Once a beacon of the Yiddish speaking world, Lithuania's Jews work to keep it alive

If one city could be said to be the home of Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jewry, it would not be New York or Jerusalem, in many minds, but Vilnius, the capital of modern-day Lithuania.

Walking through the snaking avenues and alleys of Vilnius’ Old Town today, it’s hard to imagine that the Lithuanian capital, with its high churches and pork cracklings in nearly every local dish, was once teeming with Jewish life. More than 200,000 Jews lived in the area of modern Lithuania in 1918, when the Russian Empire collapsed and the independent states of Poland and Lithuania were reborn, and one would have been just as likely to hear the sounds of Yiddish spoken in Vilnius’ streets as Polish, Lithuanian or Russian. The city was a center of Yiddish literature and culture — or “Yiddishkayt,” a Yiddish term that translates most simply as Jewishness.

Today, Vilnius’ Jewish population stands around 5,000, having sustained tremendous loss of culture and life during the three-year Nazi occupation of Lithuania, from 1941 to 1944. During that time, 95% of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered, including 70,000 Jews from the Vilnius ghetto, who were executed and buried in Europe’s second largest mass grave, in the Ponar forest just outside the city.

“The present-day community is very small, quite fragmented and quite insignificant in the wider Jewish world, but historically, it was an outstanding tower of Yiddishkayt,” said Algirdas Davidavicius, a teacher at Vilnius’ Jewish School.

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