2024-01-19 19:00:54
“It’s the event of an era. » Simonas Strelcovas, the museum’s director, is not afraid of big words when he presents to the press the brand new Jewish Museum which is opening its doors in Vilnius. If names like Avrom Sutzkever, Moishé Kulbak or the Jung Vilne movement don’t mean anything to visitors, it is here that they will learn it, around an exhibition which aims to be very educational.
Almost all of the 200,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania before World War II perished in Lithuanian forests under Nazi bullets. “We grew up and were formed in the shadow of the tragedy of the Holocaust. The museum offers everything that cannot be found in history textbooks, that is to say culture, traditions, religion, writings, cuisine, games”, underlines the museum director.
“Jerusalem of the North” comes back to life
From one room to another of the museum installed in a former high school which provided education in Hebrew, the “Jerusalem of the North” comes to life again. Vilnius was so called because of the abundance of its Jewish cultural and intellectual life. On display are the front covers of novels printed in Vilnius, as well as extracts from the numerous press in Yiddish and Hebrew. A large wooden model represents a shtetl, a Jewish village. The buildings come alive with memories.
The top floor is dedicated to the painter Rafael Chwoles. Originally from Vilnius, he emigrated to Warsaw in 1959, then to France ten years later. Ieva Sadzeviciene, the curator, discovered the painter’s works around fifteen years ago. “I discovered both the talent of the painter, but also the work of a person who was a witness to history,” she explains.
A floor dedicated to the painter Rafael Chwoles
Returning to Vilnius at the end of the Second World War, Rafael Chwoles painted the ruins of the city, especially those of the great synagogue whose complete destruction he witnessed in 1957. “Before leaving Vilnius, he painted several hundred studies which were to be useful to him and many of which were used to subsequently create large paintings. All his life he painted Vilnius”, says Milij Chwoles, one of the painter’s two sons, met in Paris.
Without the gift of his two sons, this museum within a museum would not have seen the light of day. In total, 200 paintings, 500 drawings and numerous personal objects were handed over to Lithuania, “on the condition of being exposed in a non-temporary manner”, specifies the director of the museum, Simonas Strelcovas. Would Rafael Chwoles have been satisfied? “He never expressed a desire to return to Vilnius, moreover in Poland neither. I have no guarantee that he would have approved the museum project (smile)which can be understood because he still has a dramatic and heavy experience, but we felt, my brother and I, that it was his city, and no one could take that fact away from him,” recognizes Milij Chwoles, who also spent his young childhood in Vilnius. The very first exhibition of the painter took place in 2004 with the few works of the painter that the national museum owned. A legacy of orders placed by the Museum of the Revolution during the Soviet occupation of Lithuania.
In a few years, the Holocaust Museum should reopen its doors in a symbolic location, the former library of the Vilnius ghetto, and with a completely redesigned exhibition. The Paneriai site, site of the massacre of 100,000 Jews near Vilnius, must also be redeveloped. Nevertheless, this Litvak museum is a first step, because as Simonas Strelcovas points out, “you have to have a basis to understand what has been lost.”
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