Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on September 28, 2013

By Marielle Vitureau

VILNIUS, September 28, 2013 (AFP) -- Lithuania's capital Vilnius was once a thriving Jewish cultural hub, before Nazi Germany wiped out the so-called Jerusalem of the North and killed off most of the country's Jews.

Now, individuals and state institutions alike are trying to revive the memory of this Jewish heritage by harnessing the global reach of the Internet and launching a series of interactive websites.

It is a way to restore a lost chapter in the history of this Baltic country with a controversial past as some Lithuanians collaborated with the Nazis during the 1941-1944 occupation.

"There is... a terrible lack of commemoration in modern-day Vilnius," says Menachem Kaiser, an American Jew who set up a website about the Jewish ghetto after spending a year in the capital.

"If you're there, walk around -- there is virtually nothing to commemorate the rounding up and murder of 80,000 Vilnius Jewish residents."

It has been 70 years since the Nazis liquidated the ghetto on September 23, 1943. Learning of its existence prompted Kaiser to create the English-language website http://www.revilna.org, a reference to the city's name in Yiddish, Vilna.

"Finding out about the ghetto was very difficult, very frustrating, and I wanted to create something so that even the non-scholar could get a sense of what the ghetto was like," he told AFP in an email.

"By doing this project as a website, as opposed to a book, I was able to make something dynamic, that allows the user to quite literally explore."

90% of Jews perished

Read more:
Restoring the Nazi-decimated heritage of Lithuanian Jews

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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