Lithuania’s State Jewish Museum Deletes Yiddish from all Three Vilnius Addresses

Posted on 27 February 2025 by Defending History


OPINION | YIDDISH AFFAIRS | LITVAK ISSUES | MUSEUMS

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by Dovid Katz

 

Beloved multilingual signs proudly including Yiddish from Pylimo 4A, Pamenkalnio 12, and Naugarduko 10 are all gone. Their replacements have not a word of Yiddish text. Why this decision just now, in the 2020s, to eliminate Yiddish from state institutions that were so proud to include right-on-the-street Yiddish for close to forty years? Just now, when the government is making such nice hay from the 100th anniversary Yivo celebrations. Is what the Vilna Yivo stood for taken seriously?

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From the days of its majestic late 1980s independence struggle onward, Lithuanian state policy has for forty years now had the literally “one in the world” grace of centering the Yiddish language in the Jewish culture component of its remembrance and city signage policies and vision. The city once known as a symbolic capital of Yiddish language and scholarship would preserve the memory of that heritage with national and municipal pride. Plaques on the former addresses of master scholars Zalmen Reyzen and Max Weinreich, of poets Meyshe Kulbak and Avrom Sutzkever all have prominent Yiddish text. Vilna Ghetto signage has Yiddish. Yiddish is one of the four languages adorning the Tsemakh Shabad sculpture by the late Romas Kvintas.

Above all, the buildings of the city’s Jewish Museum, uniquely in Europe, proudly affixed multilingual signs including Yiddish. See the photo above. Now, they have all been replaced. Sign replacements in general were necessitated by name changes and repurposing of sites (such as the Samuel Bak Museum at the Naugarduko unit — But was Mr. Bak consulted on this heartless and soulless Yiddish elimination?). Evolution and change are natural over decades. But instead of including Yiddish in the new signs (and, as the first sign in the photo clearly shows, Hebrew and Yiddish can cheerfully coexist on the same slab of metal), the language has been ditched without a trace. When asked where the old Yiddish facade plaques could be seen by appointment (some had been there for decades and are a notable historic treasure of the museum’s own history, e.g. the top image in the above collage), some visitors were told that staff have no idea where they are or whether they were just thrown out.

“For decades Vilnius’s one-in-the-world on-the-street Yiddish signage has been a successful city theme that helps both image and tourism.”

Inquirers at some of the museum buildings in recent weeks have been told: “Who needs Yiddish? Israeli tourists want Hebrew!” Well, nobody on the planet objects to Hebrew being there too. Moreover, virtually all the terrific Israeli tourists we have welcomed here over the decades have been thrilled to learn about a city where Yiddish was a leading language of high culture and achievement. They all read English, they did not come to visit historic Vilna to learn Hebrew, and the inclusion of Hebrew too is in any case a fine idea. A little thought experiment: If there still is an Israeli of Lithuanian heritage who thinks that the Litvak Yiddish heritage of their ancestors is abhorrent, stupid or a waste of time, then guess what, Lithuania may not be the first place on their touristic planning horizon (other than, perhaps, the night club crew). Heck, Israelis are tough and tried people. They can well survive seeing a sign with Yiddish on top, outside a Jewish cultural institution, when visiting a once-upon-a-time capital of the most intricate and advanced Yiddish culture here on ground zero of the East European Holocaust. We can produce medical certificates guaranteeing it will do them no harm.

What is going on here is the now de facto official elimination of the language of Lithuanian Jewry at the country’s major state Jewish institution. Is this really what Lithuania wants to do right now?

Itself now a remarkable museum exhibit (for somewhere on the planet)? A plaque from the good old days when Lithuania’s world-famous state Jewish museum was proud, in the spirit of modern Lithuania, to have on-the-street plaques where English, Hebrew, Lithuanian and Yiddish are together and in harmony. And from the days where there were no hang-ups, complexes, or paranoias about a symbolic policy of ‘Yiddish On Top’ as something unique to modern Vilnius, in the erstwhile Jerusalem of Lithuania. What about announcing a treasure hunt to try and find it now?

A personal memory. From my own first visit (1990) to Vilnius and over the years, two very different personalities who agreed on very little else, were refreshingly elegant and resolute when it came to the special place of Yiddish in the future of the Lithuanian Jewish experience. They are community leader Dr. Shimon Alperovich (Simonas Alperavičius, 1928-2014) and parliamentarian and primary founder of the state Jewish museum, Emanuel Zinger (Emanuelis Zingeris). Shimon made it clear that all signs in the community building would also be in Yiddish. Emanuel (to his Yiddish speaking friends: Manulik) had the same vision about his new museum. I recall the same line from them both on this one subject: “This is Vílne, it is special, and Yiddish is always going to be proudly on the door, along with the other languages. People who come from all over the world will find Yiddish here.”

For decades, no matter what the stormy controversies in Jewish affairs in play, the respect for the language, literature and culture of Lithuania’s annihilated Jewry grew from strength to strength. I saw this on the personal level on one little issue, when Dr. Alperovich and I worked on the project to affix a plaque commemorating Zalmen Reyzen (as it so happened, I was destined to live in his Greys Pohulánke Street (Basanavičiaus) flat for 18 years).

Indeed, the universality of respect for Yiddish even had its macabre angle: the abuse of Yiddish to cover for policies of Holocaust revisionism, glorification of collaborators and deflection from antisemitism. This journal has a section on those battles. It was our lot to feel we have to take this on: Love of Yiddish cannot be justly separated from Yiddish speaking Jews and from love of the last generation of Holocaust survivors. One example concerned the moral usurpation (as so often, a prelude to destruction) of the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, when it was cleansed of Yiddish specialists (and Jewish teachers), retooled to propagate Holocaust revisionism via useful foreign fellow travelers, and then closed down altogether (in 2018). To this day, Vilnius University, itself a major state institution, has failed to make available the thousands of Yiddish books that people sent from every corner of the planet to what they were told was a permanent Yiddish institute at Vilnius’s prime university over a decade and a half. If, seven years later after closure, there is no need to use them, or incorporate in the famed university library, they can easily be transferred to the National Library or another functioning library.

Alas, the arrival of the Israeli Embassy played its own role in a not-unfamiliar progression: putting Israeli Hebrew on top, Yiddish at the bottom — as symbological prelude to dropping Yiddish altogether. See, among others, the sagas from 2016 and 2023. But it makes no sense to “theorize” that the Israeli Embassy would mix in the signage on the three major museum buildings of the state Jewish museum now known collectively as the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish history. The museum itself must take responsibility.

In recent months, this journal has lavishly praised the museum’s new section on Lithuanian Jewish culture and identity, while openly bemoaning the callous and hurtful decision to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day by inviting a major Holocaust revisionist downgrader (and not having one Jewish person on the panel; just imagine an African American Museum in Mobile, Alabama with a policy of excluding the bona fide African American voice). We have also pleaded for the magnificently authentic exhibits of the Green House (Holocaust exhibit and also a room on living prewar Litvak culture in its religious, Yiddishist and Hebraist incarnations) to be preserved and not thrown into the proverbial garbage can, like the long lamented exhibit honoring Jewish World War II veterans. Oh, yes, all exhibits inside the Green House are proudly labelled in Yiddish too (Defending History stood shoulder to shoulder with then director Rachel Kostanian in ensuring that the 2010 revamping would not “lose Yiddish” (as some higher-ups had wished).

Have we reached the depth of absurdity where the inclusion of Yiddish in every one of the Green House’s text panels will be cited as one of the reasons for throwing out, instead of moving, these exhibits when the new Holocaust section premises are opened? Besides the inherent issue for respect for the language and culture of the annihilated people this very museum exists to commemorate, there is the question of respect for the museum’s own cofounders who created the Green House, all Holocaust survivors, all among the last exemplars of pre-Holocaust born-and-raised exemplars of living Yiddish culture, and all now long gone from Vilnius’s public square. What museum does not rush to celebrate the heritage of its own founders, least of all when they were themselves among the mohicans of the very wiped-out civilization the museum exists to preserve. And why in the year when the state has decided to honor the hundredth anniversary of Yivo, Vilna’s storied institute dedicated to the advance of — Yiddish.

Looking back at the near seventeen year history of Defending History, it dawns on us that never have we asked for something so simple, easy, logically uncontroversial, and downright inexpensive: the rapid restoration of proud Yiddish signs to all three Vilnius buildings of the state Jewish museum. But if we are wrong about the financial side of things, this journal will gladly launch a support campaign for the production of three Yiddish signs for the facades of the three buildings of the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History.

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Meanwhile, immediately to the left of the Pylimo 4A museum premises is Pylimo 4 — the adjoining (but “O so separate”) official Jewish Community building, the two longstanding signs remain for now untouched. Sign at left (for Lithuanian Jewish Community, or LJC) has Yiddish on top and then Hebrew. Sign at right (for Vilnius Jewish Community, or VJC) has traditional classic East European Ashkenazic Hebrew usage and spelling on top, harking back to an older tradition,  followed below by Yiddish. In both cases the message is pride in the city’s and country’s specific Jewish culture.

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