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. An investment in major archaeology at the Great Synagogue of Vilna site was wise. But was it to restore something truly huge in Lithuanian history for the benefit of Lithuania, Lithuanian Jewish culture, and the people of Vilnius? Or was the idea here to “acquire some prime real estate, 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 for GWF’s leaders, built in modernist Scandinavian style? If the leaked photos of the plans are any guide, it fits into the grace of Vilnius’s Old Town like, as we used to say in New York, a shammes in a pickle factory.
