Vilnius over time

Between 1915 and 1922, Vilna changed hands no fewer than seven times. It was multi-ethnic in its social composition: According to the census of 1897, which asked for religious affiliation and language, 23.6% of Vilna’s inhabitants were Orthodox Christians, 36.9% Catholics, and 41.3% Jews. The remainder were Muslims, Karaites, and Protestants. For language, 40% of respondents listed Yiddish as their mother tongue, while 30.9% responded Polish, 20% Russian, 4.2% Belarusian, and 2.1% Lithuanian. If anything, these figures may well understate the actual number of Jews, as well as Lithuanians and Belarusians.

Each of these groups sought to control the city, and understood its significance in a different way. The Poles called it Wilno, a symbol of Polish civilization and a stronghold of Polishness in the East, where Polish cultural influence was in decline. For the Lithuanians, Vilnius held a historical significance: it was their ancient capital, and the birthplace of the modern Lithuanian nation. Belarusians, too, loved Vilnya (Russian spelling), which reminded them that once upon a time theirs was the official language of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Then, there were the Jews, immensely proud of their Vilna, the Yerushalayim d’Lite, or the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” To many Jews, Vilna was an almost mythical site, where their history and culture met. A city that was once home to great religious sages like the Vilna Gaon, as well as political revolutionaries. And a city that produced some of the greatest Yiddish and Hebrew cultural works to be found across all of Europe.

During World War I, Vilna was occupied by German forces between 1915 and 1918. In 1919, while the complicated relationships between Lithuanians, Poles, and Soviets continued to stoke national tensions, the Germans ceded Lithuanian territories. The impact of the Russian Revolution—first the overthrow of the Tsar in February of 1917, and then the Bolshevik Revolution later in the same year—was felt far beyond the ever-shifting borders of Russia. The national status of Lithuania and the other Baltic states hung in the balance as Russia became engulfed in a bloody civil war for the next five years. The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, emerged victorious. Their promise of a multi-ethnic, multi-national socialist state became Russia’s new guiding ethos—at least for a time. Some territories captured during the chaos of the civil war were incorporated into the new USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics), which was officially formed in late 1922. These included Ukraine and Belarus. However the Baltic states, including Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, were able—along with Finland and Poland—to resist a Bolshevik takeover. Poland regained its independence in 1918 after 123 years of foreign occupation.

Following the 1918 German surrender, in the midst of the never-ending conflicts and territorial realignments of the time, Vilna became the capital of an independent Lithuania. Subsequently, during the 1919-20 Polish-Soviet war, it was briefly captured—twice—by the Soviets before it finally came under Polish rule in October 1920. The fighting over the city fostered considerable anti-Jewish violence, particularly during the time immediately after its initial capture by the Poles on April 19, 1919, during which 54-65 Jews were killed. Vilna was finally incorporated into Poland in February 1922, following elections to a local assembly in ‘Litwa środkowa’ (central Lithuania). The assembly had been established by the Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski after the Polish seizure of Vilna. The capital of Lithuania became Kaunas, and from 1922 until 1939 Vilna was officially a part of Poland.

Damaged significantly by World War I, Vilna’s residents were eager to help rebuild its institutions. They founded new community organizations and committees to aid refugees, support labor—particularly agriculture and trades—and rebuild cultural institutions. Financial aid from abroad, especially from the United States and the Netherlands, also helped support the reconstruction of Jewish institutions in Vilna. During this period, Vilna remained a hub for Jewish life in Eastern Europe, particularly for those involved in the arts or intellectual circles. Russian culture had dominated the educational system before 1915, appealing to the interests of the Jewish middle class. After 1922, a shift occurred. Polish culture took took over in accordance with the territorial realignment. However, it was unclear what the future would hold for Polish Jews in general, and especially those in Vilna.

This transitional period was also marked by the same economic tensions that affected the rest of the world at this time, including the Great Depression in the United States and severe inflation in Germany. After Vilna became part of Poland in 1922, the town was cut off from its traditional economic markets by hostile borders—Lithuania on one side and the Soviet Union on the other. This had an extremely adverse effect on its economic life. It was particularly detrimental for the local timber, paper, publishing, leather, hosiery, and glove industries, all of which featured Jews in a prominent role. Antisemitism also rose throughout Europe. This often took the form of Judeo-Bolshevism slander: a highly popularized antisemitic accusation that claimed communism was a Jewish movement controlled by Jews, which sought to achieve Jewish domination over social, political, and economic institutions. This slander, started by the defeated White Army during the Russian Civil War, spread throughout the world, reaching the United States in 1921 as well as all European nations. Nazis spread these talking points through pamphlets and other forms of propaganda. But many Lithuanians and Poles also pushed this agenda through popular media and popular culture.

Affected by these propagandistic fears of Bolshevism, and alarmed by the strength of Joseph Stalin’s USSR, Soviet culture, ideology, and institutions, many people in the Polish republic felt that what they believed was Jewish support for Bolshevism was dangerous. Antisemitic violence increased markedly around the beginning of the 1930s, and Jewish university students in Vilna were some of the first to be targeted. This took place within the context of the campaign to reduce the number of Jews at Polish universities (and then to exclude them altogether), which the nationalist right in Poland saw as both a desirable goal and also as a means to strengthen its influence among students. Vilna residents feared that another war was coming, but it was impossible for them to know just how devastating it would be.

Jewish religious customs

Vilna was a major center of 18^th and 19^th-century Jewish religious life and study. Historically, it has become well-known for its opposition to the Hasidic movement. Hasidism is a Jewish spiritual revival movement known for its dynasties and its willingness to embrace elements of mysticism. Its opponent the misnagdim  (literally “opponents,” who differed from the Hasidism on key matters of prayer, spirituality, and observance), represented a competing vision of Jewish religious orthodoxy. The bitter fight between the two views continued over many decades. While many renowned Torah scholars and respected rabbis made their homes in Vilna, Hasidic rebbes—spiritual leaders of particular Hasidic dynasties—could not find a foothold there. Many Jews would travel to Vilna or other major Eastern European cities to pray or study with religious leaders and scholars. Particularly important in the town was the musar movement which, while maintaining the misnagdic emphasis on Torah study, stressed religious education focused on personal improvement and the self.

Before both World Wars, there were over a hundred synagogues in Vilna, all of which were important sites of both religious and community life. Jewish people would gather at these sites to pray or celebrate major Jewish holidays, such as Yom Kippur or Rosh Hashanah. They also used the sites to attend lectures and participate in charity work. Families like the Rudashevskis might also have celebrated important life cycle events at one of these synagogues. Such events could include holding bris milot (ritual circumcision) ceremonies for the birth of a son, a bar mitzvah (upon a boy’s thirteenth birthday) or bat mitzvah (upon a girl’s twelfth birthday) ceremony, signing the ketubah (ceremonial wedding contract) for a marriage, or sitting shiva (a ritual mourning period) for a death. Orthodox Jews might have incorporated other prayers and rituals into their daily life, like keeping kosher in the home, participating in ritual bathing ceremonies (mikvah), or studying Torah. 

Many Jews, regardless of how observant they were, kept the Sabbath weekly on Friday nights by hosting Shabbat dinner for their families and by adhering to certain Jewish laws stating what one could and could not do on the holy day of rest. The different Jewish holidays, from Hanukkah to Passover, also each have specific prayers, foods, songs, and traditions associated with them.

YIVO in Vilna

YIVO was founded as the Yiddish Scientific Institute (Yidisher visnshaftlekher institut) by scholars in Berlin and Vilna in 1925, to document and study Jewish life and Yiddish language and culture. The scholars chose Vilna—then an important center of Jewish culture—as the site of the new institute. YIVO’s initial goals were to build Yiddish culture, to document its many forms, and to write new scholarship across many different subjects in Yiddish. To accomplish this task, documents going back to the earliest Jewish presence in Eastern Europe and up to the present day were necessary. To collect them, a massive network of ordinary Jews known as zamlers, was formed across Europe, Russia, North and South America, as well as in the Middle East and Asia. These zamlers, or collectors, sent artifacts of daily life, folklore, books, musical scores, political posters, rabbinical writings, diaries, memoirs, community records, works of art and literature, and much more to the Vilna headquarters. Because of this worldwide effort, YIVO became an immense source of pride for everyday Jews. It raised the level of the Yiddish language from that of a “jargon” to a normal European language, and became through its zamlers the greatest single repository of documentation about Jewish life in Eastern Europe and Russia in the world, extending into every part of the world where Eastern European Jews had settled. During the Nazi occupation of Vilna, many members of the “Paper Brigade”—Jews in the Vilna Ghetto tasked by the Nazis with sorting through YIVO’s collections and identifying the most valuable items—risked their lives by defying Nazi orders. They smuggled out documents, books, artifacts, and writings, or hid them in the ghetto and saved them from Nazi destruction. Many of the “Paper Brigade” became partisans or otherwise involved in resistance in the ghetto.

Max Weinreich, the founder of YIVO in Vilna, was in Denmark for a conference when World War II broke out in September of 1939. He managed to relocate to the United States and there he reestablished YIVO’s headquarters in New York City during the war. After the war, when the extent of the destruction of Vilna and its Jewish communities became clear, YIVO’s move to New York became permanent.