Museums collaborate to give Litvak story new life

The recent signing of an agreement between the Vilna Gaon Museum of Jewish History in Vilnius and the South African Holocaust & Genocide Foundation creates huge educational possibilities for Lithuanians and South African Jews, many of whom are of Lithuanian descent.

In his two years as the director of the museum in Vilnius, Dr Simonas Strelcovas found that the hardest part of the job wasn’t raising money or generating ideas. It was dealing with people.

Strelcovas said he had encountered reticence from people in Lithuania about confronting the past and the possible role they had played in some of the worst atrocities committed against Jews in Lithuania.

“The main problem we encounter is when we have occasions, especially those dedicated to the Holocaust. It always makes me angry when I hear people say, ‘Well, it was a Jewish tragedy.’ It wasn’t just a Jewish but a Lithuanian tragedy,” he said.

Strelcovas was in Johannesburg on 2 March to sign a memorandum of understanding to allow the institutions to collaborate to educate people in South Africa and Lithuania about their rich history.

From this agreement, Strelcovas hopes not only that South African Litvaks – Jews of Lithuanian heritage – will have the urge to visit Vilnius and the Vilna Gaon Museum, but that through collaboration, they will be able to learn more about their history.

The agreement between Strelcovas and Tali Nates, the founder and director of the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre, will ensure that the two institutions collaborate to broaden the scope of understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe in Lithuania and South Africa.

“When grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents came to South Africa, they came with photographs, they often came with documents, with stories, and we never collected it. We never looked at it. We never did a collection of Lithuania in South Africa,” said Nates.

This agreement will not only allow for the Vilna Gaon Museum to have access to these documents, it will allow both institutions to engage with the history of Litvaks and be able to learn about their rich history in Lithuania and South Africa.

“The agreement enables collaboration in different projects relating to Jewish culture, history, exhibitions, and education,” said Strelcovas. “If with this collaborative act we can change at least one person in South Africa and one person in Lithuania, I would be happy.”

Nates came up with the idea for the agreement because of the huge Litvak community in South Africa, and she made it happen with the participation of the Lithuanian embassy in South Africa.

In an attempt to educate Lithuanians about their history, the Vilna Gaon Museum is collaborating with the Lithuanian government to ensure that Lithuanian children are taught a curriculum focused on Jewish life and the Holocaust in Lithuania.

Strelcovas said that in Lithuania before the 1990s, when the country was under the control of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, there was no understanding of what happened to the Lithuanian Jews. “We had no idea in the schools, at universities, no literature, no books,” he said, “So when we came out of that, it was like we were living in a new reality that many still haven’t confronted.”

That’s why Strelcovas isn’t just reconstructing the Holocaust Museum in the old Library of Vilnius, which should be completed within the next two years, but also the Ponary Memorial Museum.

“We want to show that the Holocaust in Lithuania didn’t just occur in ghettos in Vilna, Kovno, Siauliai, and Svencionys, but in many different places, many small villages, and small towns, which were simply wiped out,” he said.

Across 200 different sites in Lithuania, 220 000 Jews were brutally killed and dumped in pits, mostly at the hands of Lithuanians.

To show the horrific acts committed, Strelcovas is renovating the Ponary forest memorial site 10km outside of Vilnius. From June 1941 until July 1944 more than 75 000 people were murdered in Ponary, most of whom were Jewish. The victims were brought to the murder site on foot, by motor vehicle, and by train, in groups of tens, hundreds, and thousands. There, they were shot into pits and piled on top of each other, and then their bodies were burned.

Though the memorial site was opened in 1960, what happened there and by whom was never acknowledged until it was reconstructed in 1986. This was because, as Strelcovas put it, “the Soviet system looked at everything differently”.

Strelcovas said the agreement between the two institutions was only the first step.

“This agreement is a bridge between our histories, our people, and our commitment to peace,” said Lithuanian ambassador to South Africa, Rasa Janaukskaitė. “South Africa is home to a large Jewish community with deep-rooted traditions. These are families who carried their heritage across our territory, who built new lives, but never forgot where they came from. Their presence here reminds us that history isn’t just about the past. It lives in the people.”