GREAT SYNAGOGUE SAGA | OLD CEMETERY SAGA | RESTITUTION AWRY | LJC | AJC | GWF | USCPAHA
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OPINION
by Dovid Katz
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Sometimes even the misnamed “Good Will Foundation” (GWF), a failed quango that has squandered millions on its own small circle of friends and family does a public good born of private designs. Even while wholly excluding the bona fide secular and democratic Vilnius Jewish Community and the thirty-two year old continuous-on-site religious community, in short—the actual Jewish people of Lithuania. Was the idea here to “do some archaeology and ship off the artefacts to some museum”? And then go and use the most prestigious site in the seven-hundred year history of Jewish Vilna (Yiddish Vílne) for a posh new executive office building built in modernist Scandinavian style? If the leaked photos of the plans are any guide, it also fits into the grace of Vilnius’s Old Town like, as we used to say in New York, a shammes in a pickle factory.
But things can go wrong with the best laid plans. First, the professional archaeological excavations of the remnants of the Great Vilna Synagogue—lovingly known as Di Vilner Greyse Shul in Litvish (Lithuanian Yiddish)—have been more successful than almost anyone imagined. The often unfriendly mainstream media has been coming out with the same gasps of awe and wonderment as visitors from around the globe who were lucky enough to be in town this summer. This amazing historical edifice, and the Great Synagogue Square around it (Der Vilner Shúlheyf in Lithuanian Yiddish), overnight became permanent treasures in Vilnius, a city where people from every corner of the earth feel good.
What else went wrong for the quango’s self-serving plan?