The Lithuanian government has declared 2020 the "Year of the Vilna Gaon and the History of the Jews in Lithuania" in honor of the 300th anniversary of the birth of great Torah scholar Rabbi Eliyahu Ben Shlomo Zalman, better known as the Vilna Gaon.
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The history of the Jews in Lithuania dates back many generations. According to a study conducted by the Hebrew University's Center for Jewish Art, there were close to 1,000 synagogues in Lithuania prior to World War II. Only about 100 of them still stand today as a testament to the Jewish history in Lithuania.
Most synagogues were destroyed during the war or when Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union. Some buildings survived only to collapse in the decades to follow.
When a research delegation of the Center for Jewish Art visited Lithuania in 1993, two years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, they found the Jewish heritage sites had grossly dilapidated. The situation was similar in all former Soviet republics, such as Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.
Across Lithuania, only the Choral Synagogues in Vilnius and Kaunas remained open. All other Jewish sites had either been partially destroyed or were transformed into other institutions or apartment buildings.
However, the Lithuanian position towards the preservation of Jewish sites has changed in the last 30 years. Many of the former synagogues have been renovated and turned into cultural institutions. Today they are being used by the local population while maintaining their Jewish "identity."
For example, the Lithuanian government restored the oldest wooden synagogue in Lithuania, the Pakruojis synagogue, built in 1801. It survived WWII and was transformed into a cinema in 1954. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the cinema closed down, and the building was abandoned.
In 2017 the government turned the building into a local children's library, which includes an exhibition about the town's Jewish past. The interior design of the synagogue was restored using pre-WWII photographs.
The wooden synagogue in Pakruojis is just one of many examples of the local authorities' restoration work. Synagogues were renovated in towns like Kedainiai, Kalvarija, Alytus, Joniskis, Ziezmariai, and many others.
Many Lithuanians now understand that the Jewish past and culture is an integral part of their country's history, which is, sadly, not the case in Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova.
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The restoration efforts don't mean that anti-Semitism has vanished and that all the problems of the Jewish heritage preservation in Lithuania have been resolved. But if we look at them from the perspective of a historian of Jewish culture, the trend is promising and exciting.
This article was published in collaboration with the Lithuanian Embassy in Israel.
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