Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by Alex Halberstadt
Author:Alex Halberstadt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00
They moved his remains to Dembovka, a newer Jewish cemetery in a forlorn section of Vilnius. The Gaon’s mausoleum stands there today. The slab over his tomb is littered with moldering notes in Hebrew and Yiddish, beseeching the saint to intercede on behalf of the city’s few remaining Jews and visitors from abroad.
The ashes of the ger tzedek—the possibly apocryphal Righteous Proselyte—lay nearby. The strange title was given to a Pole, Count Valentin Potocki, who in the mid-eighteenth century committed the unheard-of act of converting to Judaism and took the somewhat showy name Avraham ben Avraham. After he ignored his parents’ pleas to renounce the heathen faith—they even offered to build him a castle where he could practice his religion in peace—Catholic authorities sentenced him to death. The Gaon reportedly visited him in prison and even offered to help spring him from his cell. But Potocki decided to die a martyr. The Jews of Vilnius said kaddish for him on the day he was burned at the stake, the second day of Shavuot, 1749. A strange twisted tree, said to resemble a human body, grew up on the spot where he was buried in Shnipishok cemetery. After vandals broke off its branches, the Jews erected an iron enclosure around it. The pious and superstitious claimed that the tree would dry up when misfortune threatened the city’s Jews. It could still be seen there in 1941, shortly before the Nazis arrived, when someone cut it down.
When Semyon was a child, cantors wandered the lanes of Shnipishok, offering to chant on behalf of visitors’ dead relatives for a few groschen. A gravestone there read, “Stop and look! You’re still a visitor; I’m at home.” After Soviet bulldozers leveled the cemetery, the gravestones were used to build a stairway cut into the side of a nearby hill. If you look at these steps today, you can still read the names of the dead.
And so the metropolis of synagogues, ritual baths and slaughterhouses, Yiddish theaters and cafés—the most thriving Jewish city in the diaspora—gradually vanished. After the Jews were gone, the remnants of their culture were methodically erased. On a side street near the building where my mother’s aunt Ida had lived, I was surprised to find the outlines of Yiddish letters above the ground-floor windows. They were barely visible, ghostly under a thin coat of white paint.
The staunchest reminder of Jewish Vilnius perches on a hill above Pamėnkalnio Street. The oddly georgic wooden house looks like a village general store. Most everybody calls it the Green House, though it’s formally known as the Jewish State Museum of Lithuania. In its handful of rooms, its single permanent exhibit, titled The Catastrophe, documents the abrupt end of Jewish Vilnius. Not many original objects are on display at the Green House because of a lack of funding; most of the photographs and documents on the walls are photocopies.
A blown-up reproduction of the Jäger Report occupies an entire wall. When my mother and I visited the Green House, I stood in front of it for a long while and read the actuarial tallies of the dead.
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