Stephanie's Reflections on Our Last Days in Vilnius

The level of intensity of the last few days has been unlike anything I have ever experienced… sleep has been hard to come by… we have seen a great deal of new things, talked to so many people, gained so much new experience, physically contributed so much, visited so many homes of the locals, had so much fun, bonded as a group, bonded to the Lithuanian students, and learned an enormous amount.

Yesterday we spent the first half of the day cleaning up the gravesites in the second Jewish cemetery in Vilnius. It was unfortunate to find out that there once was a large and important Jewish cemetery right in the center of the town, but when the Communist regime took over, the plot of land that hundreds of our Jewish ancestors were peacefully resting in was put to other use. The gravestones were removed and buildings were erected in their place… even more horrifying is that the gravestones were not placed in another location, but were broken down for other use… why waste such useful material, right? When walking around the city of Vilnius, if you look closely, you can see Hebrew letters on random staircases leading up to buildings. You can see Hebrew letters used to pave roads and sidewalks. Those Hebrew letters make up the names of hundreds of loved ones… they were made with the intent to respect and remember the beautiful life that they once led, and now they are stepped on, walked over, unnoticed, and in the worst cases, forgotten.

We gathered around the burial site of the Vilna Gaon…for those of you who don’t know this man, he is a man worth remembering. He—as a very young child—was realized to be a genius. He had the five books of Moses memorized and had read (and understood) the Talmud by age ten. Despite the fact that he was capable of incomprehensible amounts of intellectual ability, he contributed to the Jewish people by instilling in them the notion that Jews, in order to be successful, should not only respect the Jewish traditions and religion, but should also fully develop a secular component as well. He taught the importance of acquiring knowledge and becoming educated in subjects other than Judaism, which has come to be one of the most valued Jewish ideologies to this day. We recited the Mourners Kaddish and had a moment of silence before our departure to the rest of the day’s activities.

Over the last two days we have had two different home visits. First, we visited some of the community’s elderly and secondly we visited the homes of some of the community members who are recipients of the JDC-sponsored children at-risk program. Many of the elderly were utterly alone, lost all their relatives, and lived through the Communist regime as well as the Nazi occupation. I visited a lady who told us she was living in a tiny Jewish community in Ukraine when Nazi soldiers marched through. One of them stopped to talk to her and fortunately he was one of the few that could speak Russian—which put her on a human level in her eyes. He helped her find her horses, gave her a bar of chocolate, and told her and her family to get out immediately because the entire town would be bombed in less than two hours. As you can imagine, they fled, but her grandparents were lost due to their inability to move quickly and their desire to stay in their homes until their last breath. She told us that the moment they crossed a bridge which led her out of the town, it was blown up and all those who did not make it were killed instantly. She was then loaded on a train and sent to a Ghetto where she was worked almost to death but fortunately made it and can now tell her story. The elderly we visited, if not for the support of the Jewish community of Vilnius and the JDC would generally not be able to afford a place to live and/or would be left alone in their apartments with the inability to care for themselves. One of the greatest obstacles for these people is the current economic situation: rising inflation taking place in the country of Lithuania, the decrease in the value of the dollar, and the stable pensions that the elderly receive which does not adjust to the inflation rate or any other economic crisis that affects the value of the little money they do have access to. The money contributed by the JDC is in the form of US dollars and, with each new day, the dollar loses more and more value, combined with the fact that the cost of the goods are rising, a serious dilemma to say the least.