Chasing Ghosts in Vilnius

On Wednesday morning, we woke up at the crack of dawn and caught a bus to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. We arrived by 11am, checked into our hotel and wandered through the streets of Old Town. It's not quite as charming at Riga, although we had been warned. We enjoyed a traditional Lithuania lunch before climbing to the top of the Upper Castle on the hill to see amazing views of the new city and the old city. We searched in vain for the Vilna Gaon memorial but only got lost in the process. Likewise, we found the old synagogue (the only one of hundreds still standing today) but the gates were locked up tight, despites signs that indicated a daily minyan every after at 4:30. In light of the fact that Vilnius is known in Jewish circles as the Jerusalem of Lithuania, I was surprised how many churches there are in Vilnius. In fact, we even stayed in an old monastery near the Gates of Dawn, just at the edge of the Old City.

Thursday we spent looking for Jewish sites and signs of Jewish life. We started at one of the three locations of the Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum. There was no mention of who the Vilna Gaon was or what his connection may have been to the sad, small and delapidated museum. Fortunately, we stumbled across the Jewish community center next door that seemed to breath a little life into the small Jewish community of today's Vilnius. Our search continued at the Green House, stop #2 on the tour of the Vilna Gaon Museum. This museum, although still small and humble, did a better job of capturing the history of the city and the richness of Jewish life during the Vilna Gaon's lifetime up until the WWI. Stop #3 turned out to be the jewel in our crown: Dubbed the Tolerance Museum, we had no idea that it was actually a Jewish museum with a fabulous depiction of the city's amazing and tragic Jewish history, including many relics saved from the Great Synagogue before the Soviets destroyed it after WWII. After lunch, we wandered back through the Old City, this time armed with a guidebook on the Jewish sites. We finally found the site of the former Great Synagogue, the Vilna Gaon memorial and the site of the Vilna ghetto.

Sadly, there is little beyond the numerous plaques to remind us of the vitality of Jewish life that once thrived in Lithuania. With a twinge of sadness, we darted through town to catch an overnight bus to Tallinn.