INTRODUCTION

This is the view from my old apartment in Vilnius where I lived as a student from 1993 to 1994. You can see a parking lot and a Soviet-style kindergarten with a dreary playground in front of it. My apartment building was situated on the crossroad of Vokiečių-Žydų gatve, in Polish the called Niemiecka-Zydowska, for its Jewish inhabitants the Daytsche gas and Yidishe gas^[1] – German Street and Jewish Street. I was vaguely aware that the city had been the home of a vibrant Jewish community before the war and concluded that I was probably living close to the former Jewish quarter.

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Fig. 1. In front of my house – the crossroads of Vokiečių gatvė (German Street) and Žydų gatvė (Jewish Street), Vilnius, Fall 2003.

A few weeks after I moved in, I realized a memorial plaque on one of the buildings I passed every day on my way to university. It stated in Lithuanian and in Yiddish that this street, di yidishe gas, had been part of the Ghetto during German occupation. Later, I became aware of the fact that the kindergarten across the courtyard stood exactly where the famous Vilner Shtotshul, the Big Synagogue, had been located, the center of the Shulhoyf which was the center of Litvak Orthodoxy.

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Fig. 2. Big Synagogue, 1930s.

I lived in this townscape in the early 1990s, in the center of the Lithuanian capital, and was surrounded by an authentic, antique environment, filled as it was with baroque and renaissance architecture. At the same time, I lived in an imagined place, the site of past Jewish habitat, which had been known to the Jewish world as Vilne, its Yiddish name. Not only the Holocaust separated these two dimensions from each other, but also the almost complete denial of the city’s Jewish past and presence in public space in the 50 years after World War II.

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Fig. 3. Architectural scheme. Destruction.

Even though I did not decide to write my dissertation on the Vilner Jews and their cultural work after the Holocaust until the year 2000, the view from my old apartment was the starting point for my project and has shaped my research paradigms: the fragmentation of spatiality/Räumlichkeit and the simultaneous, yet mostly separate existence of several Vilniuses, including a Jewish variation, Vilne. It was then that I started to get an idea of the fundamental ambivalence that members of the Vilne diaspora throughout the world hold for the Lithuanian capital today and came to understand that Jewish Vilnius is both present and it is not present at the same time.
What is left of Vilne today is a rich and multifaceted memory, consisting of bits and pieces, and many dark or empty spaces. Survivors from Vilne have lived within this post-Holocaust condition and reacted to it in many ways and on many different levels, both individually and collectively. The specific topography of their experiences offers valuable insights:
– Into the history of Eastern European Jews after the Holocaust, which has largely been under-researched to-date;
– Into the theoretical discussion on collective memory that usually operates within nation-state paradigms of “the collective” using a normative perspective.
Samuel Kassow has suggested, that there was no Jewish community in interwar Europe that reflected on itself and the meaning of place as much as the community in Vilne, the Jerusalem of the Diaspora.^[2] The benefits of an analysis that takes a look on the Vilner discourses of place – before, during and after the Holocaust – transcend the boundaries of mere local Jewish historiography and can contribute to the general field of Diaspora Studies, to our understanding of Jewish conceptions of place, to what I would like to call “Jewish local consciousness” in adaptation of Amos Funkenstein; and, last but not least, to our perception of Vilnius’ past and present as the home of a diverse, multi-ethnic population.
In this paper, I want to cast a light on how survivors’ engaged with Vilne after the Holocaust and after they left the city. Vilnius was and is a beautiful place; at the same time, it was the site of German atrocities that killed 95 percent of the city’s Jewish citizens on the spot, in the middle of all the beauty. So what can be left of such a place? How do those who survived remember the city?
Beginning with a brief historical introduction to the city and centers where many of its Jewish citizens are concentrated in immigration, I will present three “fragments” of Vilne – Leyzer Ran’s alternative city historiography in pictures, two city models that were built in the Ghetto and their use within exhibition frameworks, and the recent project to restore the Jewish quarter in the Vilnius old town – to show how this place has been “done” and remembered, re-enacted and memorialized among the Vilne’s Holocaust survivors now living in New York, Israel, and Vilnius proper.

JEWISH VILNE BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER THE HOLOCAUST: SOME HISTORICAL AND TOPOGRAPHICAL COORDINATES

Jews have been at home in Vilnius since the Middle Ages. The city was a multiethnic commercial center and home to a vibrant Jewish community, which counted more than 60,000 inhabitants immediately after World War I. This amounted not to a mere minority, but to about one-third of the entire population of the city, which also included Poles, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others.^[3] Politically and culturally Vilne was one of the most active and differentiated Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, while at the same time the social distance between its members was the smallest.^[4] Vilne, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania” as it was proudly called, was spared major pogroms and expulsions and figured as the center both of Litvak Orthodoxy and the Haskole (Yid.; Haskalah – Hebr.), the Jewish Enlightenment in Eastern Europe. It was also nicknamed the “capital of Yiddishland” and provided a wide range of secular, yet inherently Jewish life-styles. The Jews of Vilne were multi-lingual, speaking Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and Polish.^[5] To-date, there exists no comprehensive histoire croisée of the city’s various ethnic groups – Poles, Jews, Russians, Lithuanians, Belorussians, etc.^[6] Interethnic contact was evident throughout everyday life, both on a neighborly as on a bureaucratic, economic, and political level. This could be seen in the market place, at movie theaters, in concert halls etc.
The Jewish quarter with its many religious and social institutions was located in the center of the city, next to the main business street and the most important markets. In 1633, the Jewish community had been granted the privilege to settle the area of three adjacent streets – Jotkever, Glezer and Yidishe gas, which was not under the jurisdiction of the municipality, allowing for more efficient protection from attacks.^[7]
The orders that all Christian inhabi-tants should leave the area within 15 years and that all Jews living outside the area should instead resettle in its confines, which were to be enclosed with gates, were never enforced.^[8] As a consequence, Jews settled all over the city, though it was a long time before the so-called “ghetto” was officially abandoned under the Russian administration in 1861.^[9] For most of its history, the Jewish quarter has been a prosperous business area, nicknamed “di goldene tsigln” (“The Golden Tiles”), but the aggravated political situation and economic decline in Tsarist Russia, especially disruptions of the socioeconomic order brought on by WWI^[10] contributed to its demise. After the 1880s, thousands of Jews left Vilnius, mostly immigrating to the United States.^[11] Other destinations included South-Africa, Argentina and to a lesser extent, Palestine and France. Poverty was a constant feature in interwar Vilnius and caused many more to emigrate. At the same time, the interwar period witnessed the blossoming of Yiddish and Hebrew culture and education and are therefore often portrayed as the “golden years” of Jewish Vilne.^[12]
After the German attack on Poland in September 1939, Vilnius’ Jewish community swelled with 15.000 Jewish refugees.^[13] The Wehrmacht did not occupy the city itself until the summer 1941, after the German attack on the Soviet Union. Soon two Ghettos were established on the territory of the former Jewish quarter and completely sealed off. The small Ghetto, in which the Germans and their local collaborators initially concentrated the elderly and sick as well as children, was quickly “dissolved.” Between July 11, 1941 and the end of August 1941, 35.000 Jews were deported to Ponar, a forest and popular picnic area on the outskirts of Vilnius, where they were executed. Around 12.000 Jews with so-called “Arbeitsscheinen” [work permits] remained in the big Ghetto, which encompassed seven streets. Hunger, diseases, violence, isolation, fundamental insecurity and death made up everyday life for those imprisoned in the Ghetto. It was finally “liquidated” in September 1943; those strong enough to work were deported to the Klooga concentration camp, to Kaiserwald concentration camp, and others. The majority, however, were also executed in Ponar. At the end of the war, 95% of Vilnius’ Jewish population had been murdered. Yeruhsalayim de Lita became the Jerusalem of the Ghettos and finally Vilnyus-bay-Ponar, Vilnius-next-to-Ponar, or keyver-shtot Ponar, Ponar, city of graves.^[14]
After liberation in 1944, the losses caused by the Holocaust and the war lead to major population shifts that the city ever witnessed. Following the repatriation agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland, thousands of former Polish citizens left Vilnius – the vast majority of them ethnic Poles who had represented the city’s largest population group until then, but also surviving Jews who until 1941 had represented the second biggest population group. In turn, ethnic Lithuanians from all over the country moved in, soon constituting the absolute majority.
The illegal Jewish exodus had started immediately after liberation in the summer of 1944 with the Brichah. The next stop for most was Łodz, where the Union of the Vilner Jews in Poland [Farband fun Vilner Yidn in Poyln] was founded in 1946. From there, the journey continued through the displaced person camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy to receiving countries around the world where they finally settled. The survivors who reached New York did not merge into the already existing Vilner Landsmanshaftn. Three specific milieus evolved: the cultural organization Nusach Vilne, which had a Yiddishist agenda and which exists to this very day; the Friends of Vilnius for the Russian-speaking middle to upper class, which disbanded in the early 1970s; and, last but not least, YIVO, the Yidisher Vishnshaftlekher Institut or Institute for Jewish Research, which had been transferred from Vilnius to New York already in 1940.
In Israel, the Union of Jews from Vilnius and its Vicinity [Irgun Yotsei Vilnah ve-haSvivah] was founded with sub-committees in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and focused mainly on providing aid to new immigrants and on memorial work.
Attempts to re-establish a Jewish community in Vilnius was stopped short by Soviet authorities in 1948-1949.^[15] The Chorshul Synagogue was the only Jewish institution officially allowed to operate until the Perestroika in the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, there was a strong Jewish presence in the city. Thousands of Jews came from all over Lithuania and other Soviet republics to live in Vilnius in a Jewish environment that was at least informally less violently persecuted than in the rest of the Soviet Union. Culturally there was little continuity. Those who knew the city and its Jewish dimensions before the Holocaust constituted only a small fraction of the new Jewish community. The cultural leaders from the pre-war and the Ghetto period had left soon after liberation. Jewish intellectuals in Soviet Vilnius went into inner exile.

FRAGMENT 1. “YERUSHALAYIM DE LITA, ILUSTRIRT UN DOKUMENTIRT”

The lead article in the first newsletter of Nusach Vilne had the title “Ponar fun yidishn zeykher,” which can be roughly translated as “the total destruction of Jewish memory.”^[16] It was written by Leyzer Ran, a Yiddish journalist, community activist, and YIVO researcher who in his essay attacked Soviet discrimination and the further destruction of Jewish cultural life in Vilnius after the Holocaust. After criticizing political measures taken against the Jewish community by the local authorities, he turns to his main concern, the erasure of Jewish sites, structures, and architecture from the townscape and its elimination from the local and architectural historiography produced by Soviet-Lithuanian literature, press, and academia.^[17] The picture book Vilnius, published in 1955 by the State Department of Architecture in Lithuanian and Russian,^[18] especially infuriated Ran:

“A Soviet album about the most Yiddish city in the world, which through many centuries acquired the name of the Yiddish Jerusalem, does not show in its 194 photographs a single picture with a caption that would indicate that there once lived such a species as the Jews.”^[19]
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Fig. 4. Title page of Nusach Vilne Buletin 1 Sept. 1956.

For Ran this lead to what would become his life’s work, the three-volume picture album Yerushalayim de Lita, ilustrirt un dokumentirt, a “counter publication” opposing Soviet historiographers of the city in an attempt to present to the world the manifold Jewish dimensions of the city.^[20] Today hailed as a landmark of Jewish photography,^[21] the picture book appeared only in 1974 due to financial reasons and severe controversies among the editorial committee. It was planned simultaneously as an in-group and as an out-group project. Vilner landslayt were encouraged to subscribe in advance to copies to be given to their children and grandchildren as their cultural heritage. They were also asked to sponsor a copy for a non-Jewish institution in order to correct the one-sided picture gained from Soviet publications. The book finally appeared with an accompanying text in Yiddish, Hebrew, English and Russian. The book has since become an indispensable source for anybody doing research on Jewish Vilnius before the war and is a much desired object among Judaica bibliophiles.
The long history of its production and the analysis of the image of Jewish Vilnius that it finally constructed is a subject for an article in its own right. In the context of this article, I want to focus on the discursive framework from which it emerged.
The many yizker books of destroyed Jewish communities in Eastern Europe published after the war were usually initiated by the general desire to memorialize the dead. They were imbued with a strong notion of nostalgia and functioned for the survivors as “virtual cemeteries.”^[22] The book Yerushalayim deLita, however, was the product of an ongoing, complex fight over city space and participation in its discursive construction. It was considered (and marketed) by its initiators as an act of on-going resistance. To quote from Ran’s closing lines, “Lomir ale entfern [un abonirn dem albom] azoy shnel un azoy shtark, der entfer zol derhert vern umetum, vu men vil im nisht hern – <strong>un zol a klop ton undzer trot: MIR ZAYNEN DO! </strong>” (“Let us all answer [and subscribe to a copy of the album] so fast and so powerful, that the answer will be heard everywhere, where they do not want to hear it – <strong>the earth shall tremble at our step, we are here</strong>.”)^[23]
This refrain, adapted from the famous partisan hymn “Zog nit keynmol, az du geyst dem letstn veg,” which was written in the Vilnius Ghetto in a reaction to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising^[24], has a powerful resonance to this day throughout the Jewish world and especially among the Vilner landslayt. Besides the call for survival, we hear the specific sense of doikeyt, of “here-ness,” which had been promoted as a political program and Weltanschauung by leftist, Yiddishist milieus in the interwar-period. During the war, this turned into a culture of resistance. The motive of doikeyt also echoes in the strongly historical and local consciousness of Jewish Vilnius before the war. Apart from the many local legends and extensive lyrical praise for a beloved hometown, there was a substantial local historiography, which also held an important position in the curricula of the secular Yiddish schools. It was pursued by cultural organizations like the Ansky Society, the Landkentenish-Bavegung and, more than by any other organization, by YIVO. These institutions provided Vilnius’ Jews, especially the younger generation, with the cultural techniques that would later enable them to memorialize their destroyed hometown in a unique manner.
Leyzer Ran was a man of great persistence and far-reaching memory. On the last page of his album, he reconnected to his initial appeal originally made 18 years earlier by depicting Soviet Lithuanian publications on Vilnius’ architecture and history under the title Der sovyetisher Ponar fun yidishn zeykher in Vilnyus.^[25] When he died in 1995, the obituary his family placed in the Yiddish forward read, “Leyzer Ran, researcher and author of works on Vilnius, his beloved hometown, especially his monumental work Yerushalayim de Lita, ilustrirt un dokumentirt.

FRAGMENT 2. DER PLASTISHER PLAN

While the album project was under way, other members of Nusach Vilne tried to initiate a permanent exhibition on their hometown in New York. On the occasion of its 30th anniversary in 1955, they proposed to YIVO an initiative to mobilize their “bnei-ir” for a “Vilnius room, a living memorial, to our unforgettable hometown, a living symbol of Hemshekh Nusach Vilne, the continuation of the Vilnius tradition on American soil.”^[26] YIVO reacted reluctantly to this proposal and a permanent room was not established. Nusach Vilne did not give up the project, however, and by the end of the 1960s they finally found a reliable partner in The Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel, which was planning to extend its Holocaust exhibition with a “Vilne Room.”^[27] The initial idea came from Izthak “Antek” Zuckerman, one of the founders of the Kibbutz, who originally came from Vilnius and had been among the leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.^[28] Benjamin Anolik, who was also from Vilnius and had survived the Ghetto and the Estonian camps, was then the head of the educational center and became the project manager and mediator between various groups and individuals involved in the project.
“Vilne Memorial Committees” were set up in Israel and New York in 1966, which were initially concerned with raising money. Soon after, an intense transatlantic debate on the form and content of the exhibition began.^[29] The correspondence indicates that it was soon decided that the central object should be a replica of the three-dimensional city model, “der plastisher plan,” that Vilnius’ Ghetto inmates had manufactured for the German Gebietskommissar (regional commissar) in 1942.^[30]
This model was far more than a simple architectural scheme. We know from Gabriel Sedlis, who participated as a young man in the original construction, that it was initiated by Müller, Gebietskommissar Hingst’s deputy, and by Jacob Gens, the head of the Judenrat (Jewish Council). As a reward, the Germans promised to release a group of Jews who were imprisoned in Lukiskis with their families for stealing food. If the model was finished on time, these people would not be taken to Ponar.^[31] Jewish engineers and artists under the guidance of architects Smorgonski and Flora Rom put all their effort in to modeling their hometown as accurately and in as much detail as possible. The project, with a planned size of 20 sq. m., provided them with a work permit and also kept them from being killed in Ponar. Furthermore they were able to leave the Ghetto in order to measure the streets and buildings, allowing them to acquire food and get in contact with the non-Jewish resistance.^[32]
Besides these vital side effects, the plastisher plan had an important emotional and spiritual dimension. The project team stayed on after official work hours to carefully shape and paint the small buildings. The Ghetto population was thrilled by it. Herman Kruk, the famous librarian and chronologist of the Ghetto, delivered a lecture with the title “Why scale models and why exactly these scale models?”^[33] Parts of it were displayed in one of the Ghetto’s art exhibitions and many people came to the workshop to take a look.
Before the first six plates – showing the city’s most inhabited quarters Zwierzyniec, Śnipizki, Mickiewicz Street, Antokol, Zarecze, Wielka Street, the ghetto area, Rosa and the New World^[34] – were handed over to the Gebiets-kommissar, the Ghetto held a reception in honor of it.
Fifteen-year-old Yitshok Rudashevsky wrote in his diary:

“The Ghetto schools today went to look at a part of the bas-relief map of the city of Vilnius, which is being produced in the Ghetto as a gift for the Gebietskommissar. [...] On a table under a reflector there lies before us the center of the city of Vilnius. … (E)very house, every little street is marked there… Everything is beautifully colored, worked out in an exceptionally beautiful manner. The children press forward to look at the map and of course, each one looks for his house, his little street from which he came to the Ghetto. Eng. Gukhman explains to us: the Vilie, the Green Bridge, Shnipishok, and there is the Cathedral. The children look hungrily at the beautiful hilly little streets around the Vilie and the Vilenke from which they have been expelled. The bas-relief map of Vilnius is certainly a great work of art of which we may be proud because it could not have been created outside of the Ghetto. So much effort and patience was invested in the work as only a Jew can have at the present time. Since it is our work we can be certain that we shall see the beautiful Vilnius streets not only on the map but in reality.”^[35]

Yitzhak Rudashevsky was murdered in the fall of 1943, but the city model survived the war. I quoted this passage at length because it gives us an idea of the powerful feelings of belonging, collective pride, and individual hope projected onto a technical object, an architectural plaster model. It also shows the perversity of the Ghetto because only Jews fearing for their lives would invest so much effort in and pay so much attention to such a project.^[36]

* * *

Some of the people who had worked on the model in Vilnius eventually settled in Israel and wanted to re-construct it for the exhibition at the Ghetto Fighter House.^[37] But there were no photographs of it or other visual materials. Several survivors had seen the model after the war in the Jewish museum before it was closed down in 1948. Rumors said it was now stored in the basement of the municipal water department in Vilnius, but because Israeli-Soviet relations were not overly friendly in the late 1960s, it was considered best that a landsman from New York should look into the issue of the model during a “family visit” to Vilnius. He conveniently had a friend working for the municipal water department and this friend promised to secretly take pictures of the model so that the photographs could then travel back to New York and from there to Israel.^[38] Neither the correspondence of Nusach Vilne with Israeli partners nor the interviews I conducted in New York, Vilnius, and Israel provided evidence that this plan was actually carried out.

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Fig. 5. Postcard of the model in Bet Lohamei HaGetaot.

The above picture is of the replica that was finally manufactured in Israel. Its production was accompanied by intense discussion of the question about which Jewish sites should be mentioned in the legend and the supplementary printed city map. The members of Nusach Vilne in New York had heard that only the Ghetto would be outlined on the map. Full of indignation, they protested – a city as culturally rich as Vilnius with such a long Jewish history could not be reduced to the Ghetto,^[39] which as such had indeed existed only in the Middle Ages and under the Nazis. The organizing committee in Israel finally asked all Vilnius-based organizations in Israel and in New York involved in the reconstruction project to send in lists of institutions and organizations that they deemed important enough to be detailed on the replica. Based on these lists, a compromise was to be reached.^[40] Anolik, who always tried to settle differences among the groups, asked the New Yorkers finally to prepare the section on Yiddish institutions, especially on the Yiddish school system.^[41] The exhibition was finished without further quarrels and became quite a success. Visitors from New York gave enthusiastic reports when they returned home after participating in the opening ceremony on September 3, 1972, the twenty-ninth anniversary of the liquidation of the Vilnius Ghetto according to the Jewish calendar.^[42]

* * *

In the summer of 2003, I was determined to find the “plastisher Plan,” the original city model. Filmmaker Mira Van Doren saw it in the early 1990s in the Jewish Museum in Vilnius but was not allowed to take pictures of it for her documentary on Jewish Vilnius. After working my way through the complex administrative structure, Rosa Bielauskiėne, the head of the preservation department, finally told me that shortly after its foundation the Jewish Museum received the model from the Museum of Architecture in 1990, while tracing Jewish objects in Lithuanian collections. She took me to the storage area and pointed to a couple of wooden boxes that were stacked in a corner. After removing from the top some 300 dusty Russian and Yiddish books that someone had left to the museum, she opened the first box and found the following picture.

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Fig. 6. City model, Totalaufnahme.

This image shows the main boulevard, formerly Mickiewicza, today called Gediminas Prospektas, connecting the Cathedral with the affluent Zwierzyniec neighborhood. To the right is the current location of the Seimas, the Lithuanian Parliament, which was shielded by demonstrators against Red Army tanks during the struggle for independence in 1991. The other plates of the modeled city look similar. The townscape was meticulously designed and is very recognizable, though most of the tiny buildings fell off from the plaster foundation and were crumpled up in corners of their respective boxes.
The center piece was not among the plates received from the Museum of Architecture and is presumably lost. It showed the University area, the Jewish quarter with the shul-hoyf and the newer residential area around Great Pohulanka, which figured as the center of modern Jewish Vilnius with its many progressive Jewish institutions, such as the Yiddishe Folksbank, HIAS, several Jewish sports clubs, and the YIVO.^[43] This was the former heart of Jewish Vilnius, which during was turned into a Ghetto during the Nazi period and had disappeared, leaving a void in the model. For those living in Lithuania’s capital today who are intent on remembering Jewish, this object has little value. The agenda is filled with other, more urgent projects and the incomplete model is not considered important enough to be restored in the near future nor is there an initiative to search for the missing central piece.^[44]

* * *

For a long time I was convinced that the replica standing in the Ghetto Fighters’ House was based on the city model produced for the Gebietskommissar in 1942. Only when I compared my photographs of the Vilnius model with pictures of the replica in Israel did I realize that they obviously differ significantly from each other in scope, outline, and style.
The replica in Israel was based on the second model produced illegally in the Ghetto, that showed only the Ghetto and nothing beyond. It bears the Jewish stamp of the Ghetto, the date 1943, and also survived the war. The origins of this second model and its fate after the war are not mentioned in diaries or memoirs that survived the Ghetto, though there are some contemporary photographs of it.

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Fig. 7. Bild Museum Katcherginsky.

There is also no discussion about an alternative second model in the correspondence between memorial committees in New York and Israel. It is thus not clear – and, of course, it might never be – at which point the two models merged within the collective memory of the survivors.^[45] But it is certainly the introspective Ghetto model, and not the city model – the violently reduced and isolated version of Jewish Vilnius, not the full-fledged and integrated version that symbolized citizenship, hope, and good memories – that took over and dominated the three-dimensional, spatial representation of this community in the aftermath of the Holocaust. The Ghetto model, standing for the distinctiveness of the Jews as well as for their exclusion and persecution, was exhibited. The city-model that had been so important to Ghetto inmates precisely because it did not show them the Ghetto, but the rest of the city from which they had been expelled, was stored away and forgotten. An alternative interpretation could stress that the illegal Ghetto model was produced autonomously by Jews for Jews,^[46] while the city model had some ambivalence, being ordered by and produced for the Germans – some critics even said “in collaboration” with the enemy.

* * *

When I visited Israel in the spring of 2004, I went to see the Vilne Room at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, which is situated right next to the Museum’s entrance. The visitor is welcomed by photographs from the pre-war period and an enlarged version of Leiser Ran’s Yiddish city map,^[47] spotted by little, now unfortunately defunct electrical bulbs in yellow, red, and green to mark various Jewish institutions. Next to it, an arrangement of Israeli street names with a reference to Vilnius is on display.^[48]
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Fig. 8. Vilnius Ghetto model. Exhibition on Ghettos and concentration camps.

This is as far as the spatial representation of the city goes in this Vilnius exhibition, which ends before the German occupation during the first Soviet period in 1940. Where was the three-dimensional model? I finally found it in the general exhibition on Ghettos and concentration camps on the second floor. In the museum’s narrative it is thus not part of the Jewish Vilnius exhibition, but rather belongs to the world of the Holocaust.
There is no written explanation given and neither street names nor the location of important institutions are marked. Instead one can see the marks of the time – that is, the marks of the many visitors who have handled the model and discovered it with their hands.
At the moment, a fundamental re-design of the entire museum and its exhibitions is being undertaken and it is not clear yet if and where the Vilnius Ghetto model will find its place and how the Vilne Room will be integrated. Benjamin Anolik, who still works every day in the educational department, did not remember the controversies surrounding the model as they are documented in the archive of Nusach Vilne in New York. According to him, the model was from the very beginning designed for the Ghetto exhibition and never for the Vilne room. The model was, according to him, carried out shortly after the war by the painter Yisroel Shar, a Vilnius survivor who knew the original Ghetto model. When he emigrated from Vilnius, he took it apart and distributed it among his friends and family members who brought his replica to Israel piece-by-piece, where he finally donated it to the Ghetto Fighters’ House.^[49]

* * *

Back in New York, Nusach Vilna finally managed to establish a permanent Vilnius exhibition of its own in 2002. It is located in YIVO’s administrative offices, accessible only by appointment with the secretary, and consists of pictures from Ran’s book and memorial plaques.

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Fig. 9. Vilna exhibition at YIVO, 1. Shlosbarg view.

There has been a long process of negotiation over where the exhibition should be housed. Its initiators, most of them pensioners over 70, were determined to finally memorialize their hometown for future generations, when the plans for the building of a new Center of Jewish History became public. On the one side, YIVO management was mainly concerned with a stable financial plan for the new Center and counted on the strong support though donations from landsmanshaftn and individuals, while Nusach Vilne’s budget is small compared to that of other Jewish organizations.^[50] As a result, the memory of the “most Yiddish city in the world,” YIVO’s place of birth, has literally been put aside within the walls of their office. Under these circumstances, possibilities for capturing the memory of the city in a more prominent fashion, in a more expanding, e.g. in a three-dimensional manner, never came close to fruition.

* * *

Various city models of Vilnius, constructed during and after the war, carry a high symbolical value for survivors and the forms given to these models, the ways that their environments display or disclose them, bear symbolical meaning, too.
In what respect is this complex and ambivalent experience of place transmitted to the next generation? To those who have never been to Soviet Vilnius, not to speak of Jewish Vilne? Or to those who live in Vilnius today but have barely heard anything about the city’s Jewish past? Can these models convey something about the past? Their origins are only vaguely documented and their history is not explained even when they are on display. To a viewer who has never heard about their origins, they merely illustrate the story of Jewish Vilnius and function as nice, yet run-down embellishments, and not as powerful embodiments of history.
With the end of the Cold War, Eastern European Jewish geography has changed fundamentally. Vilnius has become a place where one can travel. After the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Vilius was turned in Western eyes into a mystic, inaccessible place that had to be evoked mainly through the stories of survivors – family narratives, memoirs, private photographs and paintings, Leyser Ran’s picture book, the fiction of Chaim Grade and Avrom Karpinowicz, the poetry of Abraham Suzkever, by pre-war publications, and the post-war historiography about the city. Since Lithuania became independent in 1991, many survivors have come to visit as individual and in groups, often accompanied by their children or grandchildren. They visit the places of their childhoods, the former Ghetto, and Ponar. What the younger generation has heard or read about these places is suddenly made three-dimensional, enclosing and sometimes overwhelming them. Their mental mapping of the city is a very individual process, usually closely linked to their parents’ stories. The buildings of Vilnius’ Old Town cast long shadows on these stories and the miniature houses captured in the city models disappear.
There has been a second important change, tipping the balance of people and place in the remembrance of Jewish Vilne: as the city re-entered Jewish geography, the last of those who remember Jewish Vilne began to depart from this world.

FRAGMENT 3. DEVELOPING A JEWISH TOPOGRAPHY FOR THE NEW MILLENNIUM

The Old Town of Vilnius was included in the UNESCO list of World Heritage in 1994 and the municipality initiated an ambitious preservation plan. One of its elements is the so-called “Restoration Program of Historical Jewish Ghetto Fragments of Vilnius.” It is intended to restore three fragments of the former Jewish quarter, including the Great Synagogue at the corner of Vokiečių and Žydų Streets. The official project description aims “to foster the multi-cultural heritage of Vilnius, to renew the Old Town, and to restore its urban spaces. While restoring fragments of Jewish blocks, one of the main goals will be to reveal the image of Vilnius as a city tolerant and open to different cultures.“^[51] There is, however, another set of important categories to the process of negotiating a suitable Jewish Vilnius for the 21st century: “real-estate”, “urban development”, “investment”, “tourism”, and “consumption.” The declared aim of the municipality and the director of the Jewish museum, the main initiators of the project, is to re-create the Jewish Ghetto as a tourist attraction following the successful examples of Kazimierz in Krakow and “Jewish Prague.”^[52]
This highly controversial project represents another state of “cultural” or “collective memory.” With the majority of survivors, the Erfahrungsgemeinschaft, no longer among us, the important actors in the drama changed. The Jewish Vilnius that will be excavated, restored, and rebuilt in the city center is being negotiated and designed by architectural experts, municipal institutions, local and foreign investors, and one small Jewish interest group, while the Jewish community, representing the vast majority of the city’s Jewish population, has been excluded from this process. The new Jewish Vilnius will be reconstructed for Jewish and non-Jewish tourists from abroad and much less for the local population, the city’s Jewish community, or for the Jews from Vilnius. The Great Synagogue, for example, will most probably never fulfill its original religious mission because there is already a problem in filling the minyan at the regular synagogue, the Chorshul. According to the master plan, a Jewish restaurant, general businesses, and a memorial room for the shul-hoyf will be located in the Great Synagogue.
According to the vision of the city planners, the new Jewish Ghetto of Vilnius will serve as the most powerful lieu de mémoire for local inhabitants and tourists who have no access to alternative dimensions of Jewish Vilnius via family narratives, the variegated Yiddish, Hebrew, and Polish literature and historiography (of which little has been translated into Lithuanian so far). Reconstructing the space dimension of memory, physical lieu de mémoire means the creation of simple, straightforward meaning – the creation of a stable, unequivocal, and definite structure. This implies the negotiation of “authenticity” as well as the unification of perspectives and exclusion of those deemed too controversial or too contradictory to the narrative of those in power. It also means to set an end to or at least to reduce the fundamental ambivalence since Jewish Vilnius will “be there” and “not there” at the same time.
Taking a closer look a the level of symbolic language, we notice a fundamental contradiction between the title and the political aims of the project. The “Restoration of Fragments of the Historical Jewish Ghetto in Vilnius” refers not to the open Jewish Quarter, which had for centuries been an integral part of the city, but to the medieval Ghetto and to the Ghetto that was established by the Nazis and patrolled by their local collaborators. These two periods in the city’s history are, however, to say the least, not exactly the best examples of the majority of the population’s tolerance and open-mindedness towards other local cultures.
This one-sided focus on the Ghetto fosters a key epistemological problem. If we only pay so much attention to the Ghetto and neglect other concepts of Jewish historical space, we will then repeatedly see only the Ghetto and not the vast possibilities beyond it. We will keep on running into Ghetto clichйs and learn little about the reality of the people who lived in the Jewish quarter and the many Jews who successfully made their homes in other parts of the city.
Writing about the Jewish Levant, Ammiel Alcalay has pointed at “the necessity of mapping out a space in which the Jew was native, not a stranger, but an absolute inhabitant of time and place.”^[53] This necessity exists for other past and present Jewish homelands, too. Thus, I want to suggest that the histories of the Jews in Vilnius/Wilno/Vilne be told not only as a “Ghetto history,” not only as a history of exile, isolation and persecution, but also as a Heimatsgeschichte, as a Jewish history of being at home in Vilnius, as the history of the Other home and of its denial. Vilnius/Wilno/Vilne and Eastern Europe was – and is – a difficult home for Jews, a place Jews struggled with, fought for, and deemed worth fighting for. Yet, if we don’t know to what degree this was really home, we cannot estimate what would have been possible, what has been lost, and what needs to be protected for the entire city and all of its citizens.