First Impressions of Vilnius’s New ‘Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews’




OPINION | MUSEUMS | ARTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS

 

by Dovid Katz

The creators of Vilnius’s new Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews (MCILJ or for short — “Litvak Culture Museum”), which opened its doors last January, have rapidly earned their place of honor in the 700 or so years of Lithuanian Jewish history. They have achieved a notable advance in encapsulating — in broad outline — the scope, the breadth, and many of the contours of internal diversity of one of the world’s more intriguing and complex stateless cultures, right in the city that had for centuries been its symbolic capital. That heritage is part of the larger Ashkenazic heritage that is itself often undercredited and understudied internationally, particularly among modern Jews themselves, for whom the twin pillars of modern Israel and of modern forms of religion occasionally leave no room for the civilization of their own forebears. That it was largely annihilated in its homelands during the Holocaust makes such a task more daunting still.

The makers of this museum, by and large neither Litvaks nor scions of Litvaks, have demonstrated their professionalism in museum construction, search for objectivity, profound respect for the culture depicted, and a dogged determination to avoid irksome current conflicts attaching to Jewish issues in Eastern Europe today, not least right here in modern Lithuania. They have demonstrated an impressive will to desist, in most cases, from the (ab)use of minority studies by subtle or not so subtle state-satisfying propagandistic instrumentalization of weak minority cultures to underpin self-congratulatory state narratives (all states have them!). All the more impressive in a state-sponsored museum. In one fell swoop, this museum has put itself very high on the list of “must see” things for Jewish — and interested non-Jewish — visitors to Lithuanian’s delightful modern capital city.

First, some on-the-ground basics (and current urban lore) for those coming from afar. The Litvak Culture Museum (as we shall continue to call it for brevity), at Pylimo 4, occupies “the right half” (looking from the street) of the prewar Hebrew Tarbut school building whose “left half” is today’s official Jewish Community of Lithuania. The “museum half” (popularly called “Pylimo 4A” or even, incorrectly, “Pylimo 6”) has itself for decades been one of the museum premises of the multi-building Jewish state museum of which it continues to be part. That umbrella museum is today named the “Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History.” In other words, this building is not “new,” it has for decades housed various state Jewish museum exhibits under that umbrella. But now it has been recast, reconstituted, reconceptualized, and remade from top to bottom. It therefore duly deserves to be considered new. The vast majority of the content is indeed new, albeit in placards, panels, photographs, interactive multimedia (and multilingual) features, information stands and timelines rather than, by and large, sensational original exhibits (much of post-Holocaust, post-Soviet Eastern Europe is rather poor when it comes to those).

So, the Vilna Gaon Museum’s major addresses within the city are its de facto headquarters at Naugarduko 10 (known for years as “The Tolerance Center,” then expanding to “The Tolerance Center” + “The Samuel Bak Museum,” now: “The Samuel Bak Museum”) and the “Holocaust Exhibition” at Pamėnkalnio 12, widely known for over thirty years as “The Green House.” Because it was created entirely by the minds and hands of folks among the last generation of Litvaks who came to maturity before the annihilation on its native soil, themselves all Holocaust survivors, the Green House’s exhibitions have a sanctity for the Litvak world that is entirely distinct from other museums in the Lithuanian lands. Moreover one of its main rooms is about prewar Litvak Jewish life and culture. So let that be the first — and perhaps last — major piece of vital and constructive advice we can give. It’s no great secret in town that the Green House is slated for closing down once a replacement Holocaust exhibit/museum is set up at the acquired premises on Žemaitijos Street in the Old Town (the building of the prewar Mefítsey Haskólo library, the Vilna Ghetto era Ghetto Library).

That incredible single room in the Green House, less than a ten minute walk away, without high-tech gizmos, interactives, or IT age wizardry, represents one of Lithuania’s authentic Jewish treasures: the depiction of Litvak culture constructed within the broader tent of the same larger museum by the last exemplars of the culture themselves. There is only one honorable solution: The entire room, or more precisely, the panels from the four walls and all that stands therein, need to be transported as is, without “fixing,” with their proud inclusion of Yiddish language inscriptions, right into a room of the new museum that would ipso facto add immeasurably to visitors’ understanding in a remarkably low-cost, high-yield choice: to show the world how that was done by a group of Vilna’s last prewar Litvaks, given just one modest-size room to display their destroyed civilization. At the same time, the Vilna Gaon Museum would be honoring some of its own creators, from the late 1980s Glasnost years through to our century — Jenny Biber, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Rachel Kostanian, Joseph Levinson, Rachel Margolis, and no doubt others. Resettling that room’s exhibits, and providing them a Noah’s Ark escape from loss, in the new Litvak Culture Museum is easy, cheap, quick and — indispensable for the new museum’s cultural, intellectual, social and interethnic integrity.

Turning to the new museum under review:

The text panels and exhibits are gracefully distributed over the three main floors of exhibits. The spacious grace of the czarist-era building is retained. A modern system of “psychologically invisible” moveable and rearrangeable exhibition stands, cases, and panels provide both the needed elasticity for ongoing change and renewal, while, at the same time, not competing for attention with the exhibits they are meant to highlight (a sharp contrast with projects in town where a fortune is spent on posh designers’ own lavish displays). The charming matrix of old passageways meandering around ample stairwells is left undisturbed by the addition of a modern elevator and modestly placed interactive exhibits.

The museum’s top floor is dedicated principally to artworks by Vilna born painter Rafael Chwoles (1913-2002). It is largely self-contained, complementing the Samuel Bak wing of the museum’s Naugarduko St. headquarters, now named for him. Besides the overarching pan-human value of art, and particularly painting, the two permanent exhibitions — representing veritable coups by the museum in acquiring such substantial collections of precious originals — serve, taken together, to make original Litvak Art a long-term attraction for the charming capital of modern Lithuania. Moreover, it comes on top of a number of valuable publications on Litvak Art emanating from the city, including Vilma Gradinskaitė’s 2015 book, Litvak Art in Private Lithuanian Collections, a project enabled by the Lewben Art Foundation and Vilnius’s Jerusalem of the North NGO.

The main exhibition tells the viewer up front that Litvak civilization covers vast swaths of land beyond the borders of today’s Lithuania, linking them accurately to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It is straightforwardly explained that this museum is dedicated principally to the much smaller area that is mostly congruent with today’s Republic of Lithuania. There is then an array of exhibits, all of which represent excellent points of departure, on the understanding that corrections and improvements can be easily introduced via the plastic architecture. A prime example is the collection of cards with names of each shtetl, in Lithuanian and Yiddish, that the visitor can pick up and read, replace and look for another. This is a fine example of how thoughtful low tech can outdo the sometimes misplaced use of high tech for things that can somehow touch the human soul much more on a piece of paper with the information on this or another shtetl, nearly all of whose Jewish residents were massacred in 1941. The Yiddish names of each town are duly included (see also our own listing).

Among the major sections are: The Historical Context. Judaism. Jewish Domestic Space. Languages of Lithuanian Jews. Haskalah and Education. Politics. Shtetl. Traditional Jewish Education. Secular Jewish Literature in Lithuania. Music. Lithuanian Jews in Theatre and Cinema. Religious Art. Jewish Art. Modernity in Jewish Arts. Identity. The Influence of Jewish Religious Art on Secular Jewish Art. Migration: Across the Atlantic. Migration: The Promised Land. Litvak Musicians. Contribution of Lithuanian Jews to Lithuanian Professional Music in the Soviet Era. The Jewish Theme in Lithuanian Musical Life after 1990. Jewish Theatres in Lithuania. Lithuanian Jews in Cinema.

The material on religion needs fleshing out. There is appreciation of the Litvak/Misnagdic vs. Hasidic divergence and conflict, but not of its philosophical and theological “heart and soul” or — some of the unseemly conflicts it engendered. Moreover, future development needs to go into some depth of the rich Litvak rabbinic tradition itself, including of course the nineteenth century Mussar (“Ethics”) movement. A future section should include explanation of the specific Litvish methodology of Talmudic scholarship, the feat that played a huge role centuries ago in catapulting Lithuania, and Vilna, to its “Jerusalem of Lithuania” prominence in the first place. It will be a challenge. But it can and needs to be done, hopefully with a much more developed wall on the Gaon of Vilna.

On language: The explanation of the differences between sacred-text language Hebrew and spoken Yiddish is an excellent starting point. It needs more development, but the main corrective needed is the inclusion of Aramaic within the Internal Jewish Trilingualism of Ashkenazic Jewry. Counting individual Talmudic volumes, commentaries, and commentaries on commentaries, many thousands of books in Aramaic, mostly on Talmud and Kabbalah, were published in Vilna. Even the classic Jewish-alphabet spelling of the city’s names has the Aramaic-derived form for names of cities that have become precious to Jewish communities.

We have noted the success of the museum in avoiding Lithuanian nationalist impositions on Litvak history. The creators are to be equally credited for avoiding Jewish nationalist impositions on Litvak history! The knowledgeable visitor who has a love for the East European Jewish heritage is quietly left wondering what would have been, had the museum commissioned posh Jewish professors from America and Israel to organize things. Would there have been a bias in favor of the “great winners” of recent Jewish history: the grand Jewish success story of Israel, its modern Israeli culture and vernacular language Ivrít, which so many modern Jewish “mainstream” folks consider to have long obviated the need for thinking much, or at all, about Yiddish, Aramaic, and perhaps omitted with special vehemence, Ashkenazic Hebrew. (To this day, the great Jewish museum in Warsaw down south has not mustered the courage to correct the Israeli Polín to the Yiddish Poyln, as if there is something less-than-elegant about the authentic grand culture of East European Jewry, even on its own territory, even in projects dedicated to its preservation and memorialization on ground zero of where it thrived and where it was annihilated.)

But this museum is not an intellectual colony for the American or Israeli Jewish mainstream. That is equally true of the history of Litvak religious history. Although, much more work is needed, the religious Litvak culture of the centuries is very different from most of the branches of American, Israeli and West European Jewish religious life and thought. Future exhibits can, with wisdom and work, get more into the soul and spirit of this.

It is completely natural, and an excellent choice, that part of the museum’s core would be populated, so to speak, by two major “blocks of coverage” of the interwar period when the modernist movements and lifestyles reached their apex. One is centered on independent Lithuania, that was weighted more toward modern Hebrew, Israel and Zionism (de facto capital: Kaunas, Yiddish Kóvne, classic Ashkenazic Hebrew and Aramaic Kóvno, modern Hebrew Kóvna). The other is interwar Vilna (classic Hebrew and Aramaic Vílno, Yiddish Vílne, modern Hebrew Vílna), weighted more toward Yiddish, and political movements that followed liberalism, socialism and “here-ism” (the belief in building a minority people’s future in situ, rather than aspiring to migration to a regained ancient homeland or a dreamed-of golden Western refuge). There is some reticence here and there in making it clear that “the Vilna part” took place entirely within the then Polish Republic, and all that that implies on many fronts. The major desideratum for Vilna is a Leyzer Ran wall, that would have a wealth of images and artifacts from his three volume Jerusalem of Lithuania (N.Y. 1974), in coordination, of course, with his heirs in New York.

Again, the weakest part of both exhibits is the religious component. That is in part a reflection of the circumstance that religious life proves its creative originality very much more slowly than the dramatic innovative shock-power of new ideas, movements and cultural revolution that can occur within a lifetime, or even a small part of one lifetime, in the cultures of modernity.

Moreover, the modern movements, beyond being more dramatic and differentiated in ways immediately clear to the beholder, offer a modern East European museum the luxury of displaying cases of Jewish-Gentile contact, partnership and synthesis, not least because all of the modernizing, secularizing, Westernizing Jewish movements from the earlier nineteenth century onward featured participation in the life of the majority, right down to clothing, language and details of daily life, no matter how far left (socialist) or right (nationalist) they were. That cannot be true of a religion where huge blocks of separateness (including education, holidays, and marriage) are a very part of the lifeblood of continuity and survival in the face of emerging tolerant and multicultural societies (perversely, perhaps, sometimes a harder feat than survival during times of prejudice and persecution). That is not to say that the centuries of religious Jews’ interaction with their Gentile neighbors were a tale of only separateness. It is just that the kinds of daily interaction are now much more difficult to reconstruct.

Among the most unforgettable originals are the Torah ark doors from the Great Vilna Synagogue (in Lithuanian Yiddish: Di Greyse Shul), that had for years been kept on the top floor of Naugarduko, together with the ten commandments tablet (where they didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the building). Now they have the good fortune not only to be in a Litvak culture museum, but, thanks to the recent and ongoing archaeological excavations of the Great Synagogue (long buried under an unsightly Soviet school building), to be reunited with a huge stone slab with Hebrew writing, that was recently discovered by the current archaeological project at the Great Synagogue. The bringing back together of ark doors and a memorial slab, while not in the league of a reconstructed living synagogue back in use, and while not quite two parts of one thing, is very much at the forefront of the very logic of an in-situ museum. Put differently, what it invariably lacks in original treasures it can in some part catch up with by discovery and rediscovery of that which lies buried, literally or figuratively, under the layers of subsequent settlement.

If there is any single original in the place that is the undisputed star exhibit, it is the huge Yiddish wall map of the world generated by the rising, and magnificent, secular Yiddish school system of interwar Vilna (then Wilno in the Polish Republic). When visitors see it, they understand, in one fell swoop of successful “museum shock” that “Yiddish” was neither just a hobby, klezmer evening pastime, study object, or even just a first language. It was the one and only Jewish language spoken among Jews, and in which a highly sophisticated educational system arose, historically speaking, overnight (indeed, in parallel with Belarusian, Latvian, Lithuanian and other smaller languages that had long been under the yoke of empire). The museum deserves major credit for displaying it so prominently near the start of the visitor’s journey through time and Litvak space.

In a pièce de résistance of the new museum, the Vilna streetlight reflects through the vintage window onto the huge Yiddish wall map, bringing home starkly the rapid (and for many miraculous) rise of Yiddish as the medium for every level of modern Jewish education, from kindergarten to university level studies.

Two disturbing issues, of differing nature, cannot go unmentioned.

One is the Holocaust. One solution would be to make clear that this particular museum is about pre-Holocaust Lithuanian Jewish culture, not about its destruction. A network of extensive, and generally speaking excellent timelines that meander around the museum, could have stopped at the eve of 22 June 1941. But if it is not going to stop, then it must tell the truth. Sorry, this is not terrain for compromise. I can compromise with you on money and property or even on division of topics in a museum, but the Holocaust is neither up for compromise nor for sale. Someone here, a good soul with the best of intentions, tried hard to find a neat compromise, in the local context, with the false narrative of the Genocide Museum (and its LAF panels) and the long-time lame compromise at the Jewish museum’s own Naugarduko headquarters. Lithuania’s kill rate (in the 96% range, or 96.4%, a figure range reached by the best scholars working independently) is here massaged down only slightly, to 95%, showing courage in resisting the demands of various state and media establishments to give it the bigtime downward massage to 90% (as in very many standard Lithuanian media news releases on Jewish topics, even when far from content or topic of the news item, part of a wider policy if “call it 90% enough times and people will start using that figure”).

But the numbers endeavor (all within the 90s, with or without the “fix-it” massages) pales, as a moral issue, in comparison to the graywash (closer to a whitewash?) of the barbaric LAF (Lithuanian Activist Front), which unleashed the Lithuanian Holocaust by butchering many thousands of Jewish neighbors in The First Week before the Germans even came, in many locations, and/or before they took over and imposed their administration. The formulation “led an uprising” is of course historic nonsense. When the Soviets were in power, the LAFers didn’t have the courage to shoot a rabbit (an “uprising” is a revolt against the folks in power). When the Soviets were fleeing in utter disarray from Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa (the largest invasion in human history), and Soviet authority collapsed, the LAFers (known as the “white-armbanders” in an array of languages) used the interregnum to murder, maim, rape, plunder and humiliate helpless, innocent Jewish neighbors, unleashing the destruction of Lithuanian Jewry in the Hitlerian program. That is what they were doing, not “protecting Lithuanian state sovereignty” (enough to mention the oaths of loyalty to Adolf Hitler). For some LAFers, murder was much more important than plunder. In many towns, they blocked the roads to prevent Jews escaping eastward to Soviet-held territory to ensure they were kept right in the vise of the death trap.

If this museum does not want to go the way of the fake-history “Genocide Museum” (renamed in recent years), it needs to scrap this one offensive panel. Of the thousands of Lithuanian Jewish survivors I was privileged to interview over some three decades (the material is in the process of being digitized and posted online), virtually all regarded June 23rd as the day of the onset of the Holocaust, and the day that should be as such remembered (see videographed testimonies on The First Week). But no malicious intent is ascribed. Quite the opposite, the narrative is inched toward the truth and represents “progress” compared to the other museums in town. But “led an uprising” in place of “murdered thousands of Jews before German forces is even arrived” is a dramatic bow to the far-right (and often antisemitically motivated) falsified narrative of Baltic revisionism.

This is followed by yet another attempt at acrobatics that devolves at once into tortured contortionism: “The activities of the LAF were viewed negatively because of their endorsement of antisemitic rhetoric at the beginning of the Holocaust.” Sorry, but mass murder of neighbors cannot be equated with, or fixed by bargaining down mass murder that was the onset of genocide to some kind of “endorsement of antisemitic rhetoric” that was “negatively viewed” by the hundreds of thousands of murdered victims. For an introduction into the difference between (“just good old”) antisemitism and incitement to genocide, it can be enlightening to look at the text of the leaflets designed, published and distributed by the Berlin and local “branches” of the LAF in 1941. These were collected by the Vilna Gaon Museum’s own late colleague Joseph Levinson, and made readily available to the English speaking world via the translation of his major book on the Holocaust (proudly published by the Vilna Gaon Museum itself!). To call the incitement to genocide of the Jewish people “efforts to protect Lithuanian state sovereignty” is (just like glorification of Holocaust collaborators) a form of contemporary antisemitism. This issue of glorification of collaborators and perpetrators constituting antisemitism was pointed out eloquently, and publicly, earlier this year by the United States’s ambassador to Lithuania. As for the LAF’s “efforts to protect Lithuanian state sovereignty,” the English reader can now access the notarized testimonies of survivors collected shortly after the war to ascertain the details of the rampage of butchery that unfolded at the start of the Lithuanian Holocaust.

Again, a museum of prewar culture needn’t deal with the Holocaust when that is dealt with elsewhere. If this panel is not removed, it will become a permanent stain on the new museum, a stain that its high minded, highly talented, hard working and delightfully successful creators do not deserve to have imposed on them. This museum should decidedly not be thought of in the inventory of East European museums that specialize in far-right revisionist history. It would mean that even today, no state-sponsored museum (except the Green House, for now) can tell the truth. For anyone who loves modern, delightful, democratic Lithuania, that cannot be the case.

Tortured contortions? The role of local Lithuanian collaborators “in general” is so overarchingly delineated that the inspirationally courageous Rescuers (Righteous) go unmentioned in the panel, while the actual group utterly responsible for thousands of barbaric murders on local initiative the first week is elevated to a mythical (and offensive) understanding of “state sovereignty”. 

 

One solution here would be to explain that some six centuries of overall tolerance, at many points in history the greatest tolerance in all of Eastern Europe came to a calamitous end on June 23rd 1941 when the LAF and its supporters started butchering their Jewish neighbors, and invite the reader to visit the Green House at Pamenkalnio 12 for a more detailed history. For all its low-tech modesty, it is the one address in all the land that does tell the simple truth about the Holocaust (though high political forces have over the decades forced removal and modification of exhibits on political and nationalistic grounds). Veterans of the last decades remember how the Green House’s longtime director, Rachel Kostanian, fought tooth and nail against each demand for modification. Perhaps the most legendary saga concerns the episode when, in 2010, she obtained private funding from the U.K. for a major new Holocaust documentary by legendary Lithuanian truth-telling documentary film maker Saulius Beržinis. It resulted in rapid threats from above to fire her. On this and other occasions, the late Sir Martin Gilbert came to the rescue with urgent letters to the highest leaders of Lithuania demanding such campaigns against her be abandoned. In 2021 Rachel, in her 90s and in retirement in Berlin, was awarded the Order of Merit by the president of Germany. Given that all her achievements were in the framework of the selfsame Vilna Gaon Museum, of which the Green House (with its room on Litvak culture) is part, the museum itself could proudly be featuring the award, and indeed, the Museum’s own Ms. Kostanian’s battle for historic truth, a huge credit to the museum’s own history.

The Green House, “allowed” for decades to have its “Jewish narrative” (actually: the Western narrative) up on a hill atop a driveway, invisible from the street, stands in stark contrast to the huge, falsified-history Genocide Museum (now renamed “Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights”). It too is less than a ten minute walk from the new Litvak Culture Museum.

Given that the Green House is slated for closure, it becomes urgent that all of its Holocaust exhibits be preserved intact, with their texts that include Yiddish, in the new Holocaust museum (analogous to the need to preserve its Litvak Culture room in the new Museum of Litvak Culture under review here). There are many fears about the fate of the Green House’s exhibits (both the Holocaust exhibits and the prewar culture room). If for whatever reason the new Holocaust museum will not want to preserve these exhibits intact — again: for Litvaks they will forever have sanctity, coming from the hands, pens and minds of our last beloved survivors — then they should be found a new home abroad. Such fears have in recent years been exacerbated by the fate of a magnificent exhibit honoring Jewish veterans who fought against Hitler that once adorned a room of what is now the new Litvak Culture Museum. When the political winds changed, the exhibit vanished into thin air, without a trace. Where is it?

Much less controversial is the “private museum” of the late Joseph Shapiro, in a room generously allocated by the state museum in the building that is now the Litvak Culture Museum under review. Hopefully it too can be rescued from the cellars and reconstructed in a small space: the amazing story of a Litvak who negotiated in the 1990s to have his own little mini-museum. It is a testament to the success of the Vilna Gaon Museum that it has made way for treasures over the decades that now need to be preserved. At the end of the day, it is also the simple museum ethos of preserving its own rich and colorful history. In post-Holocaust Lithuania, it would mean that a museum of Litvak culture led by non-Litvaks would have the heart, soul, and wisdom to incorporate the inspirational creations of the last pre-war raised Litvaks — now virtually all gone.

The second issue also concerns but a tiny strip of real estate in the new museum. In general, it is wise for museums dedicated to a seven hundred year history to stay away from the inclusion of living persons and all the current politics, competitions, and intrigues. At least a little of the dust of history needs to settle.

The exceptions of course concern giants of achievement widely and internationally acknowledged. When it came to Holocaust survivor Samuel Bak, the museum did very well to be able to incorporate his masterpieces of art and to celebrate it all with him. Just last month, he was zoomed in from his Massachusetts home to address the opening of a new exhibit. It was an unforgettable experience, and major success for all concerned.

That is the precise opposite of entering into the necessarily petty local nonsense of current community politics. A historical timeline of great Litvaks must not include the current — morally and culturally shabby — Lithuanian Jewish Community (LJC) chairperson who dismantled community democracy, allegedly spearheaded campaigns of personal destruction against her rivals, and spares no effort to destroy the legitimate and democratically structured Vilnius Jewish Community (VJC), which itself goes unmentioned in the museum’s timeline.

Or, if you “have” to have it, then first, do make sure to reference the media coverage that gives the visit0r perspective (for example JTA reports here, here and here); and second, to include leaders of the Vilnius Jewish Community, and other local personages of notable achievement.  Major Litvak figures such as Dov Levin, Joseph Melamed, and Efraim Zuroff, critics of the “history units” of the Lithuanian government dedicated to Holocaust revisionism in the spirit of bogus double genocide conceptualization of the Holocaust (and therein glorification of perpetrators), seem to be banished from any mention. Just as the fine new Litvak Culture Museum must steer clear of nationalist history revisionism, it must remains staunchly — and absolutely — independent of the now less-than-legitimate state-sponsored “Lithuanian Jewish Community” next door. (We can’t always choose our neighbors.) Most especially, it is imperative that persons of seminal achievement for post-Soviet Lithuanian Jewry, among them Roza Bieliauskiene, Fania Yocheles Brantsovsky, Milan Chersonski, Rabbi S.J. Feffer, Simon Gurevich, Misha Jakobas, Rachel Kostanian, Rabbi Sholom-Ber Krinsky, Dr. Rachel Margolis, and others whose records have been trashed or ignored by the ersatz state-sponsored community leadership, be included and appropriately accredited.

*

To circle back to the outset:

The makers of the new Museum of Culture and Identity of Lithuanian Jews have bequeathed to modern Vilnius a splendid new address. Be sure to visit it when you come to town.


The author’s Lithuanian Jewish Culture appeared in Vilnius in 2010 (second revised edition, Baltos Lankos publishers). Among his works available free online are Seven Kingdoms of the LitvaksWords on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish; Windows to a Lost Jewish Past: Vilna Book Stamps; four books of Yiddish fiction, mostly set in pre World War I Lithuania (anthologies have appeared in English and German translation). His projects currently in progress include the Lithuanian Yiddish Video Archive (LYVA), translation of the Bible into Lithuanian Yiddish, Litvish: An Atlas of Northeastern YiddishVirtual Mini Museum of Old Jewish Vilna; Virtual Mini Museum of Interwar Jewish Lithuania; and the Vilnius-based Yiddish Cultural Dictionary. Website: www.dovidkatz.net (Lithuania page).

 

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