Where is vilna lithuania

In one of them, Koreli "Holy Purity" , many guest speakers addressed the congregation, including the young activist Dr. Shmaryahu Levin and the historian Simon Dubnow. At the beginning of the 20th century, Vilna had hundreds of Jewish educational institutions, most of them cheders torah school for young children , in which some 13, children studied. These included state schools for Jews, a Jewish vocational school, and a beit midrash for rabbis that became a teacher training institute. In , the "Association to Disseminate Education" established three schools — one for boys, one for girls, and one mixed — whose language of instruction was Yiddish.

That same year, Dr. Epstein established the Vilna Hebrew Gymnasium high school , later renamed after its founder. The informal Jewish educational system included dozens of literature, drama, music, industrial arts, choir and other courses.

Charity and aid associations employed dozens of physicians and supported religious activities, the poor, the soup kitchen, recuperation activities for children, and burials. After receiving its privilegium in , the Jewish community in Vilna began functioning in an organized manner.

Led by the annually elected kahal community board , it subsequently assumed responsibility for several neighboring smaller communities. Its leaders were responsible for coordinating all welfare activities, including overseeing the allotment of weekly stipends to the needy, paying wet nurses to care for orphaned babies, paying burial costs for indigent families, and distributing Passover food.

Special sources of income were designated to finance these activities and kept separate from general communal funds, enabling the welfare system to function even when the communal treasury was depleted.

The best-known representative of this school was Eliyahu ben Shelomoh Zalman , the Gaon of Vilna —; known as Gra, from Gaon Rabbi Eliyahu , whose influence on the Lithuanian method of Torah study was crucial.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the Jewish community of Vilna was one of the first and most important centers of resistance to the Hasidic movement. The position was eliminated in due to differences of opinion on the nature of the position and the character traits desired in an ideal candidate.

During the nineteenth century, Vilna experienced a renaissance, with the city again becoming an important political and economic center. Its status was reflected in the construction of new neighborhoods and in such modernization efforts as telegraph and telephone networks ; ; railway connections ; the creation of a municipal sewage system ; and the establishment of an electric power-generating station After recovering from the Napoleonic conquest of the region, Vilna experienced accelerated demographic growth.

Many young Jews envisioned a future in Vilna, as the city had already become one of the most important educational, cultural, and political centers in Eastern Europe. At the same time, the Jewish population suffered under repeated cholera epidemics, physical violence during the Polish rebellions of and , a heavy tax burden, and hostility on the part of some segments of the non-Jewish population. In , the Russian government abolished the institution of kahal throughout the empire, including Vilna.

Nevertheless, the authorities left the community responsible for overseeing such functions as distribution of charitable funds, burials, maintenance of the Great Synagogue, education of orphans and children of poor families, payment of taxes, and selection of conscripts for the Russian army. These tasks now became the responsibility of the Tsedakah Gedolah, which functioned as an autonomous body until , at which time Polish authorities ordered that it be merged with the new Jewish community board.

As a result of the religious dispute that had split the community during the second half of the eighteenth century, the heads of the rabbinic court served as acting communal rabbis.

The more tsedek, a rabbinic authority on halakhic questions, played a central role in the spiritual life of many members of the Jewish community.

In the absence of a chief rabbi, the status of the more tsedek increased. The city magid , or chief preacher of the community, played a unique role in Vilna. His status was close to that of the head of the rabbinical court and many considered him as the most important religious figure in the city. Until the mid-nineteenth century, the heder and the Talmud Torah were the predominant educational institutions in Vilna.

Despite the importance and centrality of the Vilna community, no outstanding yeshiva functioned until the first quarter of s. Torah study was carried out within small circles of scholars who studied independently or under the direction of well-known scholars. Ramayles, the first well-known yeshiva in Vilna, was founded in the mids and continued to operate until World War II.

In , the Yeshiva of the Forty was founded, with a third yeshiva established a little more than a decade later. Alongside these well-known yeshivas, smaller centers of learning operated in various houses of study throughout the city.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century, Vilna was one of the most important centers of the Haskalah movement in Eastern Europe. In its earliest stages, the Vilna Haskalah arose spontaneously, supported by local merchant families such as the Rosenthals, the Klatzkos, the Blochs, and the Katzenellenbogens. The impressive response in to the establishment of a modern school with more than students enrolling in just three months attests to the internalization of the maskilic worldview among various circles in the city.

Taxes We cannot provide taxation figures and information for earlier times as there is no documentation. In , the Christians alone paid 1. In certain situations e. It was obliged to provide soldiers numbers in relation to population of the whole Duchy and contribute financially to the upkeep of the army. Moreover, it had to provide board and lodging for any army stationed in its precincts and support the city garrison needed for the protection of itself. Normally, the army camped on the outskirts of the city and only entered it at times of danger.

It was the city responsibility to provide, not only, food and accommodation for the royal army and their horses but even arms, bullets and money. Up until , the city was also responsible for the provision of horses and carriages for members of the Royal court, voivodes and other dignitaries. More stressful was the provision of accommodation. Housing had to be found for royal courtiers, ministers to the Seym, ambassadors and other foreign officials, court staff, various commissions, royal dispatchers etc.

Over the years, these duties took on an ever-changing aspect or completely changed until they became what they are today.

Below the income and expenditure for the three years the first year of independent rule , and Before we provide you with these figures let us mention the various taxes, unknown elsewhere but levied on Wilno alone. Gate tax - established by King Aleksander in Tax on food products, timber and hay brought into the city. This tax was used, primarily, for the upkeep of the city gate guards. Each wagon paid a grosz.

Carts paid 1 grosz equivalent of 3 today and this was used to build and maintain the roads. In , both the above taxes were increased. This meant grosz was charged for a horse, 5 grosz for a head of cattle and 3 grosz for a sheep or other. From till the prices dropped slightly and then increased to 5 kopec for a horse. Moreover, a tax was levied on those which had previously been exempt. In , a new tariff was created and 15 kopecs were charged per horse.

Finally in , several articles which had earlier been exempt were levied. In it was incorporated into the gate and road tax. The last two were paid by vendors selling food products and other small articles on markets, streets and courtyards. This tax was levied on imported and local alcoholic beverages the proceeds of which went to the treasury. This state of affairs remained until Decrees passed in and changed this and the tax became twofold, tax on imported alcohol and excise duty on the locally produced.

Butchers pay 30 kopecs for every heed of cattle and 5 kopecs per sheep and other smaller animals. Some income is an approximation and some depends on the competition during auctions.

Income from resources belonging to the city:1 properties and inns rented out on fixed time basis. Liba Mahrshak fought as a partisan from the Vilna ghetto. She met her late husband, David Augenfeld, also a partisan, and eventually came to Montreal with daughter Rivkah in It was part of the central Yiddish school organization.

Later on, my father was appointed as the head of the school named for Liza Gurevich, and my mother returned to school and became a certified nurse.

She was a nurse until the German army entered Vilna. I studied in the elementary school named after Sofia Gurevich. It may sound ironic, but we finished our matriculation examination one-day before Germany attacked the Soviet Union. The graduating class of the Jewish gymnasiya for the sciences in Vilna Real with their teachers On Sunday morning, the 22nd of June, the first bombs fell in Vilna.

At that point, we were still preparing for our graduation ball that for us symbolized the end of a chapter in our life and a new beginning.

This new beginning came, but it was not what we had expected. The minute that Germans entered Vilna, they started kidnapping Jews in the street and staged pogroms in different parts of the city, like Snipisiuk and Novgorod.. There was a most awful pogrom in the heart of the Jewish neighborhood. The epic of this pre-ghetto period was when the Nazis cleared the streets Straszuna, Shavlaska, Rodnitska, Yatkova, Glaser, and others, of all Jews.

Some were transferred and others killed. Out of these streets they started making a ghetto, including Glazer, Yatkovka, Jewish Streets. Ultimately, the streets Straszuna, Shavlaska, Disinienska, Svetlana, and part of Rodnitska all became part of the big ghetto, or First Ghetto. A drawing showing part of the Vilnius Vilna ghetto. An arrow in the lower right corner indicates the hiding place of the headquarters of the FPO United Partisans Organization Jewish underground.

Much has already been written about orders and rules that took all rights from the Jews, so I will not dwell upon them. I myself started working at the children's home, which was really an orphanage. Where did these children come from? The first ones arrived from an orphanage in town - all the Jewish children who had lived there were expelled. Let me give you a short history of the place. When the Soviets came to Vilna in , they united all the orphanages in town, and all the Jewish children were moved to one orphanage.

As soon as German conquered Vilna, they did the opposite: they made the general orphanage Jew-free, which is why many Jewish orphans arrived in the hospital. In the confusing days that the ghetto was first established, there was nowhere for them to go and nobody to take care of them.

The children were pushed into two rooms at the edge of the building, in what used to be the department of infectious disease, and they were practically left there all alone. I felt bad for the children and started working in the hospital, or, as it was known, Zlubek.

A teacher on the staff of a Jewish orphanage in Vilnius playing chess with one of the residents. I soon found out that my friends who worked there for two days could not stand it and escaped from there.

I was tempted to do the same but my father talked to me and convinced me to keep working there, saying it was better than washing floors for Germans. He said I was doing a much better deed by washing the floors for orphaned Jewish children.

He was right, however what I first saw when I came there was impossible to describe, the sight will never leave me. The children lay in beds without mattresses or pillows; they didn't even have hay-sacks.

Six children lay vertically crammed into each bed; they did not have any sheets but only some green vinyl material. They didn't even have any rags. They lay for hours in absolute filth in their own excrement. They would stay like this until someone would come and wash them. But even this did not last long, as one would encounter the same picture a few hours later. I was only eighteen, but I forced myself to return each day. In order to work at this type of job for eight hours a day you really needed strong willpower.

The children would scream continuously every time we took them to wash or move them to clean the place. After some time, it was as if we did nothing - everything returned to the same disarray anyway. Everyone who has been to the Jewish hospital in Zemlanka street knows that the main entrance was closed off by a impenetrable fence during the war years, since from there, one could leave the ghetto.

So now the entrance was in the gate on Spetlina Street. At the entrance to the gate, on the right, was the pathology ward. On the left was a big hall. This hall was now given to us for the orphanage. Slowly, we cleaned the place: beds were brought in, and sheets, and nurses and teachers started working there, and the children received some rudimentary treatment. Due to the horrible condition that the children experienced during the first weeks there, many had stopped talking or walking.

They became accustomed to sitting for hours in one place without moving. We put a lot of energy into getting them to say but one word, but most of our time was spent with them encouraging them to walk and act like children During the entire time of the existence of the ghetto, which was two years, we were never able to bring them to a stage of childhood normal for their age.

After a few months, the children were moved again. This time, it was a large and comfortable building in Zvelana Street. I don't remember the number, but I recall that when we came from Svitalna Street, the building number was 3. This building was once the syagogue of Rabbi Shaulke. This Beit midrash where the stage had stood now was the dinging hall, and the place where the children played and studied.

In the synagogue area, where the women used to sit, we arranged a sleeping room for girls. The boys slept in smaller rooms to the side. Life began to take on a dubious sort of order. All the children started attending schools in the ghetto and the little children had nursery school teachers inside the institution. Very quickly, the core group of children enlarged.

During each action, parents would bring their children to us thinking that if they would survive the action they would take the children back.

Sadly, only rarely did the parents survived. I saw many heart-tearing moments when the little children would run after the parents screaming but, to our great sorrow, we could in no way aid this situation. It was here that I met Zlata, the wife of Yehiel Borgin. She started working there while she was still on the Aryan side. But when living on the Aryan side became very perilous, she moved into the ghetto. Here, she encountered very difficult conditions. They took from us all the children over 14 and we were left with the younger children.

I don't want to give a detailed account of daily life in the ghetto. This, too, is something that much has been written about. I will say that I lived in a very crowded condition among those friends and comrades who had survived the actions.

As I mentioned before, we only recently had graduated, so we were very close to each other and made sure to meet every night. We knew to detail whatever was occurring with each one of our friends. Together, we went to literary meetings in the ghetto, and sometimes we even went to concerts.

We hardly met any new people. We did not try. Life continued like this until we found out that there was a resistance movement in the ghetto - the FPO - and many of us joined this movement. This was a period when morally our spirits lifted and we were excited to be part of a resistance, despite the horrible conditions in the ghetto.

This commitment to resist and be part of a movement gave us support and enabled us to survive the impossible conditions. In spite of the fact that many of my friends belonged to the FPO, we never talked about it amongst ourselves because we did not know who was a member and who was not. We could only assume that some one else in the group was a member. During the onset of the FPO, everything was underground, and people never met in large number, although there was an occasion when many of us sat in a room, and suddenly people stood up and went in different directions, nobody knew where they went.

We met in small groups of five to exchange information or participate in missions. When I first came and asked to join the movement as a member, I had to come for an interview with the members of the headquarters, whom I did not know.

I was very excited; I don't know if I can truly describe the feelings I had; I was 18 years old. With my friends, I expressed very articulately the importance of resistance to the occupiers, but here, I had to talk to strangers, and convince them that I was worthy of being a FPO member.

It's hard for me to now remember the details of the conversation, although I remember that after many months, I met Josef Glasman, one of the leaders, and he told me that after I spoke his heart broke and he cried like a child. In Vilna, we heard the details of the revolt of the Warsaw ghetto, and we imagined that soon enough this would be our fate, and we would fall in battle in the Vilna ghetto.

Dated July 1, and written in Yiddish, it calls for armed resistance against the Germans. On July 16, , during the night I worked at the orphanage. Every third night, I would stay there. When you took the job, it was mandatory that you stay there for twenty-four hours. I was awake. Actually, in the ghetto, even while you slept, it seems as if you always had one eye open to make sure that nothing awful was happening.

For me, especially, with the responsibility of all these children, I could not sleep. Around midnight, I heard someone running on the outside steps. Since it was a summer night and it was very light, when I looked I immediately recognized little Bashka, a member of a Zionist Socialist Movement Hashomer Hatzair. Bashkale, whose last name I do not remember now, was killed after her escape to the forest.

She was a member of the partisan unit named for Prachomenko. They say that she was killed by friendly fire when one of the partisans cleaned his weapon.

Back in July , she was a dedicated contact for the FPO. I understood that something was occurring in the ghetto but did not know what. The orders were that in any case of instability, I must come to a meeting place of the FPO.

But how could I leave the orphanage at an hour when I was the only responsible adult and the whole orphanage was under my care! I could not decide what to do. Luckily, after some time, the head of the institution entered - Manya Levi. She was a wonderful person. Before being a teacher in Vilna, she had spent many years abroad. I knew her well because she had been a good friend of my mothers. They had studied together in the same grade of the gymnaisium.

Now she lived in an orphanage. As she neither married nor had children, she put all her love and toil into taking care of the children. When she walked through the rooms they hugged her and held on to her, following her out of their great love.

When she entered the room where I was, I was ready to take my uniform off and run. Before leaving, I said, "I must go. I will stay here and watch the children. I left and quickly walked to Nemiacka Street 31, the place we had decided ahead of time would be our meeting.

On the way there, i met a runner who had been sent to me. He told me that the code world for the FPO was 'liza is calling. This was chosen to memorialize Lisa Magon, who was with the partisans and killed on a mission to the Arian side.

This code word indicated that everyone meet at a certain place. I now understand that the real meeting place was at Straszuna 6. I arrived there and met others but nobody seemed to know what had occurred.

Then we had to go to the alley on Oshmni 8, where the headquarters of FPO stayed. Some other comrades waited in the yard of the library. We stood in the yard for a few hours. Sometime in the morning I was given a paper with a song lyric on it: "Do not say that this is my last road.

We did not know if the mass number of ghetto residents would revolt with us or give up and not fight. We believed that the Germans would enter at any moment.

I don't have to tell you know these tragic events concluded. Wittenberg was supposed to give himself over to the Gestapo, and not by the orders the FPO but by orders of the main headquarter in town. After we spoke and argued for a while, we saw Wittenberg leave the ghetto to give himself up. The next day he was dead. The week to follow was filled with nervousness. It was a week of painful guilt and heartbreak. The depression and hopelessness was hard to endure.

It became clear to us that a big group of Jews who were members of the underground had become exposed to the Germans during this event and they must leave the ghetto. Since it was large amounts of members of the resistance they started arguing about who should leave from each party, how many should go and so on. The first group to leave the ghetto left on July 24, but David will tell about that since he was with this group and he is amongst the very few who are still alive today and can tell the exact details.

The next day, we were all filled with fear. On the second day, we learned the awful news that the Germans lay in wait for them. The Germans found some of their IDs, so they collected all the family members of the people who's IDs they found and killed them. In the ghetto I was registered as the wife of a classmate who was in this group. When I arrived at work the next day, not knowing what had happened, I found my friend looking at me with a horrified stare.

The Gestapo had found the ID of my friend, and they were sure that I had been shot. It was only a miracle that I was not shot that night. There were two reasons as to why I was spared. It was easy to skip me on the list. Father was able to arrange for me a new ID, but this cost a lot of money, so now next to my real name they wrote that I was dead.

I received a different identity. The few months between the time the first group left the ghetto and the time it was liquidated were filled with anxiety. Jews from the region were being transferred to the ghetto and from there many of them were sent to Estonia, and on September 1st, the ghetto was surrounded, and they started kidnapping people and sending them to Estonia. The Jerusalem of Lithuania The Story of the Jewish Community of Vilna Overview On the eve of the Shoah the Jewish community of Vilna was the spiritual centre of Eastern European Jewry, the centre of enlightenment and Jewish political life, of Jewish creativity and the experience of daily Jewish life, a community bursting with cultural and religious life, movements and parties, educational institutions, libraries and theatres; a community of rabbis and gifted Talmudic scholars, intellectuals, poets, authors, artists, craftspeople and educators.

This exhibition presents episodes from Vilna's history. We would like to thank Dr.