I did it all backward. Instead of taking my research trips before writing my book, like any normal historian would have, I’d waited. Only after I had completed my first draft of the book did I finally make my way to Lithuania and Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania during its brief moment of…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. This week, Henia Ragol, a Holocaust survivor and loyal reader of the Yiddish Forverts, will celebrate her hundredth birthday. (As we say in Yiddish: May she live 120 years!) During an interview with the Forverts, Ragol (née Kotton), a resident of a moshav in northern Israel who’s…
Hit a rut in your love life? Partner no longer satisfying your needs? Why not buckle up and head to Vilna, where 90% of Jewish residents were murdered during the Holocaust, to spice things up? Ah, yes: The folks who came up with a new ad campaign for Vilna, now known as Vilnius, might want…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. The world-famous Yiddish theater that eventually became known as the Vilna Troupe had its beginnings under remarkable and completely unexpected circumstances. Before World War I, Vilna had a high-quality Russian theater that attracted a mostly Jewish audience, in part due to the Polish intellectuals’s boycott of Russian…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. For hundreds of years, books played a powerful role in the lives of Vilna’s Jews. The city was home to the two most influential publishing houses of religious and secular books, Romm and B. Kletskin, as well as the great Strashun Library. Several synagogues, houses of study…
Under the Nazi occupation of Poland, if a Jew in Vilna was caught bringing outside goods into the city’s ghetto, they risked paying with their life. Yet a group of Jewish writers and thinkers, a portion of those compelled by the Nazis to aid in the looting of Vilna’s storied institutions of Jewish culture, smuggled…
This article originally appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. Vilna writer Avrom Karpinovitch dedicated his life to describing the colorful personalities of the lower class and criminal element of his city on the eve of the Holocaust. In this video he tells us about Tall Tamara, the Jewish streetwalker; Avrom Mosevski, the glutton; and Gedalke the…
Some 75 years ago, a group of Jews under German occupation in Vilna was assigned to assist Nazi authorities in curating books and other cultural items destined for shipment to Germany. There, the selection of Judaica materials was to be conserved as a collection of artifacts from an extinct people. Some items were indeed shipped…
100% of profits support our journalism
