OPINION | MUSEUMS | ARTS | LITVAK AFFAIRS
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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.
