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.