Lithuania green lights reconstruction on Jewish cemetery

Finding out that a second building is being built over your family’s graves is devastating, but there isn’t much the South African Litvak community can do about the Lithuanian national convention centre being built on the grounds of the Vilnius Jewish Šnipiškės Old Cemetery. The project was given the go ahead by the Lithuanian government on 23 July.

However, according to Rabbi Gidon Fox, a dayan on the Johannesburg Beth Din, people are “categorically not allowed” to build anything over a cemetery.

“A cemetery is a sacred and consecrated area, and the dignity with which we treat the area is the way in which we honour and respect the deceased,” he said.

Democratic Alliance Member of Parliament Madeleine Hicklin was outraged when she heard about this because she believes much of her family is buried there.

Her cousin, Izia Matskevitch, and the whole Matskevitch family are believed to be buried there, according to Hicklin. “I have some documents from my late mother that she did some research for a book that she wrote called The Latter-Day Cannibals. Part of the story was set in Vilna. Izia Matskevitch was her cousin, and he was one of the first partisans in the Vilna ghetto.”

However, when Hicklin was made aware of recent developments by the Lithuanian government to refurbish the Vilnius Concert and Sports Palace, which stands derelict on top of part of the cemetery grounds, with more than 500 graves believed to be underneath it, she was incensed, as she now cannot discover the fate of her family members’ graves.

“I’ll do anything to preserve that history because if we don’t preserve history, we have nothing to leave our children,” said Hicklin.

The Jewish community in Vilnius wasn’t notified about the prime minister’s decision to build a new congress centre at the site, and didn’t agree to this development, said Fania Kukliansky, the chairperson of the Jewish Community of Lithuania.

“There’s nothing left from the cemetery. No remains, nothing, no stones, nothing at all,” she said. “A building was built on the cemetery during the Soviet time. So, there was a decision to make it a congress hall, but this decision wasn’t accepted by our rabbonim. We were just informed that they were going to build the congress hall. They did it without any discussion, permission, information, nothing at all.

“It’s offensive that nobody spoke to us about the decision,” she said. “We aren’t a big Jewish community, but we are a Jewish community. And to build a congress hall, not a memorial on the place where the cemetery was, it’s offensive for the Jewish community.”

The Šnipiškės Jewish Cemetery was the oldest and largest Jewish cemetery in Vilnius, established in the 15th century in the Šnipiškės suburb, now part of the Žirmūnai elderate, across the Neris River from Gediminas Tower. It operated from 1592 to 1831, and was a significant burial ground for the Vilnius Jewish community including notable figures like the Vilna Gaon.

The cemetery was closed by Tsarist authorities in 1831 due to a lack of space, though it remained open to people visiting it into the early 20th century. During the interwar period, Polish authorities planned to demolish the cemetery to build a stadium.

Between 1948 and 1955, all tombstones were removed, and the now derelict Vilnius Palace of Concerts and Sports was constructed in 1971 directly on the site. Some tombstones, including the Vilna Gaon’s mausoleum, were relocated to the newer Jewish cemetery on Sudervė Road.

Over the years, there were many proposals to build over the site of the cemetery due to its prime location. In 2022, the government, then led by the conservative Homeland Union – Lithuanian Christian Democrats, proposed turning the derelict building into a museum or memorial dedicated to Jewish history in Lithuania.

An earlier government had planned to convert it into a congress centre, but the project never got off the ground. Plans to repurpose the 1971 structure, which has been unused for years, have been under discussion since 2015, when it was taken over by the government’s centralised public property management company, Turto Bankas.

Now, the derelict Vilnius Palace of Concerts is to be destroyed, and a national convention centre built, the Lithuanian government confirmed.

Though Lithuanian Prime Minister Gintautas Paluckas was quoted in a government press release saying that the project would “preserve the site’s historical significance and commemorate the events that took place there”, he wasn’t talking about anything to do with Jews. He was referring to the sports palace, which was the site of the founding congress of Lithuania’s Sąjūdis movement in October 1988.

In January 1991, it hosted the wake of the January 13 crackdown victims, a landmark event in the country’s independence from the USSR, when 13 unarmed civilians died after Soviet tanks and troops attacked the Vilnius television tower in 1991 to take over a national broadcaster.

For South African born Litvak activist Grant Gochin, there has been little backlash to these developments as there’s more of a focus on global antisemitism and the effects of 7 October “which is why this moment was grasped cynically and opportunistically by Lithuanian authorities”, he said.

“This prime land is coveted by the Lithuanian government, which has spent decades deploying every underhanded tactic to seize it from the Jewish community,” Gochin said. “It deliberately bypasses the nearby Christian cemetery, targeting the sacred grounds of the Šnipiškės Jewish Cemetery instead. Lithuania’s authorities have never engaged in honest negotiations with Jews, only manipulative schemes and deceit. Just as they have whitewashed their Holocaust complicity into a shameful distortion, they now trample Jewish history, religious law, and ethical principles with dominance.”

Rabbi Fox added, “Repurposing the area is a profound desecration of the site, exacerbated by the severe implications of disturbing the remains of those buried there. Jewish law does not allow the standing on graves and anything done that would see rampant trampling on the graves underneath must be prevented.

“Jewish law does not allow for such desecration to occur, and would require the outmost effort expended to avoid such desecration, failing which, the bodies should be exhumed and reinterred in a cemetery that will be respected and honoured going forward,” he said.

Kukliansky said that though bodies are still buried on the site, it’s no longer a cemetery as such. It’s just a plot of land with a building built on top of the cemetery.

“We know this is a holy place, and we don’t want the congress centre to be built there, but nobody asked us.”