memel) the tombstones from the old German cemetery were used as a construction material too. And plundering of the whole cultural heritage, of Ortodox Icons, of silverware of Church institutions, of parchment documents from the Chancellary of the Grand Dutchy of Lithuania, and not only that of the Jewish heritage, was going on across the USSR till the last days of the Communist Empire.
And in the Jewish museum in Vilnius even a more shocking example is on the show of how the Jewish tombstones were put to  use after the war.   
This is a tombstone with Hebrew letters still visible which was put to use as a millstone, and it was appropriated at his farm  by an individual, who during the war was shooting and robbing his Jewish neigbours. 
It is also symbolic that during the  so called Socialist Reconstruction of Vilnius after the WWII, the ruins of the Great Vilna Synagogue of XVIII c. were leveled to the ground. So, the Soviets have almost finished the work the Nazis were able to accomplish with rare exceptions. The only remaining artifact known, Tora Shield in gold and silver with Ten God‘s Commandments from the Great Synagogue put as a detail in his painting by Marc Chagall, whhile he was visiting Vilnius in 1935, was turned into  an exhibit of the Vilnius Museum of Atheism under the Communist regime. Churches and synagogues and monasteries across the country were quite often turned into storehouses, or the factories have been installed there.  
It is worth to mention, that a number of  Jewish writers and painters of Vilnius, who survived Holocaust (such as artists Raphail Chvolles and Moshe Rosenthal and  Samuel Bak) had to leave the country after the WWII. The loss of creative potential was still another of the losses the Jewish Community of Lithuania had to suffer while already dramatically diminished.
It is in the character of the Regime, that Vilna Jewish museum, which was re-established in 1944 by the surviving Vilna Ghetto intelectuals -- Shmerke Kacherginski, Abraham Sutzkever, Lazer Ran, Jankel Gutkovitch, Shloime Beilis and others --  was shut down after five years. This  was a part of the so called anti -Cosmopolitan compaign conducted from Moscow. Almost at the same time the last remaining Yiddish speaking kindergartens were closed.  Such was a wish of working masses in the language of the officialdom. I was, by the way, in one of these in my native city of Kaunas, and I remember how I suddenly found myself, as a matter -of –fact, overnight in a Lithuanian-speaking kindergarten. 
So, this wish of working masses  is probably one of the reasons I happen to be a writer in Lithuanian language today. The Holocaust which made the traditional Yiddish penmanship and authorship and readership dissapear, and the Soviets, who were a historical force to choose for me my medium of expression used predominantly by myself from very early years on, have shaped me, I believe, into a writer with Lithuanian-language medium. 
The younger generations, as I‘ve said, were being raised anaware of the Jewish contribution to Lithuanian history and of the Nazi rasism, which led to Holocaust. These subjects were never publicly addressed under the Soviets. Moreover the anti-Judaic prejudices and anti-Semitic cliches were being employed from time to time by the authorities across the USSR up until Grobachev‘s Glasnostj. These were being disseminated under the disguise of  anti-Zionism, anti-Capitalism, anti-Imperialism and adorned by drawings and comments that you could think were copied from Der Sturmer.
The Jewish past was annihilated, the Jewish future faced extinction too. 
Just around twenty- something thousand  Jews were residing in Lithuania in the sixties out of the 250 thousand-strong Community just before the WWII. Besides, the make up of the Community has irreversibly changed and this was more and more Russian speaking community due to the influx of newcomers from the East with no ties to -- or recollections - of a pre-War Lithuania.. However, against all odds, Lithuania has enjoyed an amateurish theatre, and song and dance collectives all the time under the Soviets being the only of Soviet "republics" which was somehow allowed to engage in Jewish artistic activity (Allowances in this respect for the Stalin's child-the Jewish Autonomous region of Birobidjan in the Soviet Far-East came under last President of the USSR Gorbachev. There was also a region's weekly Birobidjaner Stern, and a literary magazine in Moscow Sovietish Heimland -- all in Sovietisized Yiddish with hebraisms checked out.)The books of fiction and memoirs by several remaining Lithuanian –Jewish writers, of Kanovitch,  Meras or Rolnikaite (the latter two have survived Holocaust in Lithuania) were published and created emphaty with the victims of Holocaust. However, this didn‘t add to the more comprehensive understanding of what had happened as fiction or documentary publications in this field weren't supported by educational networks. The same can be said about historical or archival research – results were of not much use in education as no free public discourse on the subject was possible. Archival facts and documents were used selectively by the government and historical data was tailored to serve the Communist politics and ideology.****
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****A report by now is available in the archives of Lithuanian Center of Genocide by the Head of Lithuania's KGB , General Petkevichus, of December 1978 to the CP Central Committee, where he explains how his institution was able to pit against each other the "Zionist circles and Lithuanian nationalists in the US" by feeding Holocaust documents from Lithuanian archives (on which KGB's had a monopoly) to some historians in Israel and US press.
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So, there is a number of reasons why Lithuania was unprepared to face substantial problems arising from its totalitarian past and its Jewish history in  the first years of Independence. As I‘ve said above, the lack of open dialogue between the Jews and Lithuanians, both in the pre-War and, particularly, in post-War  Lithuania, was one of the reasons why there was quite a number of sore points by the end of XX century in the field of Lithuanian-Jewish relations.***** This was affecting  Lithuania‘s international standing too. Later, the apologies and expressions of regret and remorse and even of shame by Lithuanian leaders, mentioning the involvement of local population in the Genocide of Lithuanian Jewry become a kind of repetitive tradition., (The most important was the speech by Lithuanian President Brazauskas by the end of the last century at Israel‘s Knesset, which received a standing ovation, and which I was proud to ghost-write for him, Unfortunately, Unfotunately, Mr Brazauskas was met back home by a hostile Lithuanian media, which was still – more than fifty years after the Holocaust in Lithuania – unenlighted about the grim facts of the Nazi occupation or still just under a spell of ethnocentric mithology.) 
During the years of Perestroika when winds of change where blowing my brother Emmanuel, a Postgraduate student at the Vilnius U-ty, and I, have put together an exhibition of Lithuanian Jewish Art which opened in Kaunas‘ Churlionis museum. A State TV showed an extended documentary which presented the show while visited by the leaders of Central Committee of Lithuania‘s Communist party walking down the museum halls and stopping and asking all kinds of questions about the paintings,  artifacts, personalities.  This exhibition was the first since the twenties in USSR and first in the post-World War II Lithuania. The two volumes of a Guest book was filled with expressions of gratitude written in  quite a dozen of languages. Rumours have reached Central Asia. Families traveled from as far as Tadjikistan to see the so called Jewish Exhibition. This was Gorbachev‘s Glasnost in the making, though the guys from the notorious KGB where still making shots at us with their cameras from their black volgas. Nevertheless the goal was achieved: the wide Lithuanian public has heard and, most importantly, seen the proofs that there is enough of serious stuff available  to  re-reestablish  the Jewish Museum in Vilnius once again. Around this time a gathering of some two hundred Jewish himanitarians and cultural activists in Vilnius announced re-establishment of the Jewish Community in its present form and presented a request to the Government to re-open the State Jewish Museum of Lithuania.  
In 1989  the Jewish Museum of Lithuania has been re-opened and soon the Jewish Community of Lithuania has anounced its coming into being.
It was not all roses even during the Gorbatchev‘s Glasnostj and Perestroika. The official suspiciousness of Jewish culture still existed among the ranks of Moscow's Soviet nomenklatura and later in summer of  1990 the Foreign Ministry of USSR, still in charge, refused visas for almost two hundred international scholars from USA, Israel and other countries, who aplied for participation in the conference „Vilna --Jerusalem of Lithuania as a historical center of Jewish Culture“ .
 The Conference was transfered to New-York.
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* * * ** Identical observation of how the Communist totalitarianism in Poland was detrimental to Polish-Jewish relations due to the impossibility of free discourse on the subject during the most of II-nd half of XX century was shared by Polish movie producer Dariusz Jablonski in an interview with the Tablet weekly on the occassion of the opening of his production "Poklosie" ("Aftermath", dir. Wladislaw Pasikowski) in USA. See: Tablet,  28.10.2013

Several instances of the educational activity about the Jewish past today

The most important branches of Lithuania’s Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum today are the Holocaust exhibition and the Tolerance Center established in the former Jewish Drama Theatre. The Jewish Cultural history is displayed here, together with a technically advanced exhibition about the children in Holocaust. While we try here to present the facts and topics of Jewish past the modern generations scarcely heard about, we also try to use the model of Jewish history promoting Tolerance and the rights of minorities. It was there that we've exhibited the drawings of the children of Darfur. It was to this place that I have invited Lithuanian Nationalists who are marching with skinheads and neo-Nazis on Lithuania’s Independence day and filmed their visit and our discussion. (The short film I hope will serve as an instrument at our Tolerance education workshops in the future.) 
As the memories of the Nazi and Soviet rule are unavoidably intertwined by the chronology of Lithuania’s history,  a year ago a plague near the prison were Menachem Begin, the future Nobel Peace Laureate and the Prime minister of Israel was an inmate, was unveiled and it informs that he was  imprisoned in Vilnius during the First Soviet Occupation. The partners in this project were the Prime-minister’s office, Vilna Gaon State Jewish museum and the Menachem Begin Foundation in Israel.
At the former villa of Lithuania‘s most famous Jewish industrialist Chaim Frenkel, in the northern city of Shauliai, annual music festivals are conducted for 9 years already. The villa also hosts an Ethnography museum, which owns a considerable collection of photographs of Lithuania‘s pre-WWII Jewish life.
I could name quite a number of other events and commemorations restoring the Jewish part of Lithuania‘s history. The Feierlach, the song and dance ansamble of Jewish youth perform not only inside the facilities of the Community, but on Vilnius city festivals  and international events, a proffessional Lithuanian quire Young Music in Vilnius performs songs in Yiddish including Vilna, Vilna unser Heimstot too;  and the annual event Spring of Poetry last May for the first time included the recitals of Yiddish poetry, mainly, Abraham Sutzkever's, read in original by Lithuanian poets on a narrow square among Soviet-period multiapartment  buildings where the Vilna Gaon bust in stone has found its place now. The Vilnius Municipality is drawing up the project how to mark a place where the Great Vilna Synagogue once stood. The Yiddish studies at the Vilnius University each summer host students of Yiddish from all over the world. A great many other events could be listed here, however no one it seems harbours any illussions that Yiddish can be reborn as a live street language in Vilnius. 
Vilna is no more, and the most impressive, I fathom, romance to the vanished city can be found in the inscription of the Yiddish writer from Vilnius Chaim Grade's tombstone in New York. 
Our Yiddish of poetry and of a fish market, of philosophy and a daily paper is put to rest in the killing fields of Lithuania and Poland..
I need just to mentione, pasingly, that in each years calendars, Lithuanian‘s have 3 Holocaust Commemoration days. This is the Day of the Liquidation of Vilna Ghetto, the UN Holocaust day and Israel‘s Yom hashoa -- the day of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. And each fall the renewed list of Righeous Gentiles is presented by the State Jewish Museum to the President, who awards the Crosses of Saving Life in a solemnn ceremony in Presidential Palace.
I'd trade all that of course for one live Jewish fish-market on the banks of the river Neris, with its nproverbs and shouts and verbal exchange, but this is just a wish of a fiction writer!
I need to stop here since I‘m afraid I‘m starting to sound like Lithuania in Your Pocket which is available nowadays  on AirLithuania. 

Now,  to conclude,  just a  few words about  our  new projects 
Due to the letters, inquiries and donations of art objects reaching us from US and Europe, we understand over there that this a ripe time to establish, also, a proffessional Art and Culture Museum of Lithuanian Jews – the Litvaks -- in Vilnius. 
To paraphrase the known talmudic saying: „if not now-when, if not us-whom“, and I‘d like to add, „if not here-where?One of the branches of Jewish museum in Vilnius, a former Hebrew Gymnasium, which is a huge Tsars‘ time downtown building, is being allocated to this. It has enough space to host art and memorabilia of the important Lithuanian Jewish artists and public figures naming floors and halls in their name or after our donors. A long-term investment plan for this Center is already presented to Lithuanian Government. 

Kollegen und Kollegin,
on a personal side I feel prompted to share with you that during all these endeavours, trials and tribulations I’ve somehow managed to write and publish 8 books, which are three collections of poems, a short story collection and four novels,  and a play which was staged in an Academical Drama Theatre.  All of them, in one or other way unavoidably deal with my cultural background with my sensibilities, which, well, could be defined, as I've mentioned above, as both Jewish and Lithuanian. Creative writing was never a hobby, I always saw it as my only true vocation. However, it was somehow unavoidable in Lithuania, a country  in transition, to put much of my energy in the practical initiatives, mentioned above. As my Grandmother once told me, her Grandfather and my Grand -Grand- Grand-dad Abraham Chaim Singer from the Eastern Lithuania, a rabbi and a Hallakha scholar used to say first thing in the morning almost two centuries ago: 
“The day is short, and so much work!”  
If you allow me I’l finnish this talk with a translation from  of a short poem of mine, written some twenty years ago when we were discovering with our eyes wide open all the horrors of the past and also all the things bright and awesome which were to carry us into the future. 

Ode to the Wastepaper Basket
I write and toss it in the wastepaper basket.
The wads of paper remind me of snow flakes when
I was a kid. There is no greater miracle than the first snow.
Even if it is a used poem. From snow flakes
You can make a snowman, you can ride a sled
Across a field of history. Snow to the past,
My poems. Even though there were more useless works.
Translated by Scott Rollins
Lithuania quarterly. U-ty at Chicago, Spring, 2000

So, what I can tell in conclusssion?.. 
In view of what History had in store for our fathers and forefathers we may thank our fate for still being here despite all odds. 
Mir Seinen Do, as the saying in Yiddish goes — „We are here“ -- and we‘re working towards tomorrow. 
History is pressing us in the back, figuratively speaking, and Future - on our chest. 
We could become a flat tire!.. lost by the dusty road of History! 
However, we're working to bridge it.

Copyright: Markas Zingeris, 2013