Once a beacon of the Yiddish speaking world, Lithuania’s Jews work to keep it alive

VILNIUS, Lithuania (RNS) — If one city could be said to be the home of Yiddish, the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jewry, it would not be New York or Jerusalem, in many minds, but Vilnius, the capital of modern-day Lithuania.

Walking through the snaking avenues and alleys of Vilnius’ Old Town today, it’s hard to imagine that the Lithuanian capital, with its high churches and pork cracklings in nearly every local dish, was once teeming with Jewish life. More than 200,000 Jews lived in the area of modern Lithuania in 1918, when the Russian Empire collapsed and the independent states of Poland and Lithuania were reborn, and one would have been just as likely to hear the sounds of Yiddish spoken in Vilnius’ streets as Polish, Lithuanian or Russian. The city was a center of Yiddish literature and culture — or “Yiddishkayt,” a Yiddish term that translates most simply as Jewishness.

Today, Vilnius’ Jewish population stands around 5,000, having sustained tremendous loss of culture and life during the three-year Nazi occupation of Lithuania, from 1941 to 1944. During that time, 95% of Lithuania’s Jews were murdered, including 70,000 Jews from the Vilnius ghetto, who were executed and buried in Europe’s second largest mass grave, in the Ponar forest just outside the city. 

“The present-day community is very small, quite fragmented and quite insignificant in the wider Jewish world, but historically, it was an outstanding tower of Yiddishkayt,” said Algirdas Davidavicius, a teacher at Vilnius’ Jewish School.

For the remaining Jews of Vilnius, Yiddish is at the core of their identity in a way that has largely been lost in the U.S. and Israel outside of certain Orthodox communities. It sustained the Jewish community through the nearly five decades of Soviet rule that repressed Jewish life even after the Nazis were defeated. 

To make sure Vilnius’ Yiddish past is not forgotten, the Lithuanian Jewish community invited students from around the globe to take part in a two-week course in the language. Earlier this month, 26 students from as far as California and as close as Belarus, as well as several from Vilnius itself, took the course. 

“It’s no coincidence that this program happened in Vilnius,” said one of the program’s teachers, Dov-Ber Kerler, who holds the Cohn Chair in Yiddish Studies at Indiana University and is the son of Soviet Yiddish poet Yosef Kerler. “There were many great cities of Yiddish in the past, such as New York, Warsaw, Odesa … but in the others, the upper classes, the intellectuals, the elites, left Yiddish behind, which was a tragedy. Not in Vilnius, where even the rich spoke Yiddish!”

“Language is a part of the formation of our identity,” explained Ruth Reches, director of the Jewish School and daughter of the Lithuanian Jewish community’s president, Faina Kukliansky. “After the war, the Jews who were left in Lithuania and in the Soviet Union, we couldn’t celebrate Jewish holidays, we couldn’t go to synagogue because there were no more synagogues, we couldn’t learn Hebrew. We didn’t forget our traditions, but there was no place for them.

“Now, after Lithuania got its independence, the Jewish community has started to revive,” Reches added. “Yiddish is a part of that Jewish identity.”

The Yiddish course’s roots date back to shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a Yiddish language program that had been established at Oxford University in England relocated to Vilnius University. It operated for more than two decades but folded in 2018 over disagreements with the university. 

Members of the community, such as Davidavicius, immediately started advocating for something to replace it. 

Lithuania, red, in the Baltic region of Europe. (Image courtesy of Wikipedia/Creative Commons)

“It is with such gratitude that I see that this is happening again, because it is so important and so good, that this must be here. It is a mitzvah,” he said, using the Hebrew word that means a good deed commanded by God. “Vilnius is a city that can’t not have some Yiddish learning at least once a year.”

The program comes at a time when interest in Yiddish language and culture is making a comeback among Jews and non-Jews alike. 

This summer alone saw more than half a dozen other intensive Yiddish programs take place in New York, Berlin, Warsaw, Stockholm, Tel Aviv and elsewhere, as well as online, according to In Geveb, a journal of Yiddish studies. Last year, The New York Times noted the flowering of Yiddish versions of “Fiddler on the Roof” and other plays and a rash of television series focused on Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews. 

But some younger American and European Jews have also turned to Yiddish as an alternative to the Zionism or religiosity that was the main expression of Jewishness for previous generations. While their grandparents may have abandoned Yiddish as a relic of the European ghettos they left behind, today’s young Jews are reclaiming the language as an alternative avenue for connecting with their heritage. For some left-leaning Generation Z Jews, Yiddish is associated with the Jewish labor movements of interwar Europe and turn-of-the-century New York. 

A plaque in Vilnius’ choral synagogue details the destruction of Lithuania’s Jewish communities in Yiddish. (Photo by David Ian Klein)

Some of the new interest in Yiddish was prompted by the pandemic, when Jews were stuck at home and remote learning opportunities proliferated. The Washington Post has also reported that rising antisemitism has driven many Jews to reexamine their relationship with Yiddish. 

“Yiddish connects me to my roots, helping to restore the cultural transmission from my father that was interrupted by the Holocaust,” said Mendel Salik, a British-born Jew living in France. “I get joy from reading Yiddish texts with their portrayals of bygone Jewish societies with their daily struggles against poverty or persecution and their rich observations of human life distilled into proverbs.”

Vilnius allows Yiddish students the opportunity to walk the same streets trod by some of Yiddish literature’s biggest names, such as Moshe Kulbak and Avrom Sutzkever, the bard of the Vilnius ghetto.

Among those studying Yiddish in Vilnius this summer were several non-Jews, including some local Lithuanians who took part in the program.

For Anastasiya Halaburda, a Belarusian living in Vilnius, learning Yiddish was a way to gain a deeper understanding of the city in which she has made her home. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by Vilnius’ rich history, a large extent of which consists of the Jewish legacy, and I wanted to explore it more deeply,” she told RNS. “Learning Yiddish, a language that was once widely spoken in Vilnius, seemed like the perfect way to connect with this heritage.

“Through this course, I believe I gained a deeper understanding of the city’s Jewish legacy and current community (and) feel more connected to its cultural roots,” she added.

Yuri Vedenyapin teaches during the Yiddish language summer program in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Anders Sune Pedersen)

Nothing could have made organizers such as Davidavicius happier. 

“I say finally, because at least Yiddish-speaking culture was a huge part of this city,” Davidavicius said. “For so many present-day Lithuanian-speaking inhabitants of Vilnius, most of them don’t know the cultural treasures of the city. But if they come and learn, from year to year a cumulative process will go on and a lot of people will become interested.”

The non-Jewish students’ interest gives Davidicius hope that the revived interest in Yiddish isn’t a passing pandemic-born fad, but a trend that will bear cumulative rewards as word of mouth brings more of the Yiddish-curious to its onetime hub.

It is also proof, he said, that Yiddishkayt will always be a part of Vilnius and the world. “Yiddish is this background radiation of our past that cannot be extinguished,” he said.