Deputy Director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum

Rachel Kostanian, Deputy Director of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum

Vilnius, 7th of October 2005

An update of the Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum for its activities in particular of the last years

The Vilna Gaon Jewish State Museum is under the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, which also finances it. However, because of the generous support of the museum’s friends from all over the world, it is possible to maintain the whole work and to fulfil our projects: new exhibitions, new books, etc. The number of staff involved in this process is twenty-two. The museum has a new director since August 3, 2005 – Markas Zingeris, a well-known author with museum work experience. We have also changes in the position of a scientific secretary. As for new parts, look at our last section.

Education ▪ Books The museum’s main goal is to keep the Memory of our people and in order to do that, carry out research, that is preserve and publicize in the form of books, exhibitions, films, the history and culture, material and spiritual evidence of the Jewish life in Lithuania. The result is that the museum has prepared and published 30 books on Jewish history and culture in Lithuania and among them 19 books on the Holocaust, some listed below:

a) The first almanac, most of it - about the Holocaust; the second – dedicated to the Holocaust; the third – Jewish history, Holocaust, the Jewish heritage, etc.

b) The Vilnius ghetto – 2 books (in Tel-Aviv, in Beit Vilne, the survivors kissed the books and their eyes were full of tears in my presence).

c) The Siauliai Ghetto – a real encyclopaedia, which was highly evaluated by Prof. L. Truska, the leading historian on the Holocaust here in Lithuania who said, that by this book the museum proved its essential development in the field of research. It also got an excellent evaluation from the US Holocaust Museum in Washington and other readership. (known professors, artists, etc. The same was said about the previous two books.

d) Holocaust in Trakai and Trakai area, sold out already, in one month; with very good reviews;

e) The labour camp HKP – people still come to look into it for the sake of their relatives and history; a thorough study of the last camps in Vilnius to July 1944. The HKP – Heereskraftfahrpark – was a German camp for Jews to repair their military equipment.

f) Holocaust in Birzai (it was published in Israel, at the Hebrew University);

g) Three volumes of “Hands bringing life and bread” – parts of the future encyclopaedia about the Rescuers of Jews.

h) Spiritual Resistance in the Vilna Ghetto, with forewords of Sir Martin Gilbert, Prof. D. Katz, Prof. S. Suziedelis.

i) Shoah – 2 volumes with foreword of Prof. S. Suziedelis.

1 j) The diary of K. Sakowicz – a book about Ponar, compiled by R. Margolis during her work in the museum. The bestseller during the book fair in Berlin in 2004, published in Polish and German;

k) Jewish Life in Lithuania – a book catalogue to our historical exhibition “Jewish Life in Lithuania from the 14th to the 20th C.”; can be used as a separate book;

l) J. Levinson “The book of Sorrow”, about all places of mass murder in Lithuania with pictures of the memorial places and dates and figures on them;

m) Bibliographical index “Jewish theme in Lithuanian press 1985 – 1989” and “… 1990 – 1991” – two volumes. The next one is ready to be printed;

The main authors and compilers are Irina Guzenberg and Dalia Epstein and these are the 19 books.

Now we have in print a big volume “The Vilna Ghetto posters”; “The Svencionys and other small ghettos”. We have also recently published a guidebook in English on 100 memorial places of Jewish history in Vilnius.

Education by word The museum staff is active every day in guiding and lecturing to schools, visitors, VIPs, also writing reports for academic conferences in Lithuania and abroad, etc. Two years ago the Department of Statistics of Lithuania announced that the Jewish museum was among the ten most attended institutions in Vilnius. Last year showed a 20% rise of visitors. This year we currently have a 30% rise.

There are two main permanent exhibitions in the museum: “The Catastrophe” and “The Vanished World”. The exhibition about the Holocaust was set up in 1991 and the number of people who got there the “Holocaust in Lithuania” story reached dozens of thousands of people.

The visitors evaluate our work as mostly important, great, professional, and very authentic, and compare it with similar best world institutions. We have thousands of such entries. Look at our website www.jmuseum.lt and appendix No 1.

Let’s Go, a travel guide, wrote to us: “We are writing from Let’s Go Publication, a leading budget travel guide, to commend your establishment for its excellent service to our readers. Your establishment was selected as one among the best in its area.”

Education behind the walls of the museums From the first day of our existence we tried to get schools to visit us on a regular basis. Already in 1989–1990 Mark Zingeris wrote an essay on this topic for schools asked by the Ministry of Education in response to our request. The public is not ready to take this barrier. But later, on the museum’s initiative, Lithuanian schools started to visit us – not only from Vilnius, but from other places as well.

Then we thought it is time to go to the public. And we launched our first external educational program and brought the “Anne Frank” exhibition from Anne Frank House, Amsterdam. It was opened in Vilnius, Kaunas, Siauliai, Panevezys, and more than ten other venues. This cultural and educational program consisted of a drama play “Dreams of Anne Frank” performed by the Lithuanian and Jewish pupils, staged by a young producer from England; the workshops “Education through drama” lasted for a half a year. These activities resulted in seminars, a video film, “Opening up”, and its manual. The museum will distribute to Lithuanian schools 400 videos and manuals. We thank here our volunteers from Austria and Ruta Puisyte, our scientific secretary. 2 Our next project, also with support of the “Anne Frank House”, gave birth to a quite comprehensive historic exhibition – “Jewish Life in Lithuania” 14th-20th C. followed by a beautiful book-catalogue and two video films. The curator and spirit behind it is R. Puisyte and N. Hinterleitner from the Anne Frank House. We did it together with the History Institute of Lithuania and some other organizations. The travelling exhibition went around the country and abroad and was exhibited in 17 venues. The museum is working with the project partners up to now. An opening of the exhibition and a teacher-training seminar were organized in every venue. More than 700 copies of the exhibition catalogue “Jewish Life in Lithuania” and 400 videos of “Surviving Ostland” were distributed to teachers, schools and regional education departments as a teaching material.

Our exhibitions on “Lithuanian Synagogues”, “The Vilna Ghetto Posters”, not mentioning those already indicated or having been established, travelled to Washington DC, Brussels, Padua, Strasbourg, Geneva and the like. The impact of it and the lessons acquired from it are reflected in the visitors’ entries in the book, like the last one (there are more in the appendix and on our homepage).

“June16, 2005 […] The exhibits of the holocaust are among the finest I have seen anywhere in the world. I congratulate and thank you. Ronald Harwood (Screenwriter and Playwright of the film “The Pianist”), UK.”

Purposeful (specifically) for schools, we published a pamphlet on Chatzkel Lemchen, an outstanding Jewish- Lithuanian philologist and distributed it among 500 schools and education departments, together with 350 video films “Uncle Chatzkel” shot by R. Freedman (Australia), which we assisted. The booklet was compiled by R. Puisyte. The film won several awards at international film festivals. We have published a book on him as well. (G. Rozina and P. Pailis dedicated this 90s anniversary.)

The Rescuers’ department staff Victorija Sakaite in cooperation with the House of Memory and Genocide Centre lectured since 2002 in twenty-one schools all over Lithuania. These have often been followed by the museum’s exhibition.

The latest educational project was implemented by our volunteer from Austria this year, J. Langer. We asked him to visit schools. He did it with great enthusiasm. He prepared a good report on Tolerance, anti-Semitism and Europe. Supported by all main Embassies he attended 15 schools all around Lithuania with great success. Look at our webpage at News at www.jmuseum.lt/index.asp?DL=E&TopicID=98. The museum assisted film producer S. Berzinis in shooting ten of his films on Jewish life and heritage in Lithuania. They are shown in public.

It is over a year now that the museum strongly activated its work of the department for the Righteous Gentiles. Our Gallery for the Righteous was established ten years ago, in 1995, and has been visited by thousands of people from around the world.

We are deeply grateful to the Israel-based writer Icchokas Meras for becoming involved in the project - Rescuers of the Jews – the Righteous among the Nations”. To achieve the goals of the project we established a team. It consists of representatives of Yad Vashem, the Vilna Gaon Jewish State award April Museum and volunteers from Israel. Thanks to this project in the period from 9th of June 2004, to 25th of April 2005, forty-six people were granted the Righteous Among the Nations award. Ten of them received this during the ceremony on the 25th of May, 2005 in our Tolerance Center, and the museum donated to Mr. Barak, Head of the Constitutional Court in Israel, an authentic document from his Rescuer – memoirs about him. The third volume “Hands bringing life and bread” has just been published. The fourth volume is in work. We try to film the last surviving rescuers’ testimonies (when we find finances). The first film should be ready in a 3 few days. The premiere will take place on the 23rd of September, on the day of the Holocaust in Lithuania. Our cooperation with Yad Vashem is indispensable. For this work we thank the head of the department Dana Selcinskaja.

The museum became a place for studies: Jaarit Glezer, Israeli educator, used to bring her students to the “Green House” and they worked here on our material for a couple of days every year. As did other educators like Prof. C.Z. Leiman, or Prof. Zvi Gitelman, Mordechai Zalkin and others. Also student groups gathered in Moscow come here every year under the Sochnut leadership. Scientists from abroad send us their books for consultations, like the US Holocaust Museum to I. Guzenberg, Prof. Taiz to R. Kostanian.

Recently we started a common project with a Vilnius gymnasium (school?) about Jews, the war, etc. Despite not having enough human or financial resources we indeed do what we can and even more.

The newest exhibitions Finally we cannot miss the most important: the beautiful restoration of the former pre-war Jewish “Philharmonic” on Naugarduko 10. For this impossible task we can thank our long time director, Emmanuel Zingeris, now MP. No one could believe this would happen, said Sir Martin Gilbert at its opening. Today its three floors are filled up with rare originals from the Great Vilna Synagogue, pre-war and wartime Jewish artists – like Ch. Persikovicz, Arbit-Blatt, Mane Katz, Esther Lurje, Samuel Bak, Jacques Lipshitz (plus a video on him), Raphael Chvoles. We show never exhibited wonderful drawings on Jewish synagogues of shtetls over Lithuania, Jewish streets and Jewish types of the twenties and thirties of the last century, performed by Gerardas Bagdanavicius. We cordially thank for that Mrs. Lorna Swartz from California.

We show wonderful wood cuts – a life-time work of Aaron Chayet from Kelme – three panels – a whole wall – presenting the famous bible story: “King Solomon’s trial”. Thanks to our art historian A. Niunkaite we know the story. We exhibit rare religious objects and artefacts and a couple of weeks ago we opened there two exhibitions from Telsiai dedicated to the Jews in Telz (Telz or Telsiai, which housed the famous yeshiva), including a collection of rare photographs of the Jews there, done by the famous photographer Chaym Kaplanski. We got them from the Alka Museum, Telsiai. A very many of cultural and educational events take place in the museum’s Tolerance centre attended by representatives of foreign and Lithuanian cultural, educational and governmental institutions.

Acquisitions We got two wonderful paintings as a donation from Irene Zak, portraits of an old man and of a woman, painted by her father, known artist Leon Zak. As for restoration – we have recently restored an old artefact – the ladder of Ponar, used for carrying corpses of dead to be burned.

We have more information and images about our work, which can be seen on our website www.jmuseum.lt. If required, we can send it to you. If you have any other questions, you are welcome to ask.

Our postal address:

Pamenkalnio Street 12 LT-01114 Vilnius Lithuania

Email: [email protected] Tel. +370 5 2624590, +370 5 2620703, Fax. +370 5 2127083 4